Final Bit of Year-End Cramming (Patreon)

Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (Richard Linklater, 2022)

I turned this film off after 30 minutes earlier this year, but watched in full due to the acclaim it's gotten. And I mentioned a few things on Twitter related to it, which I will elaborate on, just a bit. First, I recognize that I have very particular problems with a lot of Richard Linklater's films, and they are completely personal. I'm not the most self-aware person on earth, but I do know that the similarity between his background and mine merely amplifies the choices he makes that I don't like. In this case, almost every Houston-specific bit of nostalgia felt cheap to me, because I share those points of reference and didn't get the sense Linklater was doing anything with them, apart from saying "look at the old General Cinema in my neighborhood! Hey, remember Minimax supermarkets?" etc.

But this does actually relate to my main problem with A10.5. If we acknowledge that the fake secret Apollo mission is a meaningless jape, and the meat of the film has to do with Linklater's childhood memories, then we have to ask what their purpose it. And I submit that this is very much an essay film, driven by the maker's voice and personality. However, that voice restricts itself to a list of time-bound experiences, never taking any kind of position vis-a-vis anything. Sure, it uses the older sister to introduce some of the anti-NASA talking points of the day. But does  Linklater agree with them? Does he disagree? There's really no way to tell, so he is essentially lining up various discursive positions so that they are represented, but without making any value judgments. There's a guy on Twitter right now arguing that A10.5 is very obviously against corporal punishment, and pro-counter culture. I think the second claim is obviously wrong. Linklater is a sports-loving suburban Texas guy, someone who always felt at home in this environment. As to the first claim, yes, Linklater expresses disbelief that schools were ever allowed to administer "swats," or that kids could ride on the freeway in the beds of pickup trucks, or that you could drive with an open container. But this isn't critique. It's more along the lines of, "We were so naive... But oh, the fun we had!"

Living (Oliver Hermanus, 2022)

There was no particular need to remake Ikiru. It's not a film that was crying out for an update, and besides, Hermanus and adapted-screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro set this British version in the postwar period, just as Kurosawa had done. If anything notable comes across, it's that from Ishiguro's perspective, British and Japanese culture share quite a lot in terms of repression and the general distrust of ambition or charisma, favoring those who go with the flow and fade into the collective. However, given the fact that Ishiguro did the adaptation, I found myself implicitly comparing Living with The Remains of the Day, another story of an elderly man facing his mortality and struggling to find his individual voice. 

And while Bill Nighy's performance here is certainly skillful and measured, it can't really compare with Anthony Hopkins' turn in Remains. Both men are great actors, but Hopkins had the significant benefit of a great director, James Ivory, who understood how to craft a milieu that amplified his characters' private tragedies. By contrast, Hermanus follows Kurosawa's roadmap without adding very much, except that the co-workers of Mr. Williams (Nighy) all seem identical, none of them except perhaps the youngest, Wakeling (Alex Sharp) communicating their own internal struggles. Yes, people are ground down by social convention and bureaucratic inertia, but they are not reduced to a series of interchangeable bowler-hat men from a Magritte painting. Living is okay, but could have been much better in more capable hands.

Descendant (Margaret Brown, 2022)

Brown's foursquare, deeply humanistic documentary is notable for a number of reasons, among them its implicit criticism of two of this season's other high-profile nonfiction films. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed focuses on artist Nan Goldin, and her unique vision as both chronicler of a largely unseen community and an activist within the art world. Laura Poitras does show us that many activists are involved in the effort to hold the Sacklers to account for the opioid crisis, but Goldin always remains in the center. Similarly, in All That Breathes, Shaunak Sen profiles two brothers whose efforts to rehabilitate injures birds is a kind of obsession, their own quixotic stand against the industrial despoliation of Delhi. They fix their efforts on a single type of bird, and a particular locale, and at times seem to let other matters, such as anti-Muslim discrimination, fall to others because they simply don't have time.

By contrast, Descendant is a portrait that is resolutely collective, about a community -- Africatown, outside of Mobile, Alabama -- who are working together to both preserve their history and insure their present-day survival. Various members of the community display varying levels of passion regarding the location of the sunken slave ship the Clotilda, and the sociopolitical aftermath when it is raised and becomes a centerpiece of public memory. But what is noteworthy to me about Descendant is how tired and frustrated these community activists are. They display diligence and focus, but these are people who have had activism foisted upon them by circumstance. Malign forces such as heavy industry, the Mobile political machine, and the status of the slave trader's family as contemporary Alabama millionaires, all always encroaching on the lives of the people of Africatown, and Brown shows us the endless effort they must expend just to avoid being erased. For some folks, every day entails some degree of protest.

All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen, 2022)

Now, none of what I wrote above takes anything away from All That Breathes, which is in many respects a lovely documentary about two brothers, Saud and Nadeem, who run a wildlife rescue practically by themselves. They do have an apprentice, Salik, who is a bit of a doofus and often serves as comic relief, asking naive, "why is the sky blue?" sorts of questions. And we do see Saud's wife help bandage a bird or two. But Sen takes quite a lot at face value, in particular why the brothers have decided to devote themselves to the black kite, a bird that doesn't appear to be in particular danger of extinction. This doesn't invalidate their efforts or concern, but it does suggest that within the framework of animal welfare and environmentalism, these are two men who just have a particular affinity bordering on obsession for one kind of bird. 

Again, this is not a problem in itself. But Sen never interrogates this aspect of the brothers' work. Instead, he emphasizes their sacrifices, the frustration of Saud at being the less visible half of the team who does the grant-writing, and the personal disruption when Nadeem has the opportunity to go to New York for veterinary study, something Saud cannot do because he has a family to support. In short, All That Breathes is deceptively character-driven, while at the same time remaining at a too-respectful distance from its subjects. Perhaps that's because Sen was worried about undermining the film's social-activist elements, but then, this just speaks to how thematically unclear All That Breathes often seems.

Geographies of Solitude (Jacquelyn Mills, 2022)

If All That Breathes seems uninterested in its subjects' underlying motivations for their environmental activism, Geographies of Solitude is a film that has that element front and center, but seems willfully blind to it. Mills' film is about Zoe Lucas, a self-described naturalist who has lived on Sable Island, a mostly uninhabited strip of land off the coast of Nova Scotia, for over forty years. During this time, she has undertaken extensive studies of the fauna of the island, which notably includes herds of wild horses, along with sea lions and other mammals. We learn that in her ongoing studies, Lucas has collected and labelled thousands of insects, compiled hundreds of journals of drawings and narrative observations of the horses, and analyzes their dung and carcasses for traces of plastic along with the native seaweed.

As Geographies progresses, we learn that Lucas has cleaned, collected, and cataloged all sorts of garbage that has washed ashore: trash bags, Mylar balloons, water bottles, and tiny bits of micro-plastic. Her purpose, it seems, is to provide hard evidence of the toll that human beings have taken on the planet, through her obsessive attention to one very small part of the globe. For her part, Mills has channelled her filmmaking through Lucas's sensibility, choosing to bury bits of celluloid in horse dung, use a computer program to turn beetle's steps into electronic music, and basically treat the filmmaking process as an extension of Lucas's intensive documentation. But the question is never raised. To what end? Does Lucas think that we don't know that the ocean is filled with plastic? 

Geographies is very much like All That Breathes, in the sense that the films' subjects are held up as models for conscious living. That is, the implication is strong that if each of us just appointed ourselves stewards of one tiny part of the world's problems -- a small island, an urban bird population -- that everything might be repaired. I don't necessarily disagree, although this focus on individual initiative does tend to obscure the role that massive global polluters play in the destruction of the earth, since no one expects that Exxon Mobil will "adopt an island." But more than this, Geographies so admires Lucas's dedication that Mills doesn't seem to recognize that not all of us are constitutionally built for such a monomaniacal practice, and that no single model of change-making is really exemplary.