Brief Notes on a Couple of Films, or "Meh"

Everybody Knows (Asghar Farhadi, 2018)

Or, as I'm sure Mike D'Angelo would say, "Everybody Whiffs." After going from strength to strength for four films straight (possibly even more -- I still have not seen Fireworks Wednesday), Farhadi turns in an actual bad film. While I'm sure it will seem like blasphemy, or at least an unmerited slap in the face, to make the comparison, I'm going to chalk this failure up to Shyamalan's Disease. Farhadi has built his reputation on films that have a solid Chekhovian structure, complete with a third-act revelation that radically alters the emotional stakes of everything that has happened thus far. Becoming a prisoner of his own expectations, Farhadi finally produced a film that is little more than a slack, ill-conceived parody of his own style.

It's not just that the script is shoddy, with "surprises" that any attentive viewer could see coming a mile away. (Was this the point? The title makes me wonder...) But compared with the sharp but unfussy directorial style of A Separation and The Salesman, Everybody Knows is just all-round sloppy, with shaky hand-held camera that adds nothing, and in particular a lazy, by-the-numbers approach to découpage that diffuses tension rather than heightening it. I just think back to his earlier films, and what this director could do with blocking and framing. There's none of that here. And while some have blamed the unfamiliarity of the Spanish locale and language for Farhadi's poor chops, I would submit that his French film The Past exhibits virtually all of the elements that make his other films strong. Was he simply besotted with the Spanish landscape, or the blinding beauty of his two leads? Hard to say.

Paddleton (Alexandre Lehmann, 2019)

Speaking of Mike D'Angelo (and really, aren't all of us always?), I don't have a great deal to add to his review of Paddleton, an end-of-life buddy picture with an extraordinary "no-homo" anti-subtext. These two men, Michael (Mark Duplass) and Andy (Ray Romano) are so close that they clearly need no one else in each other's lives -- not Michael's sister (and her dreaded "small talk"), not the young office girl who keeps trying to chat Andy up, and apparently not "receptionist," the woman at the hotel who offers herself to Andy only for him to demur. At a certain point, Paddleton only makes sense as a kind of conceptual throwback to the days when the sort of love that Michael and Andy share dared not speak its name.

Having watched my fair share of AIDS narratives, there was a striking similarity to those films' tragic conclusion and the (admittedly highly affecting) near-final moments of Paddleton, when Andy holds Michael as he dies. It made me wonder whether Duplass and Lehmann made a strategic decision, as some sort of odd cultural intervention, to replicate those very AIDS narratives but with ostensibly heterosexual protagonists. Is the idea that Michael and Andy are modeling an intimacy that most straight men can only dream of, and that the prospect of one of them dying is the catalyst for bringing that love to the surface? 

And then the ending, which seems to suggest that Michael's death was necessary in order for Andy to move on to a "regular" (heterosexual) relationship with the new neighbor, who is literally replacing Michael. What a perplexing film.