Which backs get lashed

Having kept my love for A Ghost Story entirely out of print -- though if you had listened to this podcast, you would have heard me rave about it -- I was somewhat taken aback when the first comment to greet my year-end list on Facebook was the following:

"Casey Affleck should BE a ghost. Fade into nothing. Scare people when he pops up so they run away."

As this comment came within five minutes of posting, when I was still in that delirious high of publishing the end result of "my year's work," I immediately felt a pit in my stomach.

Was I wrong to look past the involvement of Casey Affleck in this movie in giving it my highest honor for the year?

I knew this person was not trying to be funny, either, despite her at least somewhat playful use of the extended ghost metaphor. This is a woman I have consistently seen post about #MeToo, who does not consider this a laughing matter. (I mean, I'd hope no one would consider it a laughing matter, but this woman most certainly does not.)

So I had a momentary crisis about whether I had failed in my responsibility to an important social cause in completely disregarding Affleck's participation in the movie as a relevant factor in assessing it. Should I so actively promote something that has a genuine creep on screen for much of its running time, even if he is behind a sheet for most of it?

I've written a number of times in the past about my general philosophy -- I'm sure there are exceptions -- of separating the art from the artist. I mean, I've seen Woody Allen's films every year for five years running now, which is almost certainly my longest such streak in the man's entire career. I believe if a movie has something useful to add to the conversation, or may be doing something interesting, I should see it and grapple with it, even if the person who made it is not a very good person. There are a lot of not very good people making movies.

But I must admit I did not even have this internal debate when it came to Affleck and A Ghost Story. I know Affleck was guilty of some shady things, some awful things, on the set of I'm Still Here. Women are right to be skeeved out by him, and men should be sure he does not go near their daughters. Still, and maybe this is just because I did not pore over the details of the accusations against him, I didn't realize he was quite as worthy of being loathed as the level he is loathed. Especially as more and more names have come out of more and more people doing terrible things -- in many cases, worse things -- the accusations against Affleck have further receded in terms of how shocked I feel I should be by them.

And yet this woman came forward with an implicit scolding of me for supporting an Affleck project, reminding me just how angry people are at Affleck -- at how they have pulled him out of what has increasingly become an indistinguishable noise about sexual harassment, and targeted him specifically for their hatred and scorn.

I guess part of the disconnect for me is that he just won an Oscar last year, and I kind of feel like people already knew these things about him when Manchester by the Sea came out, though perhaps I am off on my chronology there. I feel like last year would have been the time to punish him, yet "we" did not. "We" awarded him with the year's highest acting honor, because he was just so damn good. (A textbook example of separating the art and the artist.)

In fact, I find myself wondering if Affleck will be allowed to hand out the best actress Oscar this year. I'm kind of suspecting no. Though maybe it would actually be a better punishment for him to throw him out there and see what kind of reception he gets than to keep him out of the show entirely.

So it seems especially strange to me that A Ghost Story should now be bearing the brunt of a delayed disgust with Affleck. Is it because people felt like they could dismiss A Ghost Story as a twee exercise, not a serious film, whereas Manchester by the Sea was something they should more obviously reckon with?

But I also know that this is not an unreasonable viewpoint, or one held by only a few people. My wife has so far boycotted A Ghost Story because of Affleck's involvement (though I hold out hope that I'll eventually get to show it to her). Another person said to me, regarding Ghost Story, "I also struggled with Casey Affleck in it in a way I wouldn't have if I'd liked the movie."

So I guess Affleck can set you off on the wrong foot with the movie, or, if you aren't liking it, become "the lightning rod," to quote that friend again.

What I guess I wonder is why we're not hearing people go on rants about Baby Driver because Kevin Spacey was in it or rants about The Disaster Artist because James Franco was in it. Some of that may be out there, but I haven't seen it.

Granted, a lot of that has to do with the timing. Most people saw and formed their opinions of those movies before the person in question was revealed to be a creep, though I can't imagine people didn't have suspicions about Franco. Maybe the backlash for things can't come retroactively, any more than you can say "Ugh, you like American Beauty? How dare you, Kevin Spacey is in that." Though it does seem to be the case that the timing of the accusations against Franco played a role in why he was nominated for a Golden Globe but not an Oscar. (Not that nominations are actually done like this, but I like to imagine the Academy hastily switching in Denzel Washington, for his performance in a movie nobody saw and which is supposed to be bad, in place of Franco.)

Of course, I'm not the only one supporting A Ghost Story, so I have company in my failure to punish the movie for Affleck's transgressions. Two critics I like very much and listen to on podcasts regularly, Michael Phillips and Matt Singer, had it in their top three for the year, and in glancing at one of those websites that compiles best-of lists from around the world, I saw at least one other where it was at the tippy top, like it was for me. I suspect there are more.

Still, I can't imagine I can go into a new ranking year with the same blase attitude about whether the people I'm watching on screen are shitheads or not. #MeToo is too important to not pay it some heed. So maybe I'll just skip Woody Allen's movie this year. I'm sure I won't miss much.

More than anything, I hope this is no long-term blight on David Lowery's beautiful film, in which Rooney Mara is also a blameless participant deserving of much praise. A Ghost Story deserves to be a film for the ages, and I hope that the incidental toxicity Affleck brought to the project does not keep it from being one.

And I also hope one day I can show it to my wife.

Movies as machines with replaceable parts

It’s very common to go back for reshoots on a movie, to fix up things that don’t work, or add things that are only needed as the result of some change in the thrust of the story or the tone.

What’s not as common – in fact, I don’t ever remember it happening – is what we’ve seen on Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World.

When Kevin Spacey became a pariah a couple months ago – a scant few months ago when you consider this movie and its looming release date – everyone did as much as they could to distance themselves from him. That included Netflix removing him from promotional materials for House of Cards – and the future of the show, which also was cast in doubt until they decided to go forward with Robin Wright as the primary focus. It also included deciding to reshoot the scenes in All the Money in the World in which Spacey appeared, using Christopher Plummer instead.

Which was, as it turned out, a lot of scenes.

When I first heard this news, I figured this was an ensemble movie in which Spacey played a comparatively small role. A person like Spacey can make an impression in a movie even with a small amount of screen time, or maybe a lot of screen time but in just a couple scenes. To reference another Spacey movie, you could have easily reshot the Alec Baldwin character in Glengarry Glen Ross. One of the most memorable characters and scenes in the movie, but you could easily do it again with another actor without major disruptions.

That’s not the kind of role Spacey had, and Plummer now has, in this movie.

I couldn’t tell you for sure how many scenes J. Paul Getty is in, but it’s upwards of 20. He’s probably in as many scenes as Mark Wahlberg and nearly as many as Michelle Williams, even. He’s no minor character. In fact, you could almost quibble with the fact that Plummer was nominated in the supporting category at the Golden Globes, though ultimately, that’s the right category for him.

Let’s consider that for a moment. Plummer was nominated for a role he had not even shot yet two months ago.

The reshoots – extensive reshoots – occurred from November 20^th to 29^th. The first time Plummer came on screen, I immediately looked for signs of him having been digitally inserted into existing footage. There were certain visual phenomena I thought I was seeing that I might be able to attribute to this. And though there may have been some, it was not all done this way, as I read now that both Wahlberg and Williams were involved in the reshoots. Maybe not all of them, but at least some of them.

And as the movie went on, I stopped looking for evidence of the way Plummer was integrated into this movie. I didn’t need it. He felt fully like he had always been there, like he was an organic part of this project from day one.

And that’s the miraculous part. Plummer is a very good actor, one of our current treasures among elder statesmen, but I can’t imagine it must have been easy to act in a movie that had already been completed, into which you were drafted at the 11^th hour. Not only did he have to learn all his lines, but he had to feel the character, something that sometimes starts developing as early as the table read months before shooting even begins. It’s at such a table read that you also start forging a chemistry with your co-stars, the kind that makes the characters feel like they actually know each other, and brings out the best from everyone.

Plummer didn’t need any of that. He took what was kind of the equivalent of acting against a green screen and knocked it out of the park. Having seen the film, I can say that Golden Globe nomination was fully warranted, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see an Oscar nomination following in due course. If it did so, it would not just be a symbolic snubbing of Spacey and a celebration of Plummer’s heroics in replacing him. It would be a genuine reward for genuinely great work.

Even more impressive: Plummer is nearly 90 years old. He was 87 at the time of shooting but has turned 88 since. That’s a lot closer in age to what Getty was during the events of the film than Spacey is, which makes the original casting of Spacey all the stranger. (Scott now says it was because the studio wanted a "bigger name" than Plummer, who was his original choice – though I sometimes take what Scott says with a grain of salt. I also bristle at the notion that Plummer is not a big name, though it's probably true -- I mean, the guy was in The Sound of Music for crying out loud.) 

It’s funny that a direct replacement for Spacey would have been someone 30 years his senior, and I wonder if they actually aged Spacey up with makeup, considering that the 58-year-old is meant to have teenage grandchildren. Anyway, it’s a much better choice for the film and the fact that the actor was in his late 80s didn’t prevent him from giving the performance the film probably always deserved.

Holy shit, I just checked what Spacey was to have looked like in this film, and they did indeed age him. See below:

It appears that this would have been, could have been, a career-defining type of role for Spacey, something that might have earned him tons of praise, or at least some hosannas over his range. That he was denied this kind of makes it all the sweeter. 

I can’t even imagine Spacey in the role, even with the latex making him age appropriate. In one sense I can – J. Paul Getty had something monstrous about him that he undoubtedly shares in common with Spacey. I mean, this is a man who refused to pay the ransom for his grandson’s kidnapping, eventually leading the boy to have an ear cut off before Getty finally figured out a way to make the ransom payment tax deductible. (Sorry, I guess that’s a spoiler, but the film is based on a true story.) But the fact that there is something undeniably paternalistic about Plummer, something innately human that Spacey doesn’t have, makes his monstrous qualities all the more chilling. Here is a man who seems like he has huge amounts of empathy and the capacity for sentimentality, who still refuses to part with an inconsequential percentage of his fortune to save someone he admits to being quite fond of. I don’t know that I would have bought that from Spacey, who cannot express genuine human warmth even in the best of times.

More than anything, as teased in the title of this post, I find this an interesting commentary on what is possible with a film that’s on the verge of release. If a machine is broken, you don’t trash the machine – you just replace the broken part. However, you usually wouldn’t expect to get that machine on the schedule you originally planned to get it. There would be some kind of delay.

With All the Money in the World, they replaced the broken part … without any delay. And we’re not talking about a car with one of its hub caps missing. We’re talking about a car that needed an engine overhaul. I’m having trouble imagining a larger part of a movie that needed to be changed in order to salvage it. Considerably lesser changes might logically prompt a studio to delay the release by six months.  

I guess it’s just another of the undeniable miracles that is Ridley Scott, who I trashed on this blog just two days ago. At age 80, Scott is not only making films at a ridiculous pace – this is his second of 2017 after Alien: Covenant – but he’s making large scale movies, and then sometimes he’s having to reconfigure those movies just weeks before their release. In something like All the Money in the World, he also makes it look effortless.

I gave the film only 3.5 stars out of five, but I’m wondering if that four-star rating was more appropriate, even if only in recognition of what Scott and Plummer did. But it wouldn’t be just in recognition of them, as Michelle Williams is great in this movie, and Wahlberg is better than he usually is. It’s a really solid movie, and it’s also a triumph over psychopaths who seduce and rape underage boys. Win win. 

Chart toppers

For the 19 years I've been ranking all the movies I see each year, I have always been curious when a director would top the mountain a second time. It's almost happened twice. Cristian Mungiu and Spike Jonze have each scored movies that landed at #1 and #2 on my year-end list in different years -- Jonze with Adaptation (#1 of 2002) and Where the Wild Things Are (#2 of 2009), and Mungiu with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (#2 of 2008) and Beyond the Hills (#1 of 2013). If I were ranking today, I'd rank 4 Months as #1 of 2008 as well, but I'm not ranking today, am I?

So a couple days ago, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu became the 19th different director to achieve top honors for the year. In case you're keeping track at home, the other 16 beyond Jonze and Mungiu are Al Pacino, James Cameron, Todd Solondz, Tom Tywker, Michael Almereyda, Robert Altman, Sofia Coppola, Michel Gondry, Craig Brewer, Alfonso Cuaron, Paul Thomas Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, Duncan Jones, Danny Boyle, Asghar Farhadi, and Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris.

However, I noted that a creative talent other than director did top the chart for his second time in 2014. That's cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, pictured above, who shot my #1 movie of 2006 (Children of Men) and now again my #1 movie of 2014 (Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)). With the work this guy is doing (he also shot The Tree of Life and one of last year's top ten, Gravity, which won him an Oscar), I wouldn't be surprised if he has his sights set on another of my future #1s.

That got me thinking about others who have been involved with more than one of my top-ranked films. There had to be some during nearly two decades, right?

I knew I could figure it out with some quick research ... knowing also that even with something as thorough as IMDB, it would be difficult to determine multiple appearances by technical crew and the like. I'd have to know what I was looking for already.

So I scanned the top-listed cast and some key crew on each movie, and came up with the following, in alphabetical order:

Jane Adams
Contribution: Actress, Happiness (1998) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Significance of contribution: Minimal. Although you could argue that she was one of the key members of the Happiness ensemble, she's a side character in Eternal Sunshine, possibly only appearing in that one scene.

Paul Dano
Contribution: Actor, There Will Be Blood (2007) and Ruby Sparks (2012)
Significance of contribution: Performances kind of cancel each other out. Dano's work can be described (and has been described by many) as one of Blood's few true weaknesses, and even though I don't necessarily agree with that, there's no doubt this opinion colors my perception of the performance. However, I think he's perfectly cast in Ruby Sparks and plays a big role in why it works so well.

Charlie Kaufman
Contribution: Screenwriter, Adaptation (2002) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Significance of contribution: Major. Talk about a streak of good work. Kaufman's sensibilities are entirely key to making these movies sing. I dare not think how the end-of-year-rankings in 2008 might have turned out if I'd seen Synecdoche, New York in time to rank it that year.

Bill Murray
Contribution: Actor, Hamlet (2000) and Lost in Translation (2003)
Significance of contribution: Sizeable. Perhaps this will make up for me naming him as one of three who had a bad year in Saturday's post. Murray is "only" Polonius in Michael Almereyda's adaptation of Shakespeare's most famous play, though he's quite funny. But Lost in Translation is all about his performance.

Clive Owen
Contribution: Actor, Gosford Park (2001) and Children of Men (2006)
Significance of contribution: Kind of like Murray's. The ensemble is massive in Gosford Park (I seem to have a fondness for ensemble films), so one couldn't chalk up Owen's role to anything truly significant in my overall affection for the film. But I think of his work as indispensable to Children of Men.

Kevin Spacey
Contribution: Actor, Looking for Richard (1996) and Moon (2009)
Significance of contribution: Sneakily important. I saw Looking for Richard, my first-ever #1, only that one time, so I have no memory of the size of Spacey's role. But as the voice of the moonbase robot in Moon, he's basically the closest thing Sam Rockwell has to a co-star, and helps enable Rockwell's dynamite performance.

Kate Winslet
Contribution: Actress, Titanic (1997) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Significance of contribution: Major. Both of these movies are tragic love stories, in very different ways, and Winslet's performances are undoubtedly key to the extent to which we invest ourselves in them.

Incidentally, that means Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind boasts three different contributors who appeared in previous #1s. No wonder I loved it so much.

Thank you for tuning in to Another Post Written Entirely for My Own Amusement.