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.
