Where I can't feel anything for a bunch of emotionless people

Last night was another of those moments when I'm beginning to feel firmly detached from modern cinema and especially modern cinema criticism because I can't for the life of me understand what was so compelling about the film we saw that would have critics raving about it, not least because it won the Palm d'Or at Cannes. That film is Anora. It's another Sean Baker production and I agreed to see it for precisely that reason. It's described as a "romantic comedy", which is normally something that I would avoid like it was on fire because most of them are awful. But Baker has a lot of credit in the bank with me because of two previous films: The Florida Project and Red Rocket. The former is a great example of the chasm in understanding between the privileged few and the underserved many in our nation. It's a story with pathos and one that most decent humans could feel sympathy for, in the same way that we watch Willem Dafoe make his own life more difficult in the name of making his tenants' a tiny bit easier. The latter is one of the best things we've ever seen at the Michigan/State theaters. It's a fantastic example of overweening ambition and the obvious impending failure that it leads to (reach exceeds thy grasp or thy Johnson, as the case may be.) Both of those films are replete with examples of genuinely human characters and their genuinely human circumstances and reactions to same. As many have said about Shakespeare: characters will drive your stories and make them last. Both of those stories have that. Anora... does not.

We're presented with a situation that is a young woman's (Mikey Madison) fairly successful stripping/escort career, since she lives in a comfortable home with her sister in Brighton Beach and works at what is implied as an upscale club, probably somewhere in the Lower East Side. She meets an incredibly wealthy young Russian ne'er-do-well (Mark Eydelshteyn) whom she entrances and then convinces to pay her a substantial fee to hang out with him as his "girlfriend" for a week. So far, everything is paved with gold here. But then his family finds out and their servants here in the States come to disrupt this Shangri-La, which is where our story veers from Pretty Woman to Uncut Gems. Anyone who remembers my review of the latter film will recall that I found it to be both tedious and obnoxious, which is a morbidly impressive combination. So our story of the stripper whose life is already pretty cozy and only gets better throughout the first act is suddenly turned into a 25-minute-long home invasion scene where everyone is screaming at each other and, just like with Uncut Gems, is basically being a collection of obnoxious New Yorkers failing to communicate. Just as with that film, I have no concept of how this can be entertaining to anyone. What's worse is that none of the characters involved are even remotely interesting. They're not human. They're ciphers. Pretty Woman is usually discarded as fluff because it is, failing to even approach the reality of working women in LA. Same thing here. What would make me feel sympathy for Ani's situation or person when we don't see her even stepping up from the level of hiding the rent in the toilet tank before dating the millionaire? The worst crisis she encounters before the family servants come barging in is being woken up early by her sister. It never feels like she's latching on to that one thing she's been waiting for and is then traumatized by having it swept away from her. Instead, we've basically watched her just take advantage of the situation (as most would do) and not be too troubled by any of it.

In truth, the only genuinely interesting character in the whole film is Igor (Yura Borisov), one of those thugs who breaks in to disrupt her moment with the wayward Russian heir. What makes him interesting is that we simply watch his face for the entire invasion scene, largely agog at what's happening around him and clearly not quite understanding why he's there in the first place. I really enjoyed Borisov in Compartment No. 6 and was happy to see him again, being just as effective in this role as he was as Lyokha on the train. As the one person not being bombastic but merely trying to survive the ride, he struck me as the one person reacting like most people would in that situation. In other words, as I will say again and again in all of my criticism, he was human. And acting human while everyone else was chewing scenery. He maintains that humanity even as things take a sharp turn into sentimentality in act 3. This would be the point where said sentiment is supposed to engender sympathy from the average American moviegoer. But Baker's films have never been about that, so I don't suspect that that was his intention. But the problem is that, even if it was, none of these characters, including Ani, had done anything throughout this story to generate that sympathy. Everything kind of slid off of her and so she kind of slid off of us, pants on or not. By the end of the film, we still don't really know who she is other than perhaps a vague sensation that she's been brazening her way through most of her life and this was the one time she couldn't call the shots? If that's all you have in terms of character development, then we are a long way from earlier examples of Baker's work.

And, yet, critics are raving about it (97% on RT; the Palm d'Or(!)) and all I can ask is: What am I missing? I look at this film and think of my usual later-Ridley Scott criticism: It's more spectacle than story. I mean, was the Cannes crowd just thrilled that the American submission wasn't another damn Marvel movie?

Reality in the raw

There's a certain appeal to Sean Baker's films that one could almost call "street-level." The fact that he tends to pick stories that are largely centered around the American underclass is part of that, but there's also his tendency to pick non- or new actors to fill his roles so that they feel natural in their environment. In his latest offering, Red Rocket, he cast one actor (Brittney Rodriguez) after seeing her walking her dog on the street, followed by him pulling over and asking if she'd like to do an audition. That's about as "street-level", literally, as it gets and it's that kind of unusual approach that gives his films an emotional authenticity that makes them so compelling, even if the situations that his characters end up in don't leave his audiences walking away feeling like something good has happened. Most people don't make it out of poverty and the tough situations that it creates, after all.

Red Rocket is the story of Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) returning to his hometown of Texas City after his porn career has ground to a halt and trying to generate some fast cash so he can find an opportunity to get back in the swing of things. That involves crashing at his ex-but-still-current wife's mother's home, becoming a dealer for one of the local under-the-table weed distributors, and getting involved with a cashier at the local donut shop whom he thinks he can turn into a star and use to ride back into the San Fernando Valley as a (re)conquering hero (but not, as his ex-wife, Lexi (Bree Elrod) points out, a "suitcase pimp" aka a male porn star making a living off a female talent.) Along the way, Mikey sponges off anyone who will offer a hand, including Lexi's neighbor, Lonnie (Ethan Darbone), whom he knew as a child and who still looks up to Mikey as a good guy to hang out with. Mikey, of course, is not a good guy, but is instead someone obsessed with his previous status as someone able to escape the confines of Texas City and the shadow (and fumes) of its massive refinery and whom can't stand the fact that he- a star -is stuck living with these regular people once again.

In the same way that his previous work, The Florida Project, dealt squarely with the lives of people living on the fringes of the Magic Kingdom and forced audiences to take a look inside the daily grind of their lives, Baker isn't afraid to step right into topics that are bound to make some viewers uncomfortable. Above and beyond his acknowledgment of the reality of sex as a fact of daily life, professionally and otherwise, he's willing to tread some sensitive ground when his protagonist, Mikey, essentially seduces a teenager into a career that she may not be interested in or prepared for, but which will make Mikey a lot of money and we're left with a mild feeling of tragedy when he realizes that his reach exceeded his grasp; not least because he makes the mistake of constantly trying to prove that he is more capable than everyone else around him until they decide to take advantage of that situation. In that respect, it's almost possible to feel like Mikey is correct in that he doesn't belong in this small town with all these other small people who aren't as, uh, gifted. But we also can't escape the fact that he's willing to sacrifice everyone else, to one degree or another, to his own self-interest. Baker and cinematographer, Drew Daniels, frequently highlight this contrast in a series of little moments, such as when Mikey is sure that he's sold Strawberry (Suzanna Son) on his scheme and we see him swaying from side to side on his battered bicycle on the way home in a moment of ecstasy that's just as intense as any orgasm. It's not a good thing that Mikey has done, but it's a little triumph that makes his world light again.

There are several great performances here; not least Rex's as the irrepressible Mikey, but especially Son as Strawberry, who is playfully magnetic every time she appears on screen. She responds to Mikey's expansion of her horizons with a growing self-confidence, leading us to believe that she understands more than she lets on, despite still being a prospective victim in this whole scenario. It's a role both understated and physically flamboyant, which presents Son as something of a natural and yet another of Baker's significant finds (He recruited her outside a theater in LA and didn't call her for a job for two years.) Another highlight is Judy Hill as Leondria, the local drug kingpin, who is fully aware of just who and what Mikey is from the moment he returns to town. Like him, she's more than willing to take advantage of another talented outlet for her business, but is also more than willing to cut him loose in favor of the residents (and regular customers) who are still interested in calling Texas City home, rather than discard it (and them) as trash in their wake. Leondria adds yet another key moment of hilarious normalcy when she insists on a family meeting to sort out the problems between her abrasive daughter, June (Rodriguez) and disinterested son, Ernesto (Marlon Lambert.) But possibly most affecting was Darbone (another newcomer; spotted as a waiter in a Nederland, Texas restaurant by Baker) as Lonnie, the neighbor kid whom Lexi used to babysit for and who naively believes that Mikey is someone to admire. At one point, Lexi asks that he keep Mikey from getting into trouble which he earnestly agrees to, not knowing that the situation will become quite reversed, as all of us anticipate much earlier.

Just as with The Florida Project, we can look at this film as an example of how there are often no happy endings, deserved or otherwise, but there are still real and interesting stories to tell in those situations. This film was in contention for the Palm d'Or at Cannes and it's not difficult to see why. While it does feel like it drags a little bit in the middle, as we wonder just how long it's going to take for Mikey to execute his master plan, the journey to get there is still wholly worthwhile. Highly recommended.