Two More from 2021
I watch two more films from 2021.
Both of the pictures I’ve been watching were:
Released in 2021.
Adapted from the work of a female novelist.
First-time writer-director efforts from interesting, talented female actors with established on-screen careers and diverse taste in projects.
If you don’t want to go below the fold and get details, here’s the brief. The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Passing by Rebecca Hall are both movies that have a lot going for them. The Lost Daughter is worth a look but doesn’t quite cohere into more than the sum of its parts while Passing is arguably close to perfection and not to be missed.
I became aware of Hall and Gyllenhaal at around the same time. I remember first seeing Hall give strong and likeable performances in good movies from top-tier auteurs, the Christopher Nolan film The Prestige and the Woody Allen picture Vicky Cristina Barcelona. I first saw Gyllenhaal perform in Richard Kelly’s strange, engrossing 2001 picture Donnie Darko and have watched some of her other work including the outstanding Nolan comic book adaptation The Dark Knight.
Here’s what I’ve seen.
The Rebecca Hall of Honor.
The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan, 2006. Very good movie. Well-poised performance from Hall supporting an ambitious and complicated one from Christian Bale.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona, directed by Woody Allen, 2008. Very good movie. One of Allen’s better efforts from this part of his career. Hall is outstanding in this movie and she really started to grow on me here. She displays a lot of conflict, confusion and vulnerability in a character who is struggling to maintain an image of confidence and composure. Charming, funny and subtle performance.
Frost/Nixon, directed by Ron Howard, 2008. Pretty good movie. I can’t honestly say I’ve properly seen it because I was riding on a train through some Spanish countryside and it was the in-train movie on offer and I tuned in a few minutes late and watched it on a tiny screen on the back of the seat in front of me. But I got the gist. As I recall Hall looks astonishingly beautiful in this one, partly because her naturally elegant features are accentuated by some cool costume design. I remember her performance as being perfectly serviceable even though her character is arm candy for the characterization of David Frost as portrayed by Michael Sheen.
The Town, directed by Ben Affleck, 2010. Okay movie. Shallowly written; Hall does a fine job with what she’s given. One thing I always thought was interesting about this movie was how Jeremy Renner really disappears into his character but Jon Hamm seems somehow out of place, with writer/director/actor Affleck caught in the middle, both as a protagonist and filmmaker. Hall’s character is more of a plot device that brings these three into conflict with one another but Hall seems a good sport about it.
The Maggie Gyllenhaal of Fame.
Donnie Darko, directed by Richard Kelly, 2001. Very good movie. This film was really important to a best friend of mine who died not long after it came out and I saw it for the first time with some of our other pals as one of our memorial activities for him. But outside of that charged personal context, this picture is really unique and interesting. There’s nothing else quite like it and it’s worth a look, even if you don’t fully understand it, which I’m fairly sure I don’t. Maggie Gyllenhaal performs a role in support of her real-life brother Jake Gyllenhaal who plays her on-screen brother and the title character.
Secretary, directed by Steven Shainberg, 2002. Pretty good movie. As I recall this was when Gyllenhaal broke through as a respected lead actor and demonstrated a boldness in taking on risky material. This one is about a troubled protagonist with a self-abuse problem finding a healthy identity in a dominant-submissive relationship with a character played by James Spader in a prototypically creepy-but-inviting “Get me Spader!” role.
Adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze, 2002. Very good movie. Complicated to get into it but it’s one of the most clever metatextual approaches to mainstream filmmaking that I’ve seen, a meditation both on what it means for a screenwriter to adapt someone else’s book into a movie and a self-referential hall of mirrors that literally is about itself (among many other things). I should probably watch this again some time soon; I have to say in all honesty that I don’t remember anything about Gyllenhaal’s performance in this one.
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, directed by George Clooney, 2002. Pretty good movie. Unfortunately I don’t remember Gyllenhaal in this one either. Quirky, violent, well-made dark comedy. This was itself a first-time directorial effort from a well-known film actor.
The Dark Knight, directed by Christopher Nolan, 2008. Excellent movie. Gyllenhaal takes over and improves upon Katie Holmes’s role from the previous Nolan-directed Batman film and holds her own alongside heavy-hitting performances from Christian Bale and Aaron Eckhart and a legendary, era-defining screen-acting accomplishment from the ingenious Heath Ledger.
Away We Go, directed by Sam Mendes, 2009. Lousy movie. I’ve seen every one of Mendes’s pictures; without exception they are defined by phenomenal casts and breathtaking photography while unfailingly lacking something significant from a narrative standpoint. This might be shallow characterization, poorly-written dialogue, disjointed structure or stretches of screen time that are simply uninteresting. Or in the case of Away We Go, all of these at once, combined with a smug, cloying sense of self-satisfaction. While all of Mendes’s films are flawed, some of them can also touch brilliance, but Away We Go isn’t one of those. I don’t remember Gyllenhaal in this one but I bet it was a softball for her.
Frank, directed by Lenny Abrahamson, 2014. Terrible movie. One of those films that tries to get away with substituting quirkiness for profundity and ends up being grating. Gyllenhaal plays a cool, aloof den mother to the film’s band of stray eccentrics. She’s good in the movie as are some of the other performers but overall it’s a piece of junk.
Now then. Maggie Gyllenhaal wrote and directed The Lost Daughter, based on a work of fiction by the mysterious Italian writer who publishes under the name Elena Ferrante. While Gyllenhaal’s film isn’t a home run for me, it actually encourages me to get around to reading Ferrante precisely because I imagine that the kinds of characters and themes put forth in The Lost Daughter might make more sense on the page than the screen.
The Lost Daughter concerns the confused and disoriented emotional life of a professor and translator who is trying to take a working holiday alone in Greece while flashing back to memories of being a troubled young mother and wife. The older version of the character is played by the great actor Olivia Colman whom I’ve admired for years on one of the best-ever television programs Peep Show and in the excellent movie The Favorite. The younger version of the character is played well by Jessie Buckley, an actor of whom I wasn’t aware before seeing her very good performance in the weird ‘n creepy 2020 film I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
Buckley’s scenes in the film involve demonstrating how ill-suited the character was to motherhood and how her accomplished career as a translator led her to engage in an extramarital affair with a colleague played by Peter Sarsgaard (sporting a heroic beard).
Colman plays the protagonist in the present, whatever “the present” is supposed to mean in a film released in 2021 that clearly appears to be set contemporaneously but makes no acknowledgement whatsoever of the changes to global societies and customs that would specifically make her traveling and frequenting restaurants, cinemas and beaches difficult or impossible in real life. As with 2021 releases The Power of The Dog and Passing, The Lost Daughter seems to be one of the new model of A-list Pandemic Era movies that we can expect going forward, characterized by an underpopulated airiness that the film tries to make feel natural and unremarkable through choice of setting and camera placement; however The Power of the Dog and Passing are both set about a century before The Lost Daughter and so are able to escape more readily into their period-specific sense of style, an asset that Gyllenhaal’s film lacks.
The part of the story concerned with Colman’s share of the character, named Leda, involves her feeling alienated by and yet drawn into the orbit of the fellow vacationing beachgoers and several of the resort staff, the type of de facto grouping of individuals that forms a transitory and arm’s-length sense of community and intimacy that can understandably make a solo traveler feel a conflicting mixture of social obligation and personal defiance. We mostly see Leda trying to negotiate this balance as a way of processing her own shame and frustrations about her choices as a wife and mother, which we ultimately learn culminated in her simply ditching her family and not seeing her two young children for several years. In Greece Leda explores and tampers with her regrets and flaws by finding and hiding a child’s lost doll that the family of vacationers is looking for. (The title of the film could be seen as referring to the doll, the child and/or one of several other characters, perhaps even Leda herself.)
Aside from workers played by Ed Harris and Paul Mescal who quite shamelessly and menacingly flirt with resort guests seemingly for sport, the other people with whom Leda becomes unhealthily fixated and recklessly entangled are a dysfunctional extended family by whom she is both repelled and intrigued; rather than work out the mess of her own past she sets about cultivating a new mess with people she barely knows and doesn’t trust. Like Leda these strangers are not healthy or grounded individuals and so she feels an unconscious kinship with them, but it’s not until she stops deceiving herself that she can realize that she’ll be better off confronting her own neglected demons than trying to make nice with the smiling new ones around her.
This is decent-enough, if somewhat dense and heady, dramatic material and Colman, Buckley, Gyllenhaal et al are certainly taking it seriously. This is a sensible first showing for Gyllenhaal as a feature-film writer/director, though overall I didn’t love it because it was rather muted and not particularly fun to sit through. As I said above, I was also mildly disoriented by the confusing sense that this is a pandemic-concurrent setting without the pandemic.
I wrote something a while back about how in making the transition from film actor to prestige director, it appears to me that Robert Redford stacked the deck in his favor by choosing unchallenging material and hiring expert collaborators. It seems that Maggie Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Hall have each done precisely the same.
However in Hall’s case I found the results to be far stronger. Her 2021 film Passing, based on a 1929 novel by a writer with whom I’m unfamiliar named Nella Larsen, is for me a stirring accomplishment and must-see success. The story is deceptively simple and contains depths of pathos, outer conflict and inner turmoil that are communicated in measured, nuanced, finely-wrought lead performances from Ruth Negga, whom I loved in every episode of the flawed television series Preacher, and most especially Tessa Thompson, an actor who was solid as a love interest and emotional foil for Michael B. Jordan’s protagonist in the Creed pictures and is outstanding in Passing.
I’m noticing more consciously these days how much an American period drama relies on a lead actor locating a lived-in, era-appropriate voice for the protagonist that doesn’t feel like a parody of itself. The voice and accent Thompson embodies for her character Irene forms a portion of the strong foundation that makes this film such a success, as does the jaw-droppingly exquisite monochromatic photography by Eduard Grau that gives one the feeling of having awoken into an alive and fully-inhabited world of New York in the 1920s. One of my measurements for how much I enjoy sitting through a movie is how often I want to freeze what I’m seeing and hang it on a wall, and Passing is one of those rare and wonderful motion pictures where literally almost any frame in the entire movie is worth pausing to marvel at.
The premise involves Irene, a middle-class African American woman living in her home neighborhood of Harlem with her decent and honest doctor husband and two children, reconnecting with an old friend played by Negga called Clare who has moved to Chicago and is back visiting New York temporarily. Clare is in a sense more free than Irene and so can afford to be more boisterous and flamboyant, but the tradeoff she has made in service of this freedom means she has more to conceal: both women possess the power to traverse the borders of racist segregation by “passing” as white, but Irene exercises it carefully while Clare has fled headlong into her white identity, marrying a well-to-do bigot who has no idea that the mother of his child is a woman of color.
Clare expresses a desire to reenter Irene’s life as a friend, but Irene can’t shake the feeling that Clare is abusing Irene’s good will to feel connected to their shared roots in the African American community. While Irene chooses at times to pass, she never does so without guarding her ability to fade unobserved back into day-to-day life in Harlem, while Clare is trying to have it both ways, having “become” white but reserving the right to reinstall herself in Irene’s world. This threatens everything Irene has worked so hard to build as a good housewife, caring mother and conscientious community leader.
Underneath the remarkably strong aesthetic and creative accomplishments like acting, photography, costuming and set decoration that are so easy to appreciate through every moment of this picture is a very insightful piece of dramaturgy as conceived by Larsen and adapted by Hall. (I recently watched an episode of the PBS program Finding Your Roots that featured Hall exploring her own background as a white-presenting Englishwoman with African American heritage, which elucidates the importance to Hall of Larsen’s novel and the personal significance of Hall’s effort to adapt it into a film.) Passing manages to enclose complex, expansive historical and social commentary within a tight-knit and intimate story of believable and relatable characters. Irene and Clare have both made irrevocable choices about how to conduct their lives and these divergent paths are as understandable as they are different from one another. Both feel a certain amount of inner conflict about the tradeoffs they’ve been forced to make within the corrupt system they inhabit and have different ways of dealing with and expressing their emotions, which makes their friendship and rivalry fascinatingly complicated, especially as written by Hall and realized by two actors as gifted as Negga and Thompson. Each character has reason to envy some of what the other has and both are brought to life as sympathetic, complicated, realistically flawed individuals. Most rewardingly, the film’s climax has a tasteful depth of haunting ambiguity that continues to provoke further thought long after the credits have rolled.
Basically Passing has it all and I can’t recommend it strongly enough. It certainly worked for me better than The Lost Daughter, but these are both strong first writer/director showings from Hall and Gyllenhaal and I’m fully onboard to see where each goes next from behind the camera. Maybe we’ll even get to see either or both of them perform in the other’s movie some time over the next few years or decades. A nerd can dream.