I had a cinematic experience on Saturday night that is, regrettably, increasingly rare these days:
My mind was blown.
I'm not talking about the kind of blown mind you get when you sit there in shock after finishing a movie, as the totality of how good it was overwhelms you. I got a little bit of that experience with Antebellum, though that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about a film's actual twists and turns catching you off guard, and paying off in a really satisfying way.
Twists and turns -- once a comparative rarity in movies -- are now the driving force behind even the shittiest movies. As viewers, we are conditioned to expect them, even look for them, well before the filmmaker actually wants us to know they are going to happen.
So it is, indeed, very rare that a filmmaker -- or filmmakers, in this case (debut directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz) -- can actually play it just right either so I don't expect it, or so I have really misread the movie entirely, meaning that their reveal has the effect they intend it to have.
An intended effect that is entirely ruined if you read the opening paragraph of the film's page on Wikipedia.
Now the SPOILERS.
Because I was so enthralled by the way the narrative played out -- a narrative I was greeting with some skepticism for its first half -- I went to Wikipedia after finishing Antebellum to kind of take it all in again in word form.
And this is how the film is described in that opening paragraph:
"The film stars Janelle Monae, Eric Lange, Jena Malone, Jack Huston, Kiersey Clemons and Gabourey Sidibe, and follows a modern-day African American woman who finds herself in a Southern slave plantation and must escape."
Uh, no. Major disservice here.
Bush and Renz probably cringe when they read a reductive description like that. Yes, that's what the film is about, but it's a long time before that grand design is revealed. It is not something a viewer should know before going in.
Other places the film is briefly synopsized -- such as Metacritic and Letterboxd -- do better, but still give away information I wouldn't want to have given away. Here's what they say:
"Successful author Veronica finds herself trapped in a horrifying reality and must uncover the mind-bending mystery before it's too late."
That respects the desire not to disclose certain twists, though it also points to the fact that there are twists, which is not ideal. Also, as the character perceives it herself, it's not a "mind-bending mystery" -- that's the audience's perspective on the material.
Where both of these loglines fall down is they reveal that Janelle Monae's character lives in the modern world. Antebellum itself doesn't reveal this for its first 40 minutes.
The movie begins with a long, unbroken take through a plantation circa the Civil War, the kind of cinematic technique that leaves me putty in the filmmakers' hands. I may have to watch that again before my rental expires, if I don't watch the entire movie again.
I expected this to be a prologue before we shifted to 21st century Janelle Monae, as I thought I did know that the movie was set in present day. I think I'd heard it compared to Lovecraft Country, which I haven't seen, but which also explores racism using genre elements. That show is set in the 1950s, but using the obviously older beasties from the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. I figured this would be the same.
It's not a prologue. The Civil War setting lasts for the film's first 40 minutes or thereabouts. It stayed in that setting long enough for me to assume I'd gotten the movie wrong, and what little I knew about it was not accurate. All sorts of unpleasant slave-related atrocities occur during these 40 minutes: whippings, brandings, lynchings, suicides, the burning of corpses in crematoria. If the movie hadn't gone somewhere useful, they would have just been unpleasant. Given where it does go, I found them incredibly powerful -- at least in retrospect.
But then, Monae awakens in her bed, today, next to her sleeping husband, as a coworker awakens her by phone to ensure she has enough time to get ready for her flight to New Orleans, where she will be speaking at a conference to other Black women of industry. It turns out she's actually Veronica Henley, a sociologist with a PhD who often appears as a guest on news programs to discuss the quest for racial equality in modern society.
Okay, so this antebellum south stuff was all just a dream, right? An exploration of the film's opening quotation from William Faulkner? That would be "The past is never dead. It is not even past." And she just imagined herself as a slave named Eden as an unconscious projection of her fears of being marginalized in her daily life?
So for the next 25-30 minutes, we get Veronica as she makes her way through her next two days, receiving racist microaggressions from hotel concierges, and macroaggressions from Jena Malone, first on a Zoom call and then in a series of stalking episodes -- sending her flowers, breaking into her hotel room, that sort of thing. So this is what the movie is going to be about, how the deranged views of 19th century southerners have never actually gone away, and they will result in something really unpleasant for modern-day Janelle.
In this section there are a handful of great moments with Gabourey Sidibe, of Precious fame, who I have always loved. She calls one white girl who has marginalized them "Becky" -- humorously, her name tag reads "Rebecca" -- and tells off another guy for sending a drink over to their table at dinner. You go, girl.
This section ends with Malone kidnapping Monae when posing as her Uber driver ... and then we're back on the plantation again.
So the movie shifted my expectations again. I figured we'd revisit the plantation in some form, but I didn't know what. And the next thing that happened made me understand this even less.
Eden -- or is it Veronica? -- awakens to the ringing of a cell phone. The confederate general who has been raping her awakens and goes out to a pouch on his horse, where he talks to an unheard person on the other end of the line, saying he'll "take care of it." Monae's character hears and senses an opportunity.
At this point I'm thinking "How come a character living in the 1860s does not wonder what the sound of a cell phone ringing is?" And "How come a cell phone is ringing in the 1860s?"
So for the next little bit, I thought this was just her dream again, with modern elements breaking into her personalized Civil War nightmare, as apparently unrelated dream elements are wont to do. Another such anachronism is when slaves picking cotton in the fields see a plane flying overhead, again apparently unsurprised about such a development. I began to feel a little disappointed that this movie was going to contain so much content that existed only within the dream space, but I was going with it.
And then, a few minutes later, I realized it was all real.
So the middle part of the story is actually the first thing that happens, chronologically, followed by the first part and then the third part. Veronica was really kidnapped, and where she was brought was a modern-day attempt by racist sociopaths to create a sort of plantation theme park -- you know, like Westworld, except for the American south. And except with real people taking the abuse as opposed to androids.
Brilliant.
As we see Veronica and another fellow "slave" (actually a kidnapped racial studies professor) attempt to escape, I became more and more enthralled and sat up straighter and straighter in my seat. And the final section of the film is just filled with terrific "a-ha!" moments, which I don't need to recount here, since you implicitly agreed not to read this until you'd actually seen the movie. I will say, however, that the final reveal -- that this is the secret back section of an otherwise "legitimate" Civil War reenactment park -- called Antebellum -- was the perfect capper on an excellently executed mind-blower.
Within the details of the narrative, there are other great things that you don't understand at all until the director's grand design is revealed. For example, a number of times you see "Eden" doing this tricky routine when she walks to the door of the cabin where she lives, which involves these giant yet careful movements where she's landing on every fourth board of the wooden floor. At first I thought this was how she was walking because she was still in pain over being branded. (Yes, that happens.) Ultimately, you realize it's her practicing for her eventual escape -- these are the only boards that don't creak when you step on them.
If I had read the film's Wikipedia page, or even its Letterboxd or Metacritic page, I would have known, or at least suspected, many of these things long before the film revealed them to me. And that's a damn shame. Not for me, since I did it right, but for all the others who didn't. I'm sure watching a trailer, which I also did not do, would have just made it ten times worse.
And so we have a truly strange phenomenon with people's perceptions of this film. And that brings us to the other reason you shouldn't read the film's Wikipedia page, which is that later on, it reveals that Antebellum has only a 28 on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 45 on Metacritic.
Huh?
To be sure, there are some outliers there. Scrambling over to Metacritic as I immediately did, I found that Peter Debruge of Variety gave the film a 90, which is about what I would give it. But the eight positive reviews were overwhelmed by the combined 28 mixed or negative reviews, 18 of the former and ten of the latter.
Huh?
I have to wonder what percentage of these people came in with the blank slate I did. In this day and age, it's likely most of them did not. I have no idea what percentage of critics avoid trailers like I do, or refrain from even a cursory researching of the films they are planning to review. In some quarters we still receive digital press materials for upcoming movies, and it's only logical that some or even most critics peruse them.
But the blank slate should be the condition we strive for. It's not the fault of Gerard Bush or Christopher Renz that we know things about their movie we should not know before we sit down to watch it. They constructed their film in the precise sequence it needed to be structured in order to blow our minds -- multiple times, actually. It's not their fault if those charged with the responsibility of bringing it to the public have not handled it as carefully.
Because I just don't see how a completely unbiased viewer comes away from this without feeling enthralled -- not only by the reveals, but by the technique (remember that great tracking shot to start the film) and by the acting (Monae is amazing throughout).
If the tepid reaction to the film prevents Bush and Renz from getting another opportunity to make another great film -- realizing it's fraught with peril to throw around the word "great" -- I think that's a damn shame.
Not only a great film, but one that speaks to this particular moment. There are a number of emotional crescendos in this film, but one involves Veronica's climactic discovery of a statue of Robert E. Lee on horseback. I don't imagine Bush and Renz could have known, when making their film, that the toppling of confederate statues would have been a primary narrative in 2020. But great art tends to have an intuitive relevance to the era in which it is produced, an unconscious knack for speaking to an exact moment in our culture -- even anticipating that moment.
This is certainly not a popular opinion, but I think Antebellum is great art. I hope a significant number of people can consume it under the necessary conditions to recognize that.
1 comment:
I began to feel a little disappointed that this movie was going to contain so much content that existed only within the dream space, but I was going with it.
for any query or support go here
Post a Comment