FRANK BRUNI: It’s that time of year, Ross: Conservatives grieve the death of Christmas, liberals rue the commercialization of all holidays and the director David O. Russell and the megastars Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper storm America’s multiplexes with a movie timed for awards-season glory. Three years ago it was “Silver Linings Playbook.” Two years ago, “American Hustle.”
This year they seek to sweep up Oscar nominations with a mop — literally. And you and I bring our readers tidings of “Joy.”
ROSS DOUTHAT: A Merry Christmas movie season to you as well, Frank! So what did you make of the latest Russell-Lawrence-Cooper (though mainly Russell and Lawrence, this time) paean to eccentric Northeastern white ethnics?
BRUNI: “Joy” struck me as something of a dare that Russell issued to himself: Are my skills so potent and my leading lady’s charms so prodigious that the two of us can win audiences over with a two-hours-plus biopic about a better way to clean the kitchen floor?
Of course “Joy” isn’t really about that. In telling the tale, loosely rooted in real events, of Joy Mangano, who invented the self-wringing Miracle Mop, it means to accomplish a whole lot else. It’s a parable of pluck. It’s a meditation on the overburdened, underappreciated roles that so many women have played in their families and the quickness with which the men around them belittled their dreams.
DOUTHAT: It’s a movie that reminded me in certain ways of the Diane Keaton vehicle “Baby Boom” — one of the first grown-up movies I remember seeing in the theaters, way back in 1987, which also gave us the mom-as-entrepreneur, peddling a product (baby food then, the self-wringing mop now) that promises the partial relief of the maternal estate.
BRUNI: It’s also an oddly paced mess. In its frenetic first act, it’s constantly missing its screwball-comedy marks. But I think its relationship to the current political moment is fascinating.
Although it’s set more than a quarter century ago, around the birth of the QVC cable TV channel (where Cooper’s character works), its preoccupations are entirely of-the-moment: the way the economic deck is stacked against the little guy (or gal); the frequently false promise of upward mobility; the perfidies of unchallenged, unchecked corporations. Russell is betting that Joy, as inhabited by Lawrence, will be a proxy for many frustrated Americans.
DOUTHAT: Yes, “Joy” does seem intended to resonate with our own era’s mix of blue-collar anxiety and “can women have it all?” agita among the well-to-do. And that’s
another parallel to “Baby Boom,” which belongs with “9 to 5” and “Working Girl” in the ’80s-era museum case of “women: now they’re in WORKPLACE!”
comedies.
But where “Baby Boom” stayed low and broad in its humor and satire, “Joy” is a more ambitious and bizarre — this is David O. Russell, after all. The characters talk in speeches; the storytelling is rich with artifice; there are flashbacks and dream sequences and narration from beyond the grave. A lot of this doesn’t really work. But I kind of loved it, flaws and all.
And at the very least it’s worth seeing, as you say, because Jennifer Lawrence is a Movie Star, and that holds true even when the movie around her threatens to become a Mess.
Also, better Russell’s mess than J.J. Abrams’s machine-like efficiency. Or maybe you liked “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” more than I did?
BRUNI: It’s funny that you use the word “machine” for the latest “Star Wars,” because it did seem to me a carefully rigged, painstakingly wired delivery system for the highest dose imaginable of pharmaceutical-grade nostalgia. I experienced it as a pastiche of all of the most beloved themes, sequences, plot lines and visual tropes that appeared in one or more of the first three “Star Wars” movies.
DOUTHAT: I’ve already subjected my poor readers to one over-long rant about “The Force Awakens,” but I think you’ve captured the key difference between the new movie and the originals.
Lucas’s trilogy was a pastiche of the entirety of cinematic history: Everything from Flash Gordon to Akira Kurosawa to Leni Riefenstahl to “Casablanca” found its way into those movies, and it was the combination that made everything old seem new, strange and alive.
But “The Force Awakens” is, as you say, just a pastiche of … the original trilogy. And even that’s being a little kind, since it borrows only a couple of elements from “Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi” and mostly hews so closely to the 1977 “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope” script that it’s almost just a straight remake or reboot.
Where Lucas gave us all of cinematic history in a galaxy far, far away, in other words, Abrams has just given us a handsome, well-acted George Lucas fan film.
BRUNI: As I watched it, I was struck by how many myths — whether they come from the ancient Greeks, William Shakespeare or George Lucas — revolve around the estrangement of fathers and sons. Where would literature, film and all of storytelling be without daddy issues? (For that matter, where would politics and the modern presidency be without them?)
But “The Force Awakens” never made clear to me precisely what drove Han Solo’s and Princess Leia’s child away and why he despises Han in particular so much. Han and Leia do come across as distracted, overcommitted parents, what with the fate of the galaxy constantly on the line and in their hands. Were they a two-career, two-planet couple who outsourced too much of the child rearing to Chewbacca?
Whatever the movie’s accomplishments and limitations, it’s a monster hit on a scale beyond even the most optimistic predictions, and the vacation that it offers Americans from a period of gloom, fear and campaign-trail grotesqueness has to be one reason. Of late there haven’t been many places where a baffled voter can escape the inexcusable tirades and inexplicable tresses of Donald Trump. The distant cosmos inhabited by R2-D2 and C-3P0 is one of them.
DOUTHAT: I don’t object to people enjoying a Lucas fan film, or escaping into it! (Although you may be underestimating how much of Trump’s reality-TV showboating is likewise a form of escapism for his fans, a different way of escaping the Mos Eisley cantina of politics-as-usual.) But I do think it’s a little strange how fully movie critics embraced the hype, especially just a month after the “Hunger Games” saga — a genre pastiche whose originality puts Abrams’s flick to shame — wrapped up to more indifferent or dutiful reviews. Nostalgia is the real Force, it turns out.
Even with all those plaudits, though, it seems safe to say that “Star Wars” won’t dominate awards season. So what will? Which of the fall’s prestige offerings struck you as the best this season had to offer?
BRUNI: Well, I think “Spotlight” is a serious contender for the best picture Oscar — and rightly so.
Your relationship to the Catholic Church is much different from mine, so I’m very curious for your take on that movie. What most impressed and pleased me about it — and I mentioned this in a column last month — is its depiction of the forces in American society that colluded to allow so many instances of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests and such an infuriating lag before any adequate, just response to it. There was a reluctance to think ill of “men of God,” to take on a powerful religious institution, to peer into it. “Spotlight” nails that.
DOUTHAT: I’ll play against my reactionary-Catholic type, Frank, and say that in general I’ve been impressed with Hollywood’s treatments of the sex abuse scandal. The movie industry is not exactly known for its fondness for my church (at least these days; the Hays Code era was a different matter), but where Catholicism’s greatest recent shame is concerned it’s mostly resisted the impulse to just go all in for stereotypes and sensationalism and anti-papist tropes.
I have in mind movies like “Doubt” and the slightly-more-obscure “Calvary,” which you touted in an earlier go-round. The former is an evenhanded examination of the scandal’s tangled roots, the latter a look — through the eyes of a genuinely heroic priest — at the spiritual devastation wrought by the crisis and its aftermath. And “Spotlight” fits neatly in between them: It’s harsher on the institutional church than either, but that’s as it should be, since it deals with the cover-up and its exposure, and the cover-up is the most damnable part of the scandal. There will always be abusive priests, as there will always be abusers in any position of authority, but the bishops who protected predators instead of kids are the ones most in need of millstones.
I thought the movie was impressive, if maybe just a touch too pious about its journalistic heroes, and I had only modest quibbles with its portrayal of the scandal itself.
BRUNI: I was also deeply moved by “Room,” whose lead, Brie Larson, is pretty much guaranteed a best actress nomination, while a best supporting actor nod could well go to her co-star, Jacob Tremblay, who’s only 9 years old.
DOUTHAT: Yes, precisely because “Spotlight” didn’t stoop to sensationalism, it also didn’t get under my skin in anything remotely like the way “Room” did.
Indeed I’m a little hesitant in even passing judgment on “Room,” because my reaction was so visceral, and so hard to separate emotionally from my current father-of-young-children state in life. I literally writhed and shuddered in my seat during the tensest moments, and the waterworks opened easily thereafter. Was that reaction a testament to the movie’s craft, its great performances (Larson in particular), or just a case of its primal fairy-tale conceit exploiting my rubbed-raw emotional state?
Maybe it doesn’t matter, because exploitation is itself a form of craft.
BRUNI: It haunts me, and it haunts me because of something that comes through even more clearly in this screen version than in the novel on which it’s based. “Room” is about the brutal conundrums of parenting.
On its harrowing, attention-getting surface, it’s the story of a woman who’s a sexual prisoner and has given birth to, and reared, her son in the backyard shed to which she’s been confined for over five years.
But it’s really about one of any and every parent’s most profound challenges: to paint a child’s world, no matter how small and grim, in colors of hope and wonder, so that it’s endurable. It’s also about one of any and every parent’s trickiest decisions: how much truth to let in.
And there’s a surprising, gut-punching moment in the movie’s last half-hour when you realize that it has yet one more big theme up its sleeve, which is the impossibility of knowing, in full honesty, which decisions you’ve made solely for your child and which you’ve made in significant measure for yourself.
DOUTHAT: It would probably have a claim on my best picture vote if I had one, but I sometimes felt more like its hostage than its fan.
BRUNI: You’re not the first person who’s told me that “Room” was hard to watch, almost traumatic, and that’s fascinating because it’s not explicit at all. There’s no gore. The sexual violence isn’t directly shown. That it nonetheless feels as raw to viewers as it does is, I think, a testament to the skill with which it’s been made.
And I was grateful for it, because I saw it right after “Suffragette,” which was so noble but so ordinary, and “Our Brand Is Crisis,” which was close to unwatchable, despite Sandra Bullock’s and Billy Bob Thornton’s best efforts. We wait all year for the promised cinematic bounty of November and December, and the stocking often has as many lumps of coal as it does candy canes.
DOUTHAT: And we haven’t even managed to assign some pretty big movies (ahem, Mr. Tarantino) to the “naughty” or the “nice” list. But we’ll have time for that when reconvene for the Oscars; until then, fellow Moviegoer, a very happy New Year.