Looking for the Boden-ness and the Fleck-ness

Marvel Studios has hired directors with vision (Taika Waititi), hacks (Peyton Reed), and directors with vision that they tried to turn into hacks (Edgar Wright).

The decision to hire Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck to direct Captain Marvel seems like a case of the former, but it may have ended up being a case of the latter.

In any case, after watching the movie, I’m not seeing the Boden-ness or the Fleck-ness in it.

That’s not to say I disliked Captain Marvel. In the end I had a fair bit of affection for it. I feel about toward it as I feel toward Black Panther, which is 3.5 stars out of 5.

But Black Panther was at least directed by a director with vision, who was allowed to keep that vision intact when he made the movie. Captain Marvel feels … well, just about like every other Marvel movie.

Which is kind of what they’re going for. It’s been much discussed, occasionally by me, that the real auteur behind the Marvel movies is not their individual directors, but Kevin Feige, the producer on … well, every single Marvel movie I think. He’s had credits on Marvel-related properties all the way back to 2000’s X-Men, where he served as associate producer. The guy is as steeped in the Marvel vision as Stan Lee was – more, probably.

But even within that, there is the leeway, even the desire, to step a bit afield from what’s considered to be the “standard” Marvel movie. That’s why Feige hired Edgar Wright for Ant-Man, though he wasn’t willing to go as far afield as Wright wanted. Maybe he wasn’t ready yet. Thor: Ragnarok’s Waititi and Panther’s Ryan Coogler got to inject some of themselves into the movies they made, which became massive hits.

So he was certainly ready for Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck to do their thing … but they didn’t.

Or maybe they just don’t have an identifiable “thing.”

Since the average MCU fan will likely not have seen any of their filmography – and I’m not going to blame you if you’re that person (sorry to refer to you as “average”) – I’ll give you some idea who they are and what they’ve been up to. Boden and Fleck have always worked together as far as I can see. They are not related and have never been in a relationship, which makes them a bit of an anomaly in terms of directing teams. [NOTE: I was wrong, they are/were in a relationship, but they are very private about the nature of it, though it looks like they have a child together. I'll leave this as is and just add this note.] In fact, they met on a student film and decided to collaborate. They do have a bit of a Coen brothers thing going on in the sense that both were always credited as writers but one was initially credited as the director, that being Fleck. (The man always gets the best title, right?) After about their second film they both started being listed as directors, which seems only fair.

They burst onto the scene, in a manner of speaking, with their 2006 film Half Nelson. You the “average MCU fan” still didn’t likely see it, but in indie film terms, it was definitely a bursting. It was one of the movies that helped break Ryan Gosling, who received an Oscar nomination for his role as a crack-addicted teacher. Neither crack addiction nor teaching makes an appearance in Captain Marvel.

They then moved on to something decidedly smaller scale, if only because it had no name actors in the cast. That was 2008’s Sugar, a realistic look at the attempts of a young Latin American pitcher to make it in American professional baseball, which makes it an anomaly in terms of baseball movies. The star of that movie is a young man name Algenis Perez Soto, who didn’t pick up another role for ten more years (though does have a small part in Captain Marvel, I now see). I’d say that Latin Americans and baseball do not make an appearance in Captain Marvel, but baseball does make a small appearance.

Next was another shifting of gears for the duo, who made the mental illness comedy It’s Kind of a Funny Story in 2010. This was a bit more mainstream as it featured Emma Roberts, Zach Galifianakis and Viola Davis, not to mention another guy who seemed on the track to stardom but hasn’t been heard from much lately: Keir Gilchrist. (Oh yeah, he was in It Follows.) Mental illness doesn’t make an appearance in Captain Marvel, although I suppose comedy does.

Their fourth feature, and last before Captain Marvel, was the 2015 buddy dramedy Mississippi Grind, which features Ryan Reynolds and a man they would work with again in Captain Marvel, Ben Mendelsohn, who was actually my favorite part of the movie. It’s about two guys going on a gambling spree along the Mississippi, and also trying to discover themselves. There’s no gambling in Captain Marvel, but there's self-discovery out the wazoo.

I’ve liked all of Boden and Fleck’s movies, but trying to find a throughline is pretty difficult. The question is, should we try to find that? Do good filmmakers have to revisit similar themes to stake out an identity for themselves? And does appearing to be obsessed with the same themes over the course of a career actually make you a better artist, or just someone easier to discuss because it allows film school students to construct grand unifying theories of you?

And there’s no doubt they are good filmmakers. I’ve liked all of their films, particularly Half Nelson, which was my #10 of the year it came out.

What I don’t really see, and what it may not ever be possible to see, is a logical, identifiable reason why Feige would have considered them a good match for Captain Marvel. They’re not a bad match, certainly. Good filmmakers can, presumably, take any material and make it good, as long as they’re starting with a good script and a good cast. But what was the Boden-ness and Fleck-ness he was looking for?

If forced to give an answer, I’d surmise that he saw a streak of humanism in their films, a sense of how to bring three dimensions to a character. A “gooey women’s movie” needs someone like that. (That’s not me talking, of course, but what I imagine the thinking might have been.)

In fact, their hiring represents a kind of funny half measure toward accepting female directors, and primarily female-driven content, into the MCU. It’s only half-directed by a woman, though harder to believe even than that is that Marvel has yet to make a movie in which a woman was the protagonist. They do have a Black Widow movie lined up (directed by a woman, Cate Shortland – see my thoughts on her here), and presumably will have a Captain Marvel 2 if/when this is a success. But they’re a bit late in getting here, and when they do, it’s hard to know/see what this woman has brought to this project.

Again, nothing against Anna Boden, or against Ryan Fleck. But I just don’t see what they’ve done here other than shepherd the project through and make a pretty good movie.

In a way, this makes them like the biggest recent Marvel success stories, who are also a directing pair – the Russo brothers. If you are grading MCU directors on the admittedly flawed scale I introduced earlier, from hack on one side to directors with vision on the other, the Russos are probably closer to the “hack” end of the scale. I should probably describe what I mean by that. A “hack” is thought of as someone who just does the studio’s bidding and does not display any trademark techniques or styles. You know, maybe a Joel Schumacher. On the extreme opposite end you’ve got someone like Wes Anderson, who is so much like himself every time out that literally no one else could have made his movies.

The Russo brothers came to the MCU with two random features – Welcome to Collingwood and You, Me and Dupree – as well as a handful of episodes of Community (which appear to have won them the gig) under their belt. Not much. But they ended up being the perfect choices to execute Feige’s vision, first in two Captain America movies and now in two Avengers movies, assuming they continue their run of success with next month’s Avengers: Endgame.

Boden and Fleck would certainly be happy with accomplishing something like that, but I guess I feel more is expected of them, given that they made four genuinely interesting films, one of which garnered an Oscar nomination. Their role in relation to those films was decidedly not the role of a hack, as these are smaller movies that they wrote. But neither did they develop a signature style. So when they’re tapped to direct a Marvel movie, I do expect more from them than just turning in a good Marvel movie … even if I can’t quantify what that is.

If you’ve seen the movie and can identify either its Boden-ness or its Fleck-ness, I’d love you to let me know in the comments below.