A Bit of Year-End Cramming

The Whale (Darren Aronofsky, 2022)

Piss poor. 

Confession: I HandBraked a copy of this from the screener disc I got, because I need to send the disc out to a friend. (It's going out tomorrow! Promise!) But I looked at the file and assumed it was copyguarded, because the file was so dark I couldn't watch it. Turns out, the file was fine! It's the film that's unwatchable, because, you know, Charlie (Brenden Fraser) is so lonely and depressed in his apartment, that everything is super dark. Symbolism! And possibly career-worst cinematography from Matthew Libatique.

The Whale's attempts at pathos are mostly risible, none so much as the final scene when Charlie proves his love to his daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) by getting up from the couch and toddling over to her at the front door. It's cribbed almost image-for-image from WALL-E, and there's no one to blame for this by Aronofsky. But the truth is, 95% of what's shitty about The Whale comes directly from Samuel D. Hunter, who adapted his own play for the film. There's not a single character here whose behavior rises above their circumscribed narrative function. Folks are praising Hong Chau for her work here, and she does her best. But her pathological insistence on keeping Charlie's friendship (and death) for herself plays like something out of D.W. Griffith. It all does, really. 

And while Roxane Gay is not wrong about the film, she still misses an important social point, and that's that being fat means something very different to Black lesbians and gay white men. Which isn't to say that Charlie isn't paraded as a grotesque spectacle, or that his internalized self-hatred isn't problematically visualized in this film, with gay desire and obesity both explicitly presented as forms of immoral gluttony. Fuck this film.

Nanny (Nikyatu Jusu, 2022)

A film with promise, but one that is tanked by having too many competing themes and failing to articulate any of them particularly well. On the one hand, this is a symptom of the elevated-horror problem, since Nanny would have worked better as a straight drama but you know how it is. But even within that framework, Jusu (like a lot of young contemporary artists) seems to think that having a dozen or so undernourished ideas rattling around your work equals complexity, since the film never allows one concept to stake a real claim. 

Aisha (Anna Diop) is a commanding screen presence, but the confluence of Senegalese spirituality and exploitation of labor never really comes into focus, and the mid-film introduction of schizophrenia -- the dead mother of love-interest Malik (Sinqua Walls) only makes matters worse. Is Aisha having a breakdown? Is she unconsciously revolting against her assigned role as a caregiver for a wealthy boho couple Amy (Michele Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector)? Or is her absent son exacting remote revenge? Thing is, Nanny has some good things going for it, notably Aisha's struggles with Amy over being underpaid. She is a good nanny, and makes her young charge (Rose Decker) feel cared for and secure, but it's a bit shocking when she turns off the nurturing at quitting time. This cuts to the heart of the problem -- raising children as a paid job -- and should have been Jusu's primary focus.

Close (Lukas Dhont, 2022)

Another film dealing with the process of mourning for a child, but situated in an imaginary world in which no one seems to be especially concerned for the surviving boy (Eden Dambrine) who thinks it may be all his fault. But this is a function of Dhont's jury-rigged dramaturgy. Where The Maiden displayed all the hopeless ways that adults try to help young people cope with death, Close fixes all its attention on Léo and his confused reactions to the suicide of his former best friend Rémi (Gustav De Waele). This micro-focus makes for a film that signals its desire to move you, more than it actually does. 

But more than this, it essentially cuts Rémi's subject position out of the film, turning him into a vague idea of troubled queerness. By focusing so exclusively on Léo and his more conventional masculine development, Dhont gives the game away. This isn't a film about struggling gay kids, much less a film for them. It's aimed squarely at a presumably heterosexual viewer, one who needs to grapple with Rémi's untimely death as a means to achieve liberal understanding. 

I don't know much about Dhont, since I haven't and won't watch Girl. But based on this, his method seems to be latching onto mood over context. This works, actually, in the first third, when the Léo / Rémi relationship is shown as a self-sufficient world. It vaguely resembles André Téchiné at this point. But once the hammer comes down, the absence of any larger universe -- one where Léo would have to define the meaning of his lost friendship, as it jockeys against other's external meanings -- is downright insulting.