29 June 2020
This pandemic has changed things. This rampaging virus has changed how we get food. This spiked demon has changed how and where we work. Finally, Covid 19 has changed the basic rhythm of how we interact with other people and when we interact with other people. There is now a distance between us and we rarely actually connect in real life.
For the most part I don’t like what has occurred. Truly I miss sitting and having coffee with people. Mostly I miss the banter. Talk has always been the currency of my life’s joys whether it occurs in the line in the supermarket or when I am walking by someone watering their lawn dry warm day.
I miss so many forms of human contact that have been severed. My longing for connection would be same whether the disruption is short term or for a much longer term than I want to contemplate. As I listened to a podcast last night called Make Me Smart from American Public Media, the hosts seemed to spiral into depression when they read a news blurb that said Americans and the world in general must prepare for things to be like this for two years. You know I really felt their pain.
Cut off from human contact we look for other things to occupy our minds. Over the past few days I have found myself watching a bit of media. Starting Sunday and ending last night I watched two movies. One of the films I watched was because I wanted to see the star, Elle Fanning, in a full-length feature film.
On Hulu they have been showing a series called the Great. Ms. Fanning starring role in this farce was a revelation. She was in total control of that bawdy comedic serial. Taking on the role of Catherine the Great, Ms. Fanning was given the right script, had the right supporting cast, and most of all demonstrated her timing was impeccable. What was captured in those video images set in eighteenth-century Russia’s implied that Ms. Fanning may very well may become a major star.
Having devoured all of the Great, I did a search for Fanning on Netflix and it took me to a movie called All the Bright Places (2020). I hesitated to see the film because it was based on a teen novel and the topic was teen suicide. When Thirteen Reasons Why was released a year or two ago, I watched it over about a four-day span. Thirteen Reasons Why was well done and it was strong stuff. The original episodes told a wrenching, but moving tale of the unnecessary loss of a young life. Each episode dripped with the cruelty of teens all wanting to be cool when their hormones were out of control and their psyche’s weren’t grounded. Yes, I hesitated for a good long time before watching the movie. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to the kind of dark places All the Bright Places might bring to life.
On Netflix you can hit a button that takes you to similar/related movies. The one that popped up and caught my eye was Before I Fall (2017). Fall stars another up and coming actress, Zoey Deutch. Ms. Deutch was in Everybody Wants Some. The description of Fall was this, “Forced to continually relive the day she dies in a car crash, a privileged high schooler must unravel the cosmic mystery of her suddenly looping life.” Note well there are no words like comedic take, hilarious or subversively humorous in this description. Thus, Fall was a message movie, a serious message movie. Again, the film involved the unnecessary death of a youth.
Both movies were movies trying to say something profound. One was focused on the impact of the snake pit that is high school’s social component on people who are damaged, who are wounded by life. The other seemed to be designed to look at the larger issues of meaning of human life and how that comes to the fore in the high school experience. Each movie it seemed to me was biting off a big chunk of emotional territory to digest. Did they get it right? Well…
A side note about why I watched what I watched and when. About 10 days ago I had watched the vulgar and crass alternate version of Groundhog Day called Palm Springs on Hulu. Having wandered so recently through the filthy take on the live a day, fall asleep, repeat a day cycle, I wasn’t sure I wanted to take on a potentially darkly emotional version of a repeating cycle narrative. All the Bright Places won. (I note Palm Springs is not meaningful but it is a fun diversion. The actress Cristin Milioti is so much fun to watch that it almost makes the starring presence of Andy Samberg bearable. Throw in J.K. Simmons playing a demented cop and the whole film reaches a B -, or for those of you who prefer a number rating 79 out of 100. All the Bright Places was cued up.
The lead character in All the Bright Places is a high school senior who has suffered the traumatic loss of her sister. A horrible accident took place and one sister lived and one sister died. Violet, played by Ms. Fanning, rides a bike and won’t get in a car. She lived and her beloved sister perished. Violet is tortured with survivor’s guilt. Her affect is flat and she seems lost in a world that cannot penetrate the hard shell created by her pain. In the narrative the space inside that shell is piling up one dark thought upon another.
We meet Violet as she is standing atop the railing of an overpass. Violet is clearly debating whether to jump. We meet Theo Finch as he stops to try and pull Violet back from the edge, literally. Obviously, Theo succeeds or it would be the shortest angst-ridden teen romance ever. But Theo for this gallant knight moment is not meant to be an overly sympathetic character. He is in fights. He is dangerous. The darkness insider this young man shows many signs of trouble ahead. Theo is a pressure cooker ready to blow.
Justice Smith who plays Theo is charged with a difficult task. His role demands that he portray a troubled and unstable character. Additionally, he must also show an inner childlike wonder that makes him so attractive to Violet. Mr. Smith succeeds 70% of the time in carrying this two-pronged acting burden. He succeeds most often showing us the wonder in his heart. Theo dark moments just don’t seem to fit. His absences without explanation and his explosive outbursts just don’t seem ravaged and painful enough to be believed. It is as if Theo’s darkness is being conveyed by the static flat colored tortured facial expression so common in graphic novels. Mr. Smith just doesn’t give us the nuanced behaviors of the mentally distraught that can explode with force on the big screen if done right.
Ms. Fanning as Elle hits the mark of a teen in a dark space opening up again to life after the tragic death of her sister. Violet’s character seems real more than 90% of the time. Ms. Fanning’s body language coveys the awkward and clumsy physicality of a late teen girl/young woman at first crippled by an emotional weight that should not be hers to bear.
Much of the movie is set on odd sites throughout Indiana. Some people like me love these kinds of movies. There is an older Canadian film called One Week with Joshua Jackson as the main character travels Canada looking at all the giant things. He travels to the 20-foot-tall goose in Wawa, Ontario and then to a giant (several story) hockey stick out on the prairies. Violet and Theo traipse Indiana in search of home-made roller coasters and oddly useless granite markers. As they wander Indiana in search of the odd but notable, Violet opens up to life at again. Ms. Fanning conveys this in a way that seems natural and unforced. Theo, despite his nurturing of this welcomed progression in Violet, spirals toward an inner maelstrom, the genesis of which is really not developed well.
This film is Ms. Fanning’s showpiece. She carries the development of her character with an authenticity that is moving. Her portrayal of Violet demonstrates that she can inhabit a character almost completely when given the right script. Mr. Smith if given better material to work with could very well prove to be a strong and solid actor. But the writing here leaves him in the lurch one time too many.
One final quibble needs to be voiced. There is an exposition scene at the end of the that hurts the narrative. What Violet feels as the screen fades to black could have been handled better with an internal voiceover or a montage of images rather than a clunky speech before an audience comprised of people who in reality could not care less.
There came a point about midway through this movie where what the writers had done with Mr. Smith’s depiction of Theo that made me frustrated. I needed a break despite how fascinated I was with the general storyline and Ms. Fanning’s clear capturing of the essence of Violet. At this point I jumped to Before I Fall and settled in for a different take on the American teen experience.
The elevator description of Before I Fall, is well think Mean Girls without humor but with much pathos merged with an ending that tries to be spiritually illuminating in a western Buddhist kind of way. Deutch plays high school senior Samantha Kingston. She is pretty. She is privileged.
In the opening five to ten minutes of the film we Sam go through a normal high school teen’s day, if that teen lived in the upper-class strata of the Pacific Northwest. We see her at her architect designed home showing a strained relationship with her parents and sister. We see here headed to school in a car with friends. We watch her at school, she is clearly one of the mean girls at the top of the social pecking order at this particular school. What comes next is that we see her at a party with any number of cringe worthy moments. Finally, and suddenly, without apparent rhyme or reason, dying in a SUV accident. And then the day resets and begins again. And again. And again.
Counting the main character there are five characters that matter in this film. These are in no particular order, two enemies, a wannabe boyfriend, her kid sister and the other co-leader of the mean girls. The importance of each of these persons in Sam’s life and in Sam’s last day comes out in a different repetition of Samantha’s ongoing series of death days. Some of the characters seem very wooden and contrived, but some are identifiable as decent representation of teen life.
The movie is jumpy tied to it narrative form of living the same day again and again. The movie pivots from the allure of romance to the banality of losing one’s virginity. It swings from the cruelty of teen cliques to the inevitability of fate superseding any attempt to assuage the pain inflicted by such cruelty. At times the film seems obsessed with driving home the point that years of interpersonal harm cannot be ameliorated with the actions that can be carried out in a single day, save one.
Truth be told this story has been told before, and told often. Before I Fall should be nap inducing dull. But as the film progresses, and as Sam tries different tweaks to break the endless of cycles of reliving her last day, there is a sincerity in some of the small conversations and gestures that will keep your eyes open and should keep you watching. To see someone try to evolve into a whole cloth of a person without guidance, save for two stray bits of cosmic messaging, well, it makes you root for Sam to achieve what she must do to break the cycle.
In the end I liked both movies. But I am an old man and I like messages that say growth is possible, despite pain and trauma. Do these movies work? The answer is sort of. All the Bright Places works because one actress carries the whole emotional weight of the tale with real feeling. The other works because as the film goes on the story telling improves and you begin to care about the character. You begin to root for her and you wish that her gestures, her growth could make a difference.
Do these films for their intended audiences? I don’t think so. All the Bright Places has a theme that is easily ignored among the immortal young. Growth and persevering over pain are concepts that require too much of long-term thinking for hard headed, hard charging 14-18-year-old high school students to absorb. Before I Fall might strike a chord with some of the youth who see it, but many will simply focus on the coolness of Sam’s clique as depicted in the early parts of the film. Before I Fall has a good heart, but the way the message unfolds will not capture a casual viewer. The movie will not bring a young viewer to an understanding of the hurts the main character, in tandem with her clique, cause and how they might have considered making some changes.
These are both very beautifully filmed movies. These are both films with something to say. But Ms. Fanning in her body language conveys the greatest reality to be found in either story. You could waste about two hours in far less enjoyable ways that watching one or the other of these movies.
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