Is context everything?

Five years ago on a trip to the U.S., my wife and I watched the Lake Bell film In a World … while sitting in a cabana next to the heated pool in the place we were staying. It wasn’t a resort or anything; it was a small room in an Air BNB with a really big backyard. It was November, but November is actually usually pretty nice in LA, and the pool was heated anyway. Next to the heated pool there was an even more heated hot tub. It was like being at a resort without paying for being at a resort.

I loved the movie and gave it five stars on Letterboxd. That’s a ridiculously high rating for a small and unassuming independent comedy, but such was my enthusiasm for In a World (ellipses omitted).

When I watched it for the second time last night, I thought 3.5 stars was a more appropriate rating, and might have gone as low as three. It’s a nice little movie and a nice accomplishment for its neophyte director, who is also the star, but it’s pretty disjointed.

How could I have had such a different impression of the core merits of this film now than I did then?

Sure, you experience small fluctuations in how you feel about a movie between viewings. But I’d venture that it’s usually up or down a half-star. Not a jump of a full two stars in either direction.

My conclusion? It was the cabana. It was the hot tub. It was the heated pool.

Our viewing of In a World (ellipses omitted) was in such an idyllic context that I believe I fell in love with the viewing experience as much as the movie. I was in such the right place at such the right time that I overlooked the fact that this is not a great, but merely a good, movie. I was giving that moment five stars, not that movie.

Of course, the evidence of this theory is not as plentiful as the counterarguments against it. In the very same trip, we also watched 22 Jump Street, the sequel to the very satisfying 21 Jump Street. 22 Jump Street is not as satisfying, and accordingly, I gave it the three stars on Letterboxd that I said I’d give In a World (ellipses omitted) if rating it today.

If you want a more extreme example of the potential impact of setting on viewing, and a more extreme example of that setting we had in LA, last year my wife and I went to Bali to celebrate our ten-year anniversary. We watched a movie nearly every night, sitting in a much bigger cabana, next to a private pool. No heat was needed as it was Bali, but I think it may have been slightly heated anyway. We didn’t have our kids with us, and it was probably a week we were looking forward to more than any other in the entire ten years of our marriage.

Yet on that trip, of the three new movies we watched together, we didn’t like I, Tonya, we hated Game Over, Man! and the best of the bunch, Murder on the Orient Express, was meh at best. I watched one movie by myself in bed, which was also meh, and we saw a couple movies I’d already seen, which means they don’t qualify for a discussion of first impressions. Instead of our private villa artificially inflating our perception of the quality of these films, perhaps it actually hurt that perception, as anything that wasn’t up to snuff was a bit of a waste of this precious time away from children and responsibilities. As a matter of fact, I ended up ranking Game Over, Man! as the worst film I saw in 2018.

And then there are all the examples of films I loved despite being in no condition to watch them. The examples likely abound, but the one I’m thinking of is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son, which I watched in bed while convalescing from having a tooth pulled. There was no way I should have watched a drama, a foreign language drama at that, in those circumstances. Yet I teared up on multiple occasions, and not because of any physical pain I was in. I ranked it as my #2 movie of that year.

Seeing and enjoying Aladdin on a mountaintop, as we did over the weekend, and then seeing In a World (ellipses omitted) on my couch on an ordinary Tuesday night, and not enjoying it as much, got me thinking about this. But I don’t think I have any definitive conclusions to draw about the influence of context on one’s perception of a film’s quality, except that there is obviously some correlation, except when there isn’t. The context can never make you hate a movie you would have loved or love a movie you would have hated, but it can push a mildly negative or mildly positive impression toward either extreme.

Which is probably about the conclusion you would have guessed even before I went and wrote a thousand words on the subject.