A poor man's Sean Baker movie

Although director Gia Coppola comes from a family lineage of a very different sort of filmmaking -- several different sorts of filmmaking within one family, I should say, this one probably most resembling her aunt Sofia -- the person most responsible for the look and feel of The Last Showgirl may be the man who just won all the Oscars this past year. (When The Last Showgirl also might have been up for an Oscar, if the campaign to get Pamela Anderson nominated had had legs.)

That's right, I'm not sure if we would have The Last Showgirl without Sean Baker.

As you would know if you've followed Baker's career -- or read this post -- Baker loves him some movies about sex workers. I don't know if you would actually call what Anderson's Shelly does for her career "sex work," but she's a Vegas showgirl whose breasts are bared during her Rockettes-like act. She's selling sex if not actually giving it, and it becomes clear that any equivalent replacement career she'd have, if her show were to be shut down (which it is in the course of this narrative), would be selling sex a lot more.

Then there's the fact that reference is made to the fact that she could be (but isn't) one of those showgirls who hustles on the side -- in other words, is available for "bonus activities" for a particular sort of fan who waits at the stage door after the show. She actually does have a possible interest in one such fan, never seen on screen, which is why the subject comes up at all.

It might feel even more like a Baker film -- particularly Baker's last film, the one that won all the Oscars -- because Anora also spends time in Las Vegas, the setting for Coppola's film. Of course, since the movies were released within only a few months of each other, that's just a coincidence, because of course it is.

Though the thing that really cemented the Baker connection for me, after I'd already made the initial connection with the sex work theme, was the way it's shot. I was reminded a bit of Baker's The Florida Project, which has a lot of external shots of characters in an around hotels and establishments on busy commercial or industrial thoroughfares. They share a dreamy indie sensibility that Baker did not pioneer, but may have helped bring to greater prominence. 

If we are taking about The Last Showgirl relative to Anora specifically, I have a comparison between the two films that might surprise you. I definitely think Anora is the superior film, but not by the margin you might expect. And it all comes down to how Baker and Coppola have chosen to develop, or not develop, their main character.

Whether he meant to or not, I feel like Baker left his titular character as a bit of a cypher. We spend a lot of time with Anora -- she's in practically every scene -- but all that time has not allowed us to get to know her any better. I kind of think that was an intentional choice by Baker, not an oversight, but that doesn't mean it worked any better for me. The distance I felt from Anora prevented me from getting on board with the movie to the same extent other people did.

With Shelly, screenwriter Kate Gersten has done a much better job of rounding out her history, and has not had to hit us over the head to do it. That also means that Gersten and Coppola's film is more conventional in some ways, since it really is Screenwriting 101 to give your main character a back story, past traumas that come back to haunt her, an estranged daughter, that sort of thing. We get all that for Shelly, and Anderson's performance -- which I initially wasn't sure about -- really helps sell it. 

If it makes me a basic bitch for preferring this approach to Baker's intentional deviation from it, well then, a basic bitch I am. 

How Florida became the backdrop for great independent filmmaking

Florida is among the most peculiar of the continental United States. Hawaii and Alaska may have a leg up in being separated from the rest of the country by miles and miles of ocean or miles and miles of Canada, but among states that are actually connected to other states, there may be no greater odd duck. It's kind of the south, but it's kind of cosmopolitan. It's got swampland and it's got coastal beauty. It has a huge demographic diversity, from rednecks to senior citizens to African-Americans to displaced Cubans. It plays a pivotal role in every presidential election. It attracts such weirdness and such oddity that a Los Angeles morning radio show I used to listen to had a game called "Germany or Florida?", where some outlandish little news item was proffered and you had to guess which of those locations spawned it.

Perhaps all of this has helped make it the go-to destination for independent filmmakers trying to explore serious issues of culture, identity and the American dream, all with the option of palm trees in the background.

The title of this post suggests I'm going to explain how that happened. In fact, I can't do that, though it's possible if I went on the internet and pulled some threads, I might find out. It might be nothing more profound than that Florida offers good tax breaks for films that want to shoot there. Really, I just liked how that title sounded.

The latest example, the movie that gave the idea the critical mass in my head necessary to write this post, is Trey Edward Shults' Waves, a film whose late release date caused it to get kind of lost in the shuffle at the end of 2019. In fact, it hasn't yet debuted here in Australia, an eventuality that will arrive late next week. That release date may have been delayed by coronavirus but it may not have. Sometimes, late-year American releases don't come out in Australia until the following summer -- which is winter here, of course.

I myself saw it as a 99 cent rental on my American version of iTunes. That's also not the first time that has happened, that a U.S. film has reached that point where it's no longer a new video release, so can appear at a discount price for one week, but it still hasn't made its debut everywhere in the world.

One thing setting a film in Florida does is it allows for the collision of dissimilar types, who might not otherwise inhabit the same space. My first example, from back in 2013, does that very well. That's Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, in which we get the science experiment of what happens when you combine college girls on spring break with drug dealers. Only in Florida, right? In that film -- which you know I think is brilliant, as I ranked it my second favorite of the last decade -- it allows for the college girls to find the drug dealers in themselves, and the drug dealer to find his inner college girl. That's all perfectly encapsulated in a single scene, where James Franco's Alien sits at an outdoor piano and delicately plinks out the notes for the Britney Spears ballad "Everytime," while the college girls in question dance around him wearing pink balaclavas and brandishing machine guns. Only in Florida, right?

The next film, chronologically, deals with a different sort of collision of things that seem diametrically opposed to one another, though they shouldn't. That's Barry Jenkins' Moonlight in 2016, which made my top ten of the year. Here you have the story of Chiron, who has a drug addicted mother and whose best male role model is himself a drug dealer. The twist is, of course, that Chiron is gay, a sexual preference that has a shameful history of acceptance in society in general, and in the African-American community in particular. There's something particularly Floridian about this coming of age story, as Chiron's formative sexual experience takes place on a beach by the titular moonlight. The image of Chiron being dipped in the waves by Juan, that drug dealer with a heart of gold, suggests a kind of baptism into a life of acceptance -- and also, indirectly, a life of crime.

The very next year, Sean Baker came back with The Florida Project, which, like Moonlight, also yielded a best supporting actor nomination, though Willem Dafoe did not win the statue that Mahershala Ali did. Like Moonlight, it also finished in my top ten for the year. The clash of apparent opposites here is between extreme poverty and Disney World. Baker stages the lives of children and their absent parents in a long-term motel that's adjacent to Disney World -- several miles adjacent, but close enough that the reflected glory still rests upon it, and the motels are given the types of names that might ensnare less discerning tourists. That the kids should be free to walk around in abandoned homes, and even set them ablaze, gives an indication of the duty to them that has been forfeited, and the chaos that exists just beneath what in many respects is a pretty surface. That chaos encapsulates Florida in general.

And finally we come to 2019 with Waves, which didn't yield any nominations of any kind, nor get the attention it deserved. Because I had no way to see it in time for my own best of 2019 list, it couldn't make the top ten, but I can pretty much assure you it would have made the top five if I had. Here is our first mismatch between the race of the filmmaker (white) and the race of his characters (black, with a few exceptions). Even six months later that disjuncture might already now seem problematic, but not the way Shults handles it, which is fair and credible and never assumes to know more than it does. The apparent contradiction in this story is that it revolves around an affluent black family -- and that, unfortunately, itself is a sad contradiction in what we expect from our depictions of African-Americans at the movies. Even though the members of this family have worked hard to rise above the limitations society tries to place on them, tragedy still reaches them, blurring the accomplishments of a successful businessman and his overachieving wrestler son. As much as the movie is not "about" race, racial issues bleed around the edges, and again, Florida is both the backdrop for this tarnished American dream, and in some ways, its cause. (The image above even recalls the Moonlight baptism scene.)

Four movies in six years does not a trend make, you might say. It could just be a coincidence that four superlative movies set in Florida, with similarly gorgeous looks, made by similarly visionary directors, happened to come out loosely within the space of a decade. The fact that it's closer to half a decade certainly strengthens the case, but it's still possible it's a coincidence.

However, it could also be true that there is something about the American soul that we need to wrestle with right now -- no pun intended -- that achieves its most profound dramatization in that oddest duck of states.

I'll put it this way: If in 2021 I see another Florida-set film advertised that reminds me of Spring Breakers, Moonlight, The Florida Project or Waves, I will be the first damn person in line.

Bad parenting double feature

If my wife wasn't happy with the parenting in The Florida Project, I told her definitely not to stick around for Mom and Dad.

Both iTunes rentals were expiring within 48 hours on Saturday night, so I lined them up as a double feature. I'd already seen both, of course -- The Florida Project was my #8 movie of 2017, and Mom and Dad has thus far been occupying the top slot on my 2018 rankings (though Avengers: Infinity War is trying to muscle it out -- yes, I liked the 37th MCU movie that much. I'm still thinking about it).

Due to a weird quirk with iTunes, the 48-hour clock never started for Mom and Dad when I first watched it in early April, so I've had the entire 30-day rental period to potentially watch it again. And since it is currently so high on my 2018 chart, I figured I ought to give it another look to make sure I wasn't just smoking drugs the first time I saw it.

As for The Florida Project, I rented it as a 99-cent rental, but had been unusually lax about prioritizing my second viewing, and it almost expired without me even noticing.

I figured my wife was along for the ride on The Florida Project. She commented very early on how gorgeous it looked (in contrast to Sean Baker's iPhone-shot last feature, Tangerine, this was shot on film), and when I interrupted the film to point out that the characters were singing happy birthday -- something that wasn't legally possible in a film up until very recently -- she shushed me.

So you can imagine my surprise when she got up with about 15 minutes left to pause it and check the remaining time.

One of my initial complaints about The Florida Project -- the only one, I'm pretty sure -- was that it was possibly 15 minutes too long. This one would have done better around Tangerine's 88 minutes, rather than 110. But in terms of the content, I was loving everything.

Not so with my wife. She found it interminable not because there was one too many scenes that were essentially filler -- which I'd argue is key to this movie in some respects -- but because she hated the characters.

She HATED Halley, played by Brian Vinaite, but she didn't particularly like Moonee, played by Brooklynn Prince, either. For disliking the latter she blamed the former. She just could not get emotionally invested in a film in which a parent is so neglectful of her child, a big dickhead shaping a little dickhead in her image.

It made me think. It wasn't that Halley did bad things, as almost any character in any film is more interesting if they're capable of bad things, and if indulging in them is part of their fatal flaw. My wife is the first to acknowledge and endorse that truth. But the character needs to have a heart. Her problem was that Halley did not.

I don't indict Halley's behavior quite as much as she does -- I pointed to a couple moments in which Halley's parental instincts emerged from a general cluelessness and irresponsibility -- but it did make me wonder if we'd all given the movie a bit of a free pass on this count. Although I think of Baker as a consummately liberal type -- you don't make a sympathetic portrait of transgender prostitutes otherwise -- she was concerned that the portrayal of Halley might even entail some misogyny on the part of the filmmaker.

Having a character be completely unsympathetic is usually a problem for me too, though I guess that's not how I see Halley. Let there be no doubt that she's a bad parent. But she does try a number of different methods for making money, shady though they may be, before she resorts to turning tricks. Each time one of these efforts dead-ends, you can see on her face the defeat. That look of defeat is the frustration of a legitimate effort, at least from her perspective. Her legitimate effort might not be yours or mine, but in her world, this is what passes for trying. Of course, her fatal flaw is then that she doesn't value the money she does make, taking Moonee on a 99 cents store shopping spree instead of saving the money she made from the stolen Disney bracelets, but that spree is also a demonstration of any parent's need to feel like a provider to their child.

I'm not saying my wife should have seen the things I saw in Halley, but I do think that her view is more clouded by being a parent than mine is. I've been developing this notion that as people go along in life, they acquire personal life experience that clouds their objective perspective on the themes in movies. It could be things they're born with, or it could be the result of trauma or strong political beliefs that cause them to be triggered by certain things they see up on screen. Parenting is such an important duty for my wife that this may now be the thing that reduces her objectivity.

If it sounds like I'm criticizing that, I'm not. I think it's kind of beautiful, and it's definitely a good thing for our kids, who will benefit from her commitment to that duty. For me, I just try to leave these complicating factors on the sideline, because of my role as a critic. I can't be triggered by anything, because I need to recommend or dissuade someone from seeing a movie based on its core qualities, not my own baggage about them.

I guess I don't have as much to say about the second feature in the double feature, which my wife did not watch, as I started it at around 10:30. Mom and Dad is actually the 88 minutes that The Florida Project could have been, so the 10:30 start was very reasonable. And this being a satire, the bad parenting here is of course over the top, the result of some kind of telepathic signal being sent through TV screens making parents want to kill their own (and only their own) children.

I do think the film examines parenting in serious ways too, though, which is why it's not just an outrageous genre movie with no business at or near the top of my early 2018 rankings. While there is a high concept explanation for the murderous intent of these parents, the movie demonstrates the ways parents sometimes feel like they actually do want to kill their children, and why that happens. There are some interesting passages in here that dramatize the ways parents feel reduced to shells of their former selves by the drudgery of parenting, the type of thing that leads to their mid-life crises. The film takes really thoughtful pauses from its violent and zany overall tone to consider why a parent would build and then destroy a pool table, as a symbol of his own sense of being stuck in the mud, and then an exaggerated response to that feeling.

And then it gets funny again, and boy is it funny.

When I told her I was going to make Mom and Dad the second movie, my wife told me we probably would have been better off watching that than Florida Project. I volunteered to delay my second viewing of Mom and Dad until Sunday night, as that would still get it in prior to the expiration, but she said she couldn't watch movies in which parents are awful to their kids on two straight nights. Fair enough. I might have even suggested that instead if the driving force of the evening weren't to watch Florida Project once before it expired, but instead to watch Mom and Dad twice.

Besides, I thought she'd like The Florida Project more.

When it comes to images of shitty parenting on screen, even ones I consider thoughtful like this one, you never know what will trigger whom.

At last, the arrival of awards contenders

After a month of December in which I spent most of the time trying to choose between Daddy's Home 2 and Bad Moms 2, finally the awards contenders are starting to come out.

Last night's viewing of The Florida Project (on its opening night) kicked off a fecund period that will be followed by Call Me By Your Name (December 26^th), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (January 1^st), All the Money in the World (January 4^th), The Post (January 11^th) and The Shape of Water (January 18^th).

I’m not listing the January 25^th releases (I, Tonya) because that will be after my ranking deadline, which is all I really care about. Which means I’m really not mentioning Phantom Thread (February 1^st) and I’m really REALLY not mentioning Lady Bird (February 15^th, which seems like cruel torture).

It happens every year, but I never fail to be amazed by the way that Australian distributors avoid the lead-up to Christmas for their prestige pictures. Even the December 21^st release of The Florida Project seemed strangely timed. I suppose they are not only competing with Christmas, but with summer, which carries with it a different mentality of what people might want to see.

At least the late Oscar nominees announcement date this year (January 23^rd) will mean I’ll get in most of the movies I need to see, with the few exceptions listed above. Unfortunately, it also means that neither of Paul Thomas Anderson’s last two movies will have come out in Australia in time for me to rank them, just as neither of Martin Scorsese’s last two films came out in Australia in time for me to rank them.

In these cases, the consistency of Australian distributors is maddening.

The Florida Project? What did I think?

Well, it's just about exactly a month until I release my rankings. Maybe I'll make you wait so you know how I feel.