Unbridled outrage and the lack of conclusions

Since we're no longer members of the Michigan Theater, we've been seeing fewer films, as you might expect. So when the Oscar nominations were announced the other day, I decided I/we should try to catch up on a few things. We've seen four of the ten Best Picture nominees but had seen none of the documentary feature films, so I figured we'd start there. I'll cover the first four (The Perfect Neighbor, The Alabama Solution, Mr. Nobody Against Putin and Come See Me in the Good Light) here. The fifth, Cutting Through Rocks, is only available on the Sundance Channel so I'm not sure when we might get a chance to see that.

The Perfect Neighbor- This one was about the killing of Ajike Owens in Ocala, FL in 2023. Susan Lorincz was Owens' neighbor who complained constantly about Owens' children and the children of other neighbors playing near her apartment. Those complaints included repeated calls to the Marion County sheriff. On June 2, 2023, Lorincz allegedly assaulted some of the children by hurling objects at them and calling them names. When Owens came across the street and knocked on her door to protest that behavior, Lorincz shot her through the locked door, killing her. Lorincz later cited Florida's "stand your ground" law as an explanation for her behavior. Public protests followed swiftly and Lorincz was eventually convicted of manslaughter, among other charges, and given 25 years. The film is yet another tragic example of basic racism and the idiocy of these so-called "self-defense" laws that allow our gun-happy society to exercise their "rights" to kill other people. But the fascinating thing about the presentation is that the vast majority of the film is comprised of the sheriff's officers' bodycam footage, as well as internal cameras at their HQ. Those bodycams give us insight as to their views on the absurdity of the situation (frequently walking away from visits to the neighborhood muttering about how the only one causing problems is Lorincz) but also to how they're basically unable to do anything about a person who is clearly not stable (she's arrested during the film for destroying the gate of a local business that had been closed on the area where she'd illegally parked her truck) but isn't doing anything that would enable them to either act directly or, at the very least, find some mental health resources for her that might help her situation (if those even exist at that level in the state of Florida.) It's on Netflix.

The Alabama Solution- should leave any decent person with a fine sense of outrage (similar to what you should be feeling over events in Minnesota these days.) It's about the systematic mistreatment within and injustice of the correctional system in Alabama, which basically serves as those of many states do, which is the perpetuation of slavery under another name (i.e. unpaid labor by prisoners who are systematically denied any genuine case review for release.) What makes that worse are the number of deaths that take place in that state's system that are simply waved away by the public (there are a couple great moments when the local shock jocks are heard dismissing an inmate being beaten to death by guards with essentially: "Shouldn't'a been there in the first place!") and which leaves families no recourse as to accountability or even explanations as to why their loved ones end up never returning from behind bars. It's infuriating, but really well done, since most of the footage comes from cell phone recordings from devices smuggled into the prisons (by guards, so they can make more money, as they are also systematically underpaid and abused by the system.) Some of the best parts are in recorded conversations with Robert Earl Council and Melvin Ray, two prisoners who are the leaders of the Free Alabama Movement, which the Alabama dept. of corrections despises because it exposes their perfidy in the most basic of ways. It's on HBO. 

Mr. Nobody Against Putin- This one starts out far more lighthearted than the first two, as it's initially presented as the story of a young man, Pavel Talankin, who is the videographer and event coordinator for the largest school in Karabash, a town of 15,000 people in the Ural mountains, once solely famous for being the most polluted town in all of Russia, thanks to the local copper mining and smelting operation. (See Mark Twain's Roughing It for a detailed description of just how awful copper mining- and mining, in general -really is.) Pavel loves his job... until the invasion of Ukraine begins and his job and that of the teachers becomes one of spoon-feeding propaganda to their students to encourage them not just to support the invasion, but also to indoctrinate them to the idea of fighting for Russia being their highest possible mission in life. It becomes an hour-and-a-half excursion into the concept of "patriotism being the last refuge of a scoundrel." It's also told entirely through Pavel's equipment, both at the school and his home and reveals not only his personal misgivings, but also how he starts to translate those objections into actions at the school (At one point, where the school is now required to start each day with a march through the hallway to the Russian national anthem, he replaces it with The Star-Spangled Banner.) Eventually, his actions attract the attention of higher-ups and things begin to get really dark in this small town. Once again, the primary emotional reaction of most watching should be some level of outrage, followed by shaking one's head at the stupidity of it all. It's on Apple TV.

Come See Me in the Good Light- And, finally, what is easily the most personal of those presented and what may be the best of them, as well. This film is the story of Colorado's poet laureate, Andrea Gibson and their wife, Megan Falley, as they struggle with Andrea's cancer. It follows them through treatment, the changing tides of their progress and regression and how it changes Andrea's outlook on their work, their relationships, and their life. Having grown up in a strict Baptist household, Andrea's poetry orbits the topics of identity, gender, and self-determination (and the emotional impact of all of those) pretty regularly. In the early 00s, they began performing as a spoken word artist and became something of a rock star in the poetry scene, but retreated from all of that after their diagnosis. Neither Andrea nor Megan are inhibited by the presence of (plain, old regular) cameras and so this ends up being a surprisingly intimate depiction of two people struggling with the concepts of mortality while still trying to maintain their normally hopeful (Megan) and determined (Andrea) demeanor about life and everything in it. When it came to a close without displaying what the resolution of Andrea's struggle was, Tricia complained that we didn't find out "what happened." My response was that because this was a film about life, whether they had died or not wasn't relevant. The film had shown what they wanted and that was life and everything in it that was to be appreciated and sometimes endured. It's also on Apple TV.

The show must go on

Sometimes, it's all about the navigation, be it winding around the islands near Hiroshima or figuring out just how you're going to deal with things left undone and unsaid which can never be completed. Those are just two of the themes in Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car, which is easily among the best films we've seen at the Michigan/State Theater in the past year. I'm certainly a fan of Japanese cinema, as my lifelong affection for Akira Kurosawa will attest, but this goes beyond my fondness for the style (which this film maintains) and instead is simply a response to a story well told, well acted, and so emotionally present that I couldn't help but feel echoes to the turns my own path has taken, both recent and well in the past.

Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a theater actor whose wife, Oto, is a screenwriter who develops ideas through sex and not always just with Yûsuku. Struggling with his own feelings of betrayal competing with his devotion to her, he's not present when she dies suddenly and he's left to deal with his feelings of frustration and survivor's guilt. When he agrees to direct a production of the Anton Chekov play, Uncle Vanya, which he's previously performed in the title role, he encounters not only one of his wife's former lovers among the cast, but a woman assigned to him as a driver, Misaki Watari (Tôko Miura), under the theater company's regulations, which disrupts his usual method, his self-enforced distance from others, and the last real connection he has with Oto, who recorded lines for him to listen and respond to while he drove. Misaki has her own deep-rooted problems from her past and the film ends up being a depiction of how they try to struggle through those issues, with the shadow of Chekov's work all around it.

At its root, this is just a great story, which is always the baseline test for me with any film. It's not especially complex or elaborate on the surface level, as its mostly about the basic relationships and emotions that almost every human encounters and frequently struggles with. But it becomes complex because of its depth and because of the passion with which its expressed, not only by the two leads, but also by a couple of their co-stars, especially Masaki Okada as Kôji Takatsuki and and Park Yoo-rim as Lee Yoo-na, who communicates only through Korean sign language throughout the film. Indeed, language is a key element, as Yûsuke prefers to mix languages in his productions, so that the actors performing Uncle Vanya are speaking in their native tongues, whether that be Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Tagalog, or Malay. It's this natural flow of communication for the speaker which is sometimes unintelligible to the listener that is perhaps the best euphemism for the difficulties of conveying emotion, even for those who've been bonded for a long time; sometimes especially for them.

Nishijima is fantastic as the primary (ahem) vehicle of the film, as all of our action is from his vantage point, and he never once slips into melodrama or emotion for its own sake, even as he portrays the rather self-righteous and demonstrative title character of Chekov's. You can always see the vulnerability of a person so tortured by their longing for someone who hurt them so terribly but it never rises to a rending-of-sackcloth level. Certainly, that's within the style of Japanese drama, so it can't be too surprising, but it's still a brilliant performance. Likewise, the cavernous pain of Miura's eyes, even when she begins as the strictly professional employee and gradually slips into the role of someone who clearly sympathizes with Yûsuke's pain, not only because it mirrors her own but simply because she's a human being who understands that internal conflict, is fascinating to watch. Combining those standout performances with the excellent thematic visuals of roadways, tunnels, and a lonely pair of headlights in the pitch blackness of the Chûgoku countryside is a genuinely standout example of craftsmanship by Hamaguchi and cinematographer, Hidetoshi Shinomiya. One interesting choice in that respect was what may have been the longest cold open of any film I've ever seen, as the credits only appeared a third of the way into the film's three hour runtime; every minute of which was worth it.

Indeed, there was a point about a half hour from the end, when the two leads were reaching something of a crux point in both their own relationship and their understanding of the most important past ones (Oto for Yûsuke and her mother for Misaki) when I had a personal reflection on emotional communication that, as always, in hindsight seems blindingly obvious but which is just a feature of the human condition that makes us sometimes unable to take the simplest steps. But just like the characters in Drive My Car and those in Uncle Vanya, the eventual message is that you have to push through those barriers and the pain and the confusion because, in the end, the show must go on. This is when you know you've encountered a great story that makes you think about things larger than yourself, but which may, in the end, be just about yourself and how you interact with the world around you and especially the other humans who inhabit it. I can't say enough positive things about this one, as you've probably realized by now. Spectacular.