Post-Festival-Brain Reviews
Janet Planet and Evil Does Not Exist
As I wrote last time, the festival halo is a real phenomenon that can make mid movies seem utterly thrilling just because you saw them early, or with the perfect audience. So for you, beloved readers, I waited a full month to review two films I was super excited to catch at SIFF, because you deserve my clearest thinking.
Okay, it’s more that I swapped festival brain for puppy brain. Waffle, our 14-week-old Golden Retriever, came home a month ago, and since then my time is split between training the puppy and playing with the puppy and watching the puppy minutely for signs that he’s about to pee and driving the puppy to and from kindergarten and dressing the puppy in his Pride tie and giving the puppy frozen Kongs and smelling the puppy’s belly and making sure the puppy doesn’t wear out his welcome with our adult Golden and following the puppy around to stop him from eating the baseboards/bamboo/area rug/garden rocks. My original plan had been to write whenever the puppy slept, but instead I just kind of slump on the sofa and stare numbly into space? But conveniently, both films are just now making their way into theaters, so maybe my timing’s not so bad after all.
Evil Does Not Exist
This is the latest film from Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who made a big splash a few years ago with Drive My Car. I fell pretty hard for that movie, and then even harder for his other recent films, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Happy Hour. Hamaguchi is intensely interested in the platonic and romantic connections between modern urbanites, some of them middle-class working people and others, like the theater director at the center of Drive My Car, members of the Japanese culturati. Through long, patient scenes, he allows conversations to play out at what feels like real-life length, his characters moving in and out of the shadows as they decide how much of themselves to show to other people. Many of Hamaguchi’s protagonists are lonely, but the possibility of connection is always available to them if they decide it’s what they want; his worldview is melancholy, but not cold.
His films are also about process. The protagonist of Drive My Car is staging a multilingual production of Uncle Vanya, and we follow the cast through several table reads as they struggle to react to line readings in languages they don’t speak. Early in Happy Hour, a group of women friends attend a New Age self-actualization workshop that plays out for forty-five uninterrupted (and riveting) minutes. In Evil Does Not Exist, the process du jour is a meeting between residents of a snowy rural village and representatives of a developer intent on building a “glampsite” in the area. Before the meeting, we’ve spent a largely dialogue-free half hour watching the residents go about their business. The local handyman chops wood. His young daughter walks home from school through the woods. A restauranteur who relocated from Tokyo gathers wild wasabi for her weekly special. (The restauranteur talks about the pristine quality of the village’s water in a way that slyly suggests gentrification is coming with or without the glampsite; change a few details and she could be a Brooklynite moved to Vermont.) The mayor and some townspeople gather the night before the meeting to discuss strategy, which seems to come down to “well, let’s see.”
The developer’s PR flacks, a man and a woman, were hired by a talent agency for their polish and smooth manners. When they ask “any questions?” at the end of their rosy presentation, they’re wholly unprepared for the very specific questions the townspeople have about septic capacity, deer fencing, and (crucially) the exact placement of a well. I guess there isn’t a lot of competition for this prize, but I personally found it to be the most fascinating municipal-infrastructure discussion I’ve ever seen on film; it immediately kills any simple-folk-vs-city-slickers vibes and lets us know we’re watching a different dynamic.
After the meeting, we join the PR reps on their drive back to headquarters, and through more relaxed, loping conversation we learn that they are also not at all the people we might have expected. Is this Hamaguchi’s Local Hero? I thought, settling into a series of scenes exploring the interactions between the two parties as relations slowly thaw. It seemed a bit schematic by his standards, but I didn’t really mind. (By the way, I annoy myself when I can’t stop asking “what kind of movie is this?” while I’m watching it. I came in knowing that at 1:46, Evil Does Not Exist is very short by Hamaguchi’s standards, and I think that knowledge made me anxious to starting Getting It before It was over.)
I also knew in advance that earlier audiences found the ending quite shocking, and…yes. In the final twenty minutes, a character goes missing, and the village sets out looking for them, leading to a heart-stopping, stunningly shot final scene which I still don’t quite grasp, a month later. What is Hamaguchi up to here? For an hour and forty minutes, he’s been setting up themes and then knocking them down. Huh, is he making a kinda basic film about capitalism vs the environment? I thought early on. Nope, not quite. Country people vs bean counters? Nah. Every muddying of the waters was a great relief to me, a lover of haze. But the last few startling images, though in retrospect exquisitely set up by earlier shots and events, left me feeling shut out. Maybe that’s the point: that the human connections Hamaguchi’s other films revel in can vanish in an instant and without a human explanation? That while we are arguing about nature, nature will proceed as it chooses? That theme itself isn’t something we can count on in this life. I don’t know! I don’t get it. Have you seen it? Do you get it?
My Hamaguchi viewing to date, rated:
Happy Hour: A+
Drive My Car: A
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy: A- (this is a triptych, with two spectacular chapters and one that’s just okay)
Evil Does Not Exist: B
Janet Planet
1991 New England. A tween girl calls her mother from camp and demands to come home. “I’ll kill myself if you don’t come get me,” she says, deadpan, though we somehow understand she will do no such thing. The mother arrives the next morning in her Corolla, looking tired, an understanding smile fixed on her face. As the girl exits her cabin, another camper presents her with a friendship bracelet that the girl shows to her mother. “I was leaving because I didn’t have any friends,” she says. “Now I guess I want to stay.” The mother sighs.
Janet Planet is the directorial debut of Pulitzer and MacArthur-winning playwright Annie Baker, who I first encountered 10+ years ago in the Seattle Rep production of Circle Mirror Transformation. Part of her “Vermont Cycle,” CMT is a slice-of-life dramedy about a community theater workshop. I don’t remember too much else about it, but I do recall that Baker got a lot—humor, sadness, uncertainty—out of silences. Silence is practically a supporting character in Janet Planet, which allows cicadas, aspen trees blowing in the breeze, and other ambient sounds of late summer to fill the spaces where people might normally be talking just to talk.
The mother (Julianne Nicholson), who is perhaps in her late 40s and who parents lightly but responsibly, is an acupuncturist, a profession she only settled into within the past decade. She is dating a older man (Will Patton) who we sense would like to be a benign person, but who is too haunted by PTSD to pull it off. Through the girl’s unsentimental eyes, we watch him and several other friends and lovers move in and out of her mother’s world. There is the avant-garde actress who miiiiiight sort of be in a cult, and the avuncular Jewish mystic who miiiiiiight sort of be the leader of said cult, and who is definitely the actress’s ex-boyfriend. The mother greets each one as a new adventure, and though the daughter is often preoccupied with tween things like piano lessons and dreading the start of school, it’s clear she’s beginning to wonder what her mother gets out of these relationships.
Will you be mad if one day I date a girl? she asks the mother one night. Of course not, the mother says, and explains that she’s always kind of thought the daughter might grow up to be a lesbian. The girl prickles at this and demands to know why. The mother thinks for a moment. There is a straightforwardness to you, she finally says. And I don’t know how that will work when it comes to men. The men the mother dates aren’t awful, and yet we see that they set the agenda, that she smilingly molds her boundaries to their needs.
Janet Planet is a hangout movie par excellence. People eat dinner and run the occasional errand and of course attend the odd four-hour multimedia theatrical performance in a meadow, but mostly they just exist in rural New England in August. I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan for over a decade and so I instinctively understood the characters, thoughtful spiritual seekers who feel a little bad about being so extremely white. Near the end of the film, the mother and daughter go to a dance in a church. Oh yeah, it’s gonna be contra dancing, I said to myself, and lo, it was. (I assume the church was Unitarian.) Your experience with the film will depend on your tolerance for the vibe. Personally, it reminded me of a long-ago summer I spent in Vermont with WASPs turned just a little bit hippie, and I sank right in. I liked its people, and two hours was about the right amount of time to hang with them.
Your experience will also depend on your okayness with movies where not much happens. I myself do not really care about plot. Actually, I’m sick of plot. How many more events do any of us really need to deal with? Haven’t we had enough? Just give me a wavelength, please. And also, perhaps a more generous view of “happening” is called for. Later in the scene I described above, the mother makes a confession to her daughter. “I know I’m not that beautiful,” she says. “But I’ve always had this knowledge that I could make any man fall in love with me, if I really tried.” A pause. “And I think it might have ruined my life.”
I’ve thought about that speech almost every day for weeks now. Doesn’t that count as an event? I think it does. I think something happened in that theater—to them, to me.
Some other hangout movies I love:
Twentieth Century Women
Everybody Wants Some!!
Paterson
Before Sunset
Magic Mike XXL
Ocean’s Twelve
Jackie Brown
Duck Season
And a bonus shot of Waffle, just because.
