Uncharacteristically, I watched two movies last night. I don't normally watch much television - streaming or otherwise - other than news, sports, and the occasional episode of the latest "prestige" drama series. But last night, I watched both Cord Jefferson's American Fiction and David Lowery's The Green Knight, two very different films.
I heard terrible things about The Green Knight and had been advised not to bother watching it, but I enjoyed it very much. I heard great things about American Fiction and it's even up for a Best Picture award in tonight's Academy Awards presentation, but I disliked it.
I'll start with American Fiction. I get it - it's not at all subtle about it's message. It's theme is that depictions of the lives of Black Americans aren't popular among audiences, especially white audiences, unless the characters are steeped in stereotypical street violence, gangsta language, and impoverished lives. Stories about upper middle class persons of color, or successful, educated, and urbane African Americans, are difficult to sell. So the movie focuses on a Black university professor of English, a sophisticated, articulate, and cultured man who knows and appreciates fine wines and books and who chooses to write about things other than the ghetto experience white audiences think are "authentic."
Okay, I'm with you so far - not the worst premise for a film. But much of the movie follows the life of that professor, played by the eminently likeable Jeffrey Wright, as he deals with family issues like the sudden death of his M.D. sister, his plastic-surgeon brother's coming-out issues, and his mother's increasing age-related dementia. But these stories are played out more like soap opera than drama, and the banal comforts of their affluent lives makes everything appear more like a Lexus commercial than a movie. Look, I don't care what color the skin is, but fuck the bourgeoisie. Seriously, fuck them up the ass. They're not interesting people and their pampered, sheltered lives are boring. Regardless of race.
"There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue." - Anton Chekhov
And a movie that is trying to point out the absurdity of stereotyping needs to take a long look in the mirror about how it depicts gay people. They apparently can't establish that the plastic surgeon brother is gay without having young men wearing only bikini briefs disco dancing in his house for no apparent reason other than to indicate his orientation.
The dialog was hackneyed, the film was so obvious in its theme that the viewer didn't need to bother to think at all, and the characters were all reduced to archetypes of the racial/political positions they were meant to represent. Seriously, how in the fuck did this get a Best Picture nomination? I've seen better "very special" episodes of afternoon television shows than this Tyler Perry wannabe telenovela.
I didn't like it.
Now, The Green Knight doesn't pretend to be easy to understand. There were lots of "what the hell is going on" sequences, some of which later became apparent and some of which I still haven't figured out, at least not yet. But I'll say this - the movie was compelling enough that it makes me want to think about it and to continue to think about it even after it's over.
It's an art film along the lines of Terrence Malick and Peter Greenaway that don't get made that much anymore, with touches of Alejandro Jodoworsky and John Boorman. It's not meant to deliver a precise socio-political "message" like American Fiction, or even to "entertain" in the style of the MCU superhero movies, but to provide what is truly a wonder to behold, and to allow appreciation of its beauty and its mystery. If you let it cast its spell on you, it does tell an epic adventure story with appearances by bandits, ghosts, giants, and even a talking fox. Not to mention the most badass Ent this side of Middle Earth.
It's not meant to deliver a precise "message," but its themes include honor and bravery, as well as story-telling itself, whether those stories are that of the movie, the Arthurian legend on which it's based, or the epic tales that the characters tell themselves.
I could definitely see myself watching this film again and finding new meanings and themes within, and I could see myself watching short sequences of the film and just admiring the visual images like one does a painting.
In retrospect, the "terrible things" I heard about the movie were from people who didn't want to bother trying to figure out what was going on or were too impatient to let the meanings unfold themselves before the viewer. I would expect some people might find it "slow moving," conditioned as we are to expect explosions, fights, or witty lines delivered every few minutes as determined by some Hollywood test-audience algorithm.
The Green Knight did not win any Oscars and as far as I know, wasn't even nominated, but it is a far better movie than American Fiction by every imaginable metric.
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