Charlie Kaufman movies that don't involve Charlie Kaufman

When you saw the trailer for Dream Scenario, your first thought may have been "Oh, this must be Charlie Kaufman's latest." The presence of Nicolas Cage, star of the Kaufman-written Adaptation, might have cemented that impression.

Of course, if you follow Kaufman with any degree of closeness, you'd know that Dream Scenario could only represent an earlier incarnation of the writer-turned-director. His 2020 film I'm Thinking of Ending Things -- which was my #1 of that year -- certainly indicates that he's on to much less accessible fare.

In his film about a man who suddenly starts entering everyone's dreams, even the people who don't know him, Dream Scenario director Kristoffer Borgli is certainly successful in the homage he's paying to this earlier version of Kaufman. If you want to know how successfully, you'll have to wait until my rankings are up on January 23rd. (Or, wait a few days until I write my review, which will be linked to the right.)

What I can write about today, without spoiling my impression of the film, is that it reminded me that we have a whole subgenre of films that seem as though they should have been written or directed (or both) by Kaufman -- and that Dream Scenario feels like the first we've gotten in a while. Just as soon as I venture the idea that these sorts of mindbinders might be approaching extinction, though, I think of a second one from this very year, in addition to Dream Scenario.

Here are the ones that immediately came to mind, in no particular order. In order to narrow things down a bit, I'll limit this to the time period Kaufman was actually working. 

Stranger Than Fiction (2006, Marc Forster) - Will Ferrell can hear the woman who is narrating his life as she speaks. An existential conceit straight out of the Kaufman playbook, released during the peak period of Kaufman's influence on popular films.

Cold Souls (2009, Sophie Barthes) - Is it possible Paul Giamatti has never actually appeared in a Kaufman film? He's Kaufman's perfect schlub. Here he plays an actor trying to disentangle his emotions from the emotions of his characters, who pays for a service to have his soul placed in cold storage. I can only remember this being a bit disappointing. Anyway, shades of Synecdoche, New York all over this. 

Fingernails (2023, Christos Nikou) - Here's that one from this year. People in relationships have the ability to test whether they love each other by having a fingernail torn out and analyzed. The low-fi analog technology in this film is very reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as is the theme of star-crossed romance.

Vanilla Sky (2001, Cameron Crowe) - I think the cold storage of Cold Souls got me thinking about the ending of this film, which I won't spoil even though the movie is now 23 years old. It's just the sort of intricate script with high concept elements about identity that Kaufman would have dreamed up, though I actually have this ranked higher than any Kaufman film on my Flickchart, so kudos to Crowe for that.

The Truman Show (1998, Peter Weir) - This is a bit of a cheat in that it came out a year before Being John Malkovich. Kaufman was working in television but he had not yet made a movie. But the premise is similar to Dream Scenario in that the world revolves around a single ordinary man, so if Dream Scenario is like a Kaufman film, so is this. 

Click (2006, Frank Coraci) - If it were someone other than Adam Sandler in the title role here, I think this story about a man who literally fast forwards through his life would strike us as more of a Kaufman high concept mindbender. As is even with Sandler, it's pretty poignant and potent at certain parts.

Vivarium (2019, Lorcan Finnegan) - Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots are trapped in an apparently empty neighborhood of identical houses from which there is no escape. The title suggests they are being watched for their reaction. Very Kaufman, and Eisenberg is another who should play a Kaufman surrogate at some point.

Her (2013, Spike Jonze) - It feels like a technicality that Kaufman is not actually involved with this. Jonze directed two of Kaufman's films, so this is sort of a cheat. And while we're cheating anyway ...

The Science of Sleep (2006, Michel Gondry) - If I'm going to list the future work of one Kaufman collaborator, I should list the future work of another. 

Swiss Army Man (2016, Daniel Scheinert & Daniel Kwan) - A buddy comedy between a suicidal man and the talking corpse that helps him find a reason to live? Yep, Kaufman could have written this.

Ruby Sparks (2012, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris) - While we're already on Paul Dano, this is another one in the Stranger Than Fiction/Adaptation neighborhood, where a written character comes to life and tries to make a Kaufman-like schlub with writer's block happy. 

Moon (2009, Duncan Jones) - I'll let this stand in for a whole category of films featuring clones, as a clone gets at the existential concepts in which Kaufman always dabbles. 

It's becoming clear I could go on for quite a while listing films that narrowly qualify, with diminishing returns. But instead I'll wrap it up with the thought "You get the idea."

One thing I'll say, though, is that even when they fail, they fail in interesting ways. If someone wants to try to make a Charlie Kaufman movie, I'm always game for it -- and I don't want us collectively to forget how to do it, especially now that Kaufman himself doesn't want to be quite so on brand as to have a whole genre unto himself. 

Chinese mothers should talk to their daughters, and other Everything Everywhere All at Once thoughts

I couldn't help noticing, when I watched an advanced screening of the 4.5 star Everything Everywhere All at Once on Thursday, that it bore a remarkable similarity to the most recent 2022 4.5 star movie I saw the weekend before. That would be Turning Red, Pixar's latest.

Both movies deal, using a huge amount of metaphorical and fantastic imagery, with the communication breakdown between immigrant Chinese mothers living in North America, and their more westernized daughters. 

The age of the daughters differ. Red's Meilin is supposed to be 13, while the actress playing Everything's Joy, Stephanie Hsu, is 31 years old, though Joy's age is never mentioned. 

The conflicts, though, are very similar. In both cases, the more traditional mother cannot accept her daughter's desire to step outside of the limited range of what's expected of her -- in one case a heightened interest in a boy band, in the other, because she's a lesbian. And both inherited their own strictness from the generation before, a mother in one case and a father in the other.

It's just funny to see such a similar theme explored in the same week in two very different sorts of movies that immediately became my favorite and second-favorite movies of 2022, though which is which may be something I can't truly decide for a while yet. (Plus, both could well be eclipsed by other movies as we go along.)

Here are some other thoughts from my first advanced screening since early December:

Security on patrol

As I was walking into the screening, a large bald man in a suit with a big smile said something to me, which was surely related to the confidentiality requirements during the screening -- no use of your phone, etc. I didn't hear exactly what he said but was happy enough to nod along to it, knowing it would be conditions I could agree to, much as I sign various user agreements without reading all the fine print. (Most recently on our agreement with the person who will market our home in Los Angeles. Yeesh.)

Despite his big smile and friendly demeanor, that man took the security very seriously in this movie.

Now, I'm not really sure what he was trying to prevent. Is it really a thing anymore where people try to record a movie on their phone so they can sell a bootleg copy of it later on? His militant desire not to see any phone screens light up during the movie was certainly not just to protect the undisturbed enjoyment of the other patrons. 

How militant? He walked the aisles at least a half-dozen times during the movie, a sort of hulking deterrent who didn't mind if he were providing the same sort of viewer distraction that would be provided by the peripheral sight of a mobile phone screen in use. And when one phone did go on during the movie, he walked right over to that person and snuffed it out.

Needless to say, my own phone was conspiring to run me afoul of him. 

I tend to forget during Thursday night viewings that I have an alarm that's set to go off at 6:45 to tell me to take out the garbage cans. It used to be on Sunday night at my old house, and caused the same sort of problem then.

Namely, the supremacy of the alarm is considered to be such that it powers on the phone just to let you know it's going off. There is likely a setting I could adjust so it wouldn't do this, but I haven't adjusted that setting yet, and besides, there might be situations where I'd want to preserve the battery, but I'd want the phone to power on at a designated time.

That designated time is not 30 minutes into a movie, when not only does the alarm go off and power on the phone, but while you're trying to shut the phone down again, all the other audible notifications that have been waiting while the phone was off have to chirp out to you. At least the sound of the alarm itself is a peaceful one.

As I tried in vain to power the phone back off again, I noticed the security guard eyeing me. Given how quickly he later squelched the other phone user, I was surprised my frustrated wrestling with my phone didn't draw him over. But because I didn't want to draw him over, I eventually lost the wrestling match, and instead of getting the phone to shut off again, which requires holding down a button for longer than you should need to, I hastily stuffed it in my backpack, where I hoped at least the lining of the bag would smother future noisy emissions.

So annoyed was I by this that it kind of ruined my next five minutes of the film, and for a minute I worried I wouldn't recover my equanimity. Fortunately, this movie is good enough -- and it's one of those movies that gets better, rather than worse, the longer it goes -- that my mental order was soon restored.

Ke Huy Quan returns

I can't remember, if I ever knew, why the erstwhile Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Data from The Goonies gave up acting, but presumably it had something to do with him no longer being a cute young kid, and the movies no longer welcoming him after a certain point. In any case, he has no credits whatsoever between 2002 and 2021. 

Well welcome back, Ke Huy Quan.

It was lovely to see the boyish charm still present in this 50-year-old man. He's still got the same voice we remember from those movies, he's still got a ton of energy, and he still makes you smile. 

He's also sort of this film's secret weapon. Michelle Yeoh is its main weapon, and awesome secondary weapons include the aforementioned Hsu, James Hong, and Jamie Lee Curtis as we've never seen her before. But I don't think this would be the delight it is without Quan.

Is it too late for him to cameo in the next Indiana Jones movie?

The easiest way to get me

This is not giving anything away about the movie, not anything you probably couldn't guess yourself, but I'll be vague about it anyway.

If you really want to bring me to the edge of waterworks, all you have to do is get a character to renounce their previous prejudices.

I suppose this is true in multiple spheres, but I notice it most often when a character gets over their intolerance of homosexuality, as happens in this movie.

You'd think I were gay or something, with the way I'm always pushed to and beyond the threshold between not crying and crying when a character embraces the LQBTQI person in their life. Except that I don't have to be, because cinema is that empathy machine that Roger Ebert described, where you can put yourself in the shoes of others, and vicariously experience the powerful emotion they would be feeling in that moment.

One of the most powerful instances I can think of this happening is in Kissing Jessica Stein -- which, if we're being honest, is really a heterosexual movie masquerading as a gay movie. That doesn't change the power of a moment where Tovah Feldshuh's character is comforting her daughter, played by star Jennifer Westfeldt, and her voice hitches for a moment as it becomes clear she understands something we didn't know she knew: her daughter has been seeing a woman. "I think she seems like a very nice girl," she says. 

I'm getting verklempt. Please, go talk amongst yourselves.

I don't think the moment or moments in Everything Everywhere All at Once are as profound or as smartly executed, but that just shows you what an easy target I am.

Daniels are back

This film is directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who directed a previous top ten movie for me, 2016's Swiss Army Man. I obviously loved that at the time for how far it went outside the box of our expectations, and still feel fondly toward it even though it couldn't maintain that high level for me on the second viewing.

Everything Everywhere All at Once has the same sort of rule-shattering craziness in it, and though the core questions are perhaps a bit more traditional than those in Swiss Army Man, the execution is equally joyous, colorful, surprising and hilarious. 

I realized while watching it that these guys made a movie in between, The Death of Dick Long in 2019, and I never really heard anything about it, nor noticed it playing in a theater near me. It apparently wasn't a dud, either, as Wikipedia shows the movie having a 74% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Guess I better seek that out, as any chance to luxuriate in their distinct cinematic vision is a good one. 

The representation of gayness and not-gayness

Macklemore released a poignant song a couple years ago called "Same Love," which is also sort of hilarious if looked at the right way.

It's poignant because it celebrates gay rights, including lyrics decrying the homophobia of hip hop culture and a refrain by a female singer that goes "My love, she keeps me warm."

Macklemore himself is not gay -- the song would lose a bit of its meaning, in fact, if he were, because then he'd be writing it out of self-interest rather than a magnanimous impulse to fight hatred.

The funny part is his insistence on establishing that he's not gay in the song, which could read as problematic if the mere existence of the song weren't proof of his tolerance. The opening lyrics of the song go:

When I was in the third grade I thought that I was gay
'Cause I could draw, my uncle was, and I kept my room straight
I told my mom, tears rushing down my face
She's like "Ben, you've love girls since before pre-k."

It's just these four opening lines, and then the man born as Ben Haggerty never returns to the topic of his own sexuality. But they do read enough like a denial that the guys from Lonely Island thought they'd make a great subject for parody. Though I have not yet seen Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping -- and I can't even tell if it's going to get an Australian theatrical release, especially after the poor U.S. box office -- I understand it contains a song with similar lyrics to "Same Love," except Conner4Real inserts the disclaimer "not gay" in the middle of nearly every verse. It's a perceptive observation, as when I encountered this song for the first time myself (within the past year -- I bought the Macklemore CD for my wife two birthdays ago), I too was struck by just the tiniest bit of hypocrisy on the rapper's part.

This is all a way of backing into what I really want to talk about today: Whether movies that present apparently gay subject matter must actually be "gay."

The topic came up in reference to Swiss Army Man, and it came up in an email conversation with a friend who had also seen it (and liked it, but not as much as I did). Some of the following discussion assumes that you also have seen it, but I don't know that it necessarily spoils anything -- unless you consider the fact that Daniel Radcliffe is not as dead as he originally seems to be a spoiler. In which case, oops! Sorry.

There are a couple scenes in Swiss Army Man that register as gay on a textual level, but subtextually may be referring to something different -- or may not be. My friend and I disagreed about what that something different was, and whether it was even something different.

Even if you haven't seen it, you already know from the trailers that the castaway played by Paul Dano, named Hank, develops a friendship with the corpse played by Radcliffe, name Manny. What you may not know is that the film is unafraid of staging it as potentially more than a friendship. There's a lot of physical imtimacy, generally, in the movie -- as might be assumed in a scenario where one guy has to carry the other around -- but the intimacy also becomes emotional, and sexual.

In one instance, Hank dresses up as the girl on the bus that Manny thinks he remembers from a picture on his phone. Not only does Hank totally commit to the feminine persona, embracing it as more of a second skin than a costume, but the scene ends with Hank and Manny leaning in toward one another in the familiar fashion of incipient lovers locking lips for the first time. The kiss is aborted when Hank's balance shifts, serving to awaken him from his reverie, and to make him reconsider the wisdom of his impulse.

For those dissatisfied with that bit of coitus interruptus -- or at least kissus interruptus -- don't worry, because Hank and Manny do get it on later. And by "get it on" I mean "kiss." It's an underwater kiss that causes fireworks to go off -- in a rather literal way.

I didn't interpret this as Hank loving Manny. I interpreted it as Hank loving himself.

So I guess I am going to spoil a bit more of Swiss Army Man, if you still want to turn away at this late hour.

It doesn't take any analytical skill at all to realize that Manny is, in many ways, not a separate person, but an external manifestation of Hank himself. When we meet Hank at the start, Hank is about to hang himself out of the desperation caused by (what we think is) loneliness and starvation on a deserted island. Coincidentally, that's when he sees Manny. Sure, Manny might actually be a body washed up on the shore, and with all the jokes built into the things that his body does, his physical actuality is well asserted. But more likely is that it's Hank seeing into his own "future," as it were, as he contemplates taking that plunge off that cooler and hanging himself. Hank is moments away from being Manny in a very literal sense -- a corpse.

If you look at it purely in that way, then Hank's love for Manny is a growing love for himself and for his own life -- a desire, then, not to actually commit suicide.

My friend doesn't think that. My friend thinks that the moments when he's almost kissing Manny, and then actually kissing him, are the moments when he's setting himself free from the way he represses his homosexual desires, the very desires that may have led him to this suicidal place to begin with. There's a reason, so says my friend, that we see the gay theme returned to repeatedly. In a sense, Swiss Army Man is a further exploration of the way we know teenagers wrestle with their owns sexuality and the way they contemplate killing themselves when they are bullied. "It gets better," the movie hopes to tell us.

My friend may be right, and by saying "my friend my friend my friend" I am certainly not trying to demonstrate that I think his position is ridiculous. In fact, his position is the furthest thing from ridiculous.

But, to bring it back to Macklemore, something that's about being gay does not itself have to be gay. Or maybe isn't even about being gay, just because it has stuff in it that seems to be gay.

Rather, I think that the writer-directors of this film -- Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, credited as "Daniels" -- want to show how gay friendly and gay forward they are without needing it to be a function of their self-interest. They want to get credit for being progressive, and I don't mean that in a way that suggests they are greedy about being praised by those from the liberal and queer communities. What they want is to make a movie that openly flirts with gay ideas as just a normal part of self-discovery and artistic discourse, not as a central theme, because it's not concerned about being thought of as gay, or even welcomes the associations because it doesn't give a squirt of piss if someone thinks it is gay. They want to go one step better than Macklemore, in other words.

It's interesting, though. As a pair of men who are directing a movie together without being related to each other, they must get questions about whether they are in a partnership that's more than just business. Is this them saying "I'm not gay, but I like gays?" Or is even saying that beneath them because it acknowledges that it's anybody's business but theirs? (And I checked; they aren't gay.)

There's kind of a lot to unpack here. Both Hank and Manny pine after the character they call Sarah, whether that's actually her name or not -- she's played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead. One of them apparently had the experience of seeing her on the bus and falling in love with her on sight. So much so that he surreptitiously photographed her and became sort of obsessed with her. Kind of the very definition of being straight, right?

Except maybe not. Hank mentions at one point that the thing that drew him to her was that she looked so happy. That isn't the typical reason listed for falling in love with someone. Usually it's that they're pretty or nice or funny. Someone happy is not necessarily someone you want to be with, although it certainly helps. It's someone you want to be -- especially if you are not yourself happy. Especially if you yourself are suicidal.

But there's a possibly gay wrinkle here. We also see a photo of Sarah with her husband. That's also a photo on the phone, and also a photo Hank/Manny has looked at before. Maybe he wants to be Sarah because he wants to be with her husband. Maybe.

And is it any coincidence that he's named Manny? Okay, now I'm really stretching.

Looking back on this post, it just seems like a bunch of rambling about gayness and not-gayness without any real point.

Well, maybe you'll find the point I feel like I didn't quite make, somewhere hidden in here.

Maybe my point is that Swiss Army Man can be what either of us thinks it is, or five other things, because great art is malleable and can fit itself into the worldview of the person viewing it. Great art means different things to different people, and not only allows multiple interpretations, but actually invites them.

And I do think Swiss Army Man is pretty great art.

The man with the good choices

During one of the moments Swiss Army Man left me spellbound last night, I had a revelation that was only tangentially related to the movie:

Paul Dano may be my favorite actor.

If we define "favorite" as consistently appearing in movies that I've loved, and his presence alone making me believe a movie will be good, then I don't know who has a better claim to that title than Dano.

As I allowed myself to get momentarily distracted from the bizarre delights appearing before my eyes, I started to mentally review all the films I love that Dano has appeared in. The numbers started to stagger me. I'll list them below chronologically, followed by the percentage on my Flickchart where these movies appear:

L.I.E. (2001, Michael Cuesta) - 81% - Though to be fair, I didn't actually remember that Dano was in this movie until I just looked it up on IMDB.

The Emperor's Club (2002, Michael Hoffman) - 83% - Ditto about not knowing he was in this. Don't worry, we're getting to the point where I actually started to recognize him.

The Girl Next Door (2004, Luke Greenfield) - 92% - Where I first consciously learned who he was. I have a huge fondness for this movie.

Little Miss Sunshine (2006, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris) - 67% - I don't love this how some people do -- or used to, anyway -- but I thought the percentage was high enough to mention.

There Will Be Blood (2007, Paul Thomas Anderson) - 99% - My #1 movie of 2007. He really did hold his own next to Daniel Day-Lewis.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009, Spike Jonze) - 97% - This is Dano's most similar film to Swiss Army Man in terms of the sense of wonder it produced in me.

Meek's Cutoff (2011, Kelly Reichardt) - 89% - Dano's role was more supporting in this, but it continues his string of smart choices.

Ruby Sparks (2012, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris) - 98% - My #1 movie of 2012. Dano holds the center of an unconventional romantic comedy/drama.

Looper (2012, Rian Johnson) - 91% - A memorable portrait of desperation by Dano.

Love & Mercy (2015, Bill Pohlad) - 87% - Dano kills it as the younger Brian Wilson.

And that's not even mentioning movies I like but don't love, like Prisoners, Fast Nood Nation and 12 Years a Slave. And sure I've left out some stinkers -- I'm looking at you, Gigantic -- but nobody's perfect.

What is it about Dano that continually enthralls me?

The short answer is probably "everything," but I'll try to go deeper than that. He is one of the most aggressively real-looking A-list actors we have. He might not quite be A-list, but he's a lot farther away than that from being conventionally handsome, or even unconventionally handsome. He's a weird-looking dude who manages to simultaneously look like a stiff breeze might blow him over, yet also possess a real vigor that comes across in the intensity of his performances.

To say that Dano is like you and me is not accurate either, since he really isn't. He's like an eccentric caricature of a regular person, which is not a description of his performance style -- at least not totally. Saying someone is a caricature is usually a criticism. What I mean is that his features have a certain extremity to them that makes him a perfect vessel for quirky characters. To Dano's credit, though, he has steered clear of playing exclusively quirky characters, and even his quirkiest characters don't deserve the backhanded compliment implied by the term "quirky."

In short, I feel like he's bringing something new every time out, even when he's undeniably calling on things he's done previously (which all actors must). He's growing as a craftsman, sure, but more than that he's figuring new ways to extract the truth from the characters he's playing. He does tend to do better when he's in a lead role, as it gives him the space to move around and explore the character he's been assigned to play. As one example, I think he might not have come off that well in a movie like 12 Years a Slave -- as I recall, he was petulant and a bit of an out-sized stereotype of an awful slaveowner. This was a supporting role. Then again, he haunted me in a similar-sized role in Looper, in which he gives one of the most palpable performances of fear I've seen in the past couple years.

Even if it's not possible to distill what works about Dano as a performer, the choices speak for themselves. Six of the ten films I listed above landed in my top ten for that particular year. Meek's Cutoff and (if I remember correctly) The Emperor's Club may have landed in the top 20. I didn't actually see L.I.E. in the year of its release, so who knows about that one. So not only does Dano have good taste, but he has the influence to get himself cast in the projects in which he wants to appear. Powerhouses like Paul Thomas Anderson and Spike Jonze have seen him and said "That's the guy I need to do this particular thing I'm trying to do."

And boy does he do that particular thing in Swiss Army Man. My affection for Swiss Army Man is such that I should probably devote an entire post to singing its praises. Instead, I'll refer you to my review, which is a bit delayed in posting but will probably be up with a link to the right within a few hours of this publishing.

Daniel Radcliffe may play the multi-functional tool in that film's title, but Dano is my multi-functional tool as an actor.