The first one is obvious, which is that they did something shitty that we, collectively, cannot forgive them for, often times because they fail to take responsibility for it themselves.
This is what happened to Casey Affleck.
The second one is more nebulous. It has to do with people losing interest in you, sort of. With reaching a certain age. With burning through your allotted 15 minutes and not being able to renew for another 15, for reasons maybe we can't even identify.
This is what happened to Jason Segel.
Both actors are back in the movie Our Friend. They should have been back two years ago, but after the movie premiered at TIFF in 2019, the pandemic happened. The release was pushed to January of this year.
I didn't real hear about it when it came out. Or maybe I did, because it was on my Letterboxd watchlist, but then I forgot I heard about it.
I remembered I heard about it when I saw it was available as the 99 cent rental on iTunes. This was almost a month ago. My 30-day rental was in danger of expiring.
Thankfully, it did not. Thankfully, I watched this remarkable film on Tuesday night.
It's directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite. She directed the killer whale documentary Blackfish.
This is an entirely different skill set, and it's only one of the things I should write about this movie that looks at a man (Affleck), his wife dying of cancer (Dakota Johnson) and the friend who helps them through it (Segel).
But today I want to just welcome these guys back.
I don't know if I've forgiven Affleck. But he was on the very leading edge of the #metoo movement, which is probably the wrong way to describe it -- it makes it sound like he was an early adopter of something great. Instead, he was just one of the teasers for what Harvey Weinstein would bring fully into our consciousness.
I don't remember exactly what Affleck did. Something about holding a girl in a hotel room against her will. Not good. But maybe not unilaterally reprehensible either.
But he's always had the skills, as we saw in Manchester by the Sea around that time, and in numerous other films. He's ten times the talent of his brother, in any case. And for a person who tries to separate the art from the artist -- when possible -- I'm of the opinion that the art trumps, assuming I can't be 100% certain of what a shithead the artist is.
In the past few years, Affleck has worked, but it hasn't been regular. His most prominent performance during that time was as a detective in The Old Man & the Gun, though his appearance there might have as much to do with his relationship with director David Lowery -- who worked with him on Ain't Them Bodies Saints and A Ghost Story -- as any kind of indication of being welcomed back into the fold. There was also Light of My Life, The World to Come and Every Breath You Take, none of which I've heard of. Not a great slate for a recently anointed Oscar winner.
With Segel, it's been more mysterious, and I guess it's something like professional failure, unwarranted though it may seem. Since he received rave notices as David Foster Wallace in 2015's The End of the Tour, he's appeared in a misfire from a good director (2017's The Discovery) and then one other feature, something called Come Sunday from 2018. Fortunately he does also have two films in post-production, so maybe this is the start of a new stretch of regularity.
Life is messy, a truism captured perfectly by Our Friend. It's certainly been so for Affleck and Segel, for very different reasons, and in the latter case, reasons we may never be privy to. In a way, their recent lives have resembled their characters in this film -- Affleck a talented journalist who is absent and sometimes a dickhead, Segel a sad sack who can't progress in his career.
I hope Our Friend brings them both back to us, so one can atone, and the other can just remind himself that he's really good.
The movies have missed them while they were behind bars.
No comments:
Post a Comment