Girls, Interrupted

Year: 2018

Director: Sebastián Lelio

Cast: Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams, Alessandro Nivola 

Run Time: 1 hour 54 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As a gay person, you get pretty used to any major motion picture with gay protagonists being arty awards bait that shows you how Important and Tragic your life is. The straights of the world can see themselves in blockbusters ranging from Titanic to Indiana Jones to Bee Movie, but we're stuck with stuff like Milk (dead gay guy), Brokeback Mountain (dead gay guy featuring sad closeted gay guy), Moonlight (sad closeted gay guy). Sure you get your Priscilla, Queen of the Deserts and your To Wong Foos and whatnot, but let's just say gay movies with happy endings don't have a lot of crossover with worldwide audiences.

It's even worse for lesbians. Because women are so rarely protagonists in mainstream movies, the percentage of gay ones is even lower. But the truly crappy thing is that these movies rarely even commit. Because lesbianism is only important to mainstream culture as it relates to men's interest in it, almost every big lesbian movie has its main character sleep with a man, either primarily or sometimes even exclusively. This might be a shock to you, but this is not how lesbians work. (This is not to discount that there are bisexual people and characters out there - but I dare you to find a single known movie where a lesbian actually only sleeps with women)

Disobedience was always going to be about what it's like to be gay in a straight world. It was never going to be a fun romp about two Rachels cavorting through a field of flowers. But it's maybe the worst example of a straight person (in this case, director and co-writer Sebastián Lelio) making a queer story I've ever seen.

But more on that later, after we've finished spitting into each other's mouths. You know, like lesbians do.

Disobedience wants to have its cake and eat it too, so in addition to being a lesbian movie, it is also an orthodox Jewish movie. When her father, a beloved London rabbi, passes away, Ronit (Rachel Weisz) returns to her childhood home for the first time in over a decade. While she's there, she discovers that her two best friends got married without telling her: Esti (Rachel McAdams) is a schoolteacher and David (Alessandro Nivola, who we just saw in 1999's Mansfield Park) is a rabbi protege of her father's.

Over the course of her stay, the ladies ignite a physical passion that has lain dormant for many years, while Esti chafes against the rules and expectations of her culture. They make out sometimes, but mostly they walk together, heels clicking against the pavement in front of grey, dreary skies. Yadda yadda, Oscar stuff.

This screenshot and the previous one are like an hour apart.

So yes, both characters sleep with men (even the unmarried one, in a scene that has so little to do with the rest of the film that even the soundtrack is intrusively different) in this film, but that's just the tip of the faux-prestige lesbian iceberg. Of course, there's also the complete misunderstanding of lesbian sex that I alluded to earlier, compounded with completely inscrutable shooting and editing that obliterates any hope of eroticism. But let me ask you this: Do you think a lesbian filmmaker would give the film's most crucial narrative arc to Alessandro Nivola?

Look, I can admit the dude looks sexy serving orthodox bearded realness, and he is certainly allowed to have a fleshed-out, rounded character, but the movie almost exclusively traffics in how he's feeling about everything. Esti's role is too subdued and frequently offscreen to draw any real impact from, and Ronit is flat as a board, trapped playing the Manic Pixie Dream Girl part in her own film. She's somehow both the lead and the character who dips in to shake things up and learn nothing from experience. 

I'm honestly surprised THEY didn't sleep together at any point.

Disobedience fails as a lesbian movie, but it also fails as a movie in general, so I guess at least that's fair. Nearly every element competes for the title of Worst Thing in the Movie: The cinematography is drab and oppressively grey, an effect it was certainly going for, but one that in no way fits well with the intense tedium of the story (the Rachels don't have a moment alone together until maybe the hour mark). Then you have the production design, which presents us with interiors as varied and rich as a porno, and the score, which attempts to channel the orchestral grandeur of a John Williams with some supremely ill-timed flute trills that triumphantly clash with every scene they appear in.

Hmmm... This is usually the part in a negative review where I say something nice. I suppose I don't dislike any of the actors, but none of them have the strength to claw out from the deep well of milquetoast drudgery the film has tossed them into. And that spitting scene is certainly thrillingly bonkers, much like the peach sequence in last year's similarly dull prestige queer drama Call Me By Your Name. And there's a scene that uses my favorite Terrible Movie trope to predictably delightful effect (this being the fact that nobody in any movie ever gives the speech they were meant to give, and devolves into a monologue about the lessons they've learned that makes sense to the viewer but must be powerfully perplexing to anyone actually in the audience for the speech).

In short, Disobedience is a massive waste of a grossly extended amount of time. It doesn't breach the two hour mark thankfully, but it sure feels like it does. I'd call it boring as sin, but I wouldn't want to be respectful to Sin, which is something this movie should be full of and is sorely lacking.

TL;DR: Disobedience is a dreary, deeply unerotic slog.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1000

Reviewing Jane: A Quick Succession Of Busy Nothings

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen, as I read through her extended bibliography for the first time.

Year: 1999

Director: Patricia Rozema

Cast: Frances O'Connor, Jonny Lee Miller, Alessandro Nivola

Run Time: 1 hour 52 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Mansfield Park has been described quite rightly as Jane Austen's most controversial novel, though not for the steamingly erotic reasons the marketing of the 1999 film would seem to suggest (and don't get your hopes up folks, suggestion is all there is). Mansfield Park is essentially a morality play, Austen's most po-faced and didactic work in her entire short career. The way it enforces the etiquette and strictures of Regency society can be punishing to modern readers, and requires a lot more context than most of her other work. It is not a novel for the impatient, so adapting a film from the story necessarily required a lot of adjusting and rearranging. Let's see how they did!

So far, so busty.

Mansfield Park tells the story of Fanny Price (Frances O'Connor), a poor young woman who was sent at the age of 10 to live with her rich relations: the tyrannical imperialist Sir Thomas Bertram (the playwright Harold Pinter), the lazy opium addict Lady Bertram (Lindsay Duncan), and their children, the entitled drunkard Tom (James Purefoy), the well-mannered nice guy Edmund (Jonny Lee Miller), and prissy, boy-crazy daughters Maria (Victoria Hamilton) and Julia (Justine Waddell). In the book, Fanny Price is a bland, passive character who is tossed around by these careless, larger-than-life personalities.

That didn't really work for making her the protagonist of a movie, so they have her a personality, and that personality was literally Jane Austen's. In a montage they show Fanny writing most of Austen's juvenilia (her early, posthumously published work), and they force her into the "anachronistically modern girl sarcastically fighting against the foibles of her time" mode in which most portrayals of Austen or her most beloved character Lizzy Bennett can usually be found. This completely and utterly destroys any reason this particular story had to exist, but whatever. Their lives get tangled up in lusty and romantic twists and turns when the seductive brother and sister Henry (Alessandro Nivola) and Mary Crawford (Embeth Davidtz) come to visit. Drama ensues.

They're certainly dressed for it.

We do really need to dig deep into the character of Fanny Price. She's the moral center of the book, and while there's no denying that she's a boring stick in the mud, there's literally no point to the story if she's not boring. She's supposed to be the steady center amidst the chaos of youthful licentiousness and adult hypocrisy whirling around her. By making her interesting, the story loses its lynchpin and the wheels rattle off, sending it all crashing to the ground.

It doesn't help that the other changes made to the material are entirely superficial, like adding a fresh coat of paint to a wall that's full of sledgehammer holes. As I already mentioned, this film was billed as a sexy, steamy romance, that element mostly relegated to a pair of scenes that require an extremely  liberal reading of the source material to mutate Mary Crawford and Fanny's relationship into a bizarrely sublimated lesbian affair. It's nonsense that exists only to be provocative, and it barely succeeds at that because of the way it pulls its punches, demurely hiding behind its implication.

The other major embellishment on the source material is the addition of a much more prevalent angle on slavery. In the book, it is only mentioned Sir Thomas Bertram has property in the South American colony of Antigua, though readers at the time would probably be aware he held slaves. But that fact is drawn into the light here, making his slave-driving an important facet of the narrative and the drama between his character and Fanny Price. Unfortunately, Mansfield Park completely fails to make any point about slavery and the way the family profits from it. It's just one more ingredient to some overbuild melodrama, and the big conflict about it (involving some way-too graphic depictions of rape and torture) is resolved offscreen, so it's obvious once again that the filmmakers were too shy to actually go through with their bold reinterpretations.

I mean, what's the point when we could be watching straight white people almost kiss?

Really, Mansfield Park is a thorough waste of time. But there's at least a spark of what the film could have been. It's still funny, as almost any Jane Austen adaptation has to be - at least briefly. The standout character is the same as the novel: Sheila Gish's manipulative, self-indulgent Aunt Norris. Her pert little reactions to hugely tragic situations are amusing to be sure, and any scene with her in it seems to perk up a bit, even visually speaking. She is present for most of the visually creative moments Mansfield has to offer. In fact, perhaps the best is a smash cut to the death of Mr. Norris, as described by Fanny in a letter to her sister (these letters, which are presented by Frances O'Connor speaking directly to the camera, are the only other times that the movie actually tries to accomplish something stylistically unique).

These sequences are few and far between, but the movie has the gall to end on a beautiful series of tableaux that gently break the fourth wall as we follow each of the characters' fates in the epilogue. When Mansfield Park actually uses the medium of cinema to breathe life into one of Austen's most lifeless novels, it accomplishes a great deal, but unfortunately they're mostly content to have the narrative crumble around them just like the walls of the titular manse.

The romance here isn't even compelling. Whereas in the novel, we see Fanny pining for her cousin throughout the entire story (gross), here her more active character causes him to pine for her, which deflates every scrap of drama that is supposed to be created by his fervent, blind interest in Mary Crawford. I'm not here to complain that they changed details from the novel. This is what movies do. But did they have to change the detail that fundamentally fuels the entire romantic conflict? It's monumentally fatiguing. Every choice that was made in this adaptation was the wrong one, and the budget doesn't provide for sets and costumes lush enough to redeem it by at least allowing you to sink into cozy period domesticity.

I obviously have a lot of patience with these things, so please don't take my warning lightly. Don't waste your time with this one.

TL;DR: Mansfield Park is a waste of time, embellishing a book that's not that interesting in a way that makes it even less interest.

Rating: 5/10
Word Count: 1140
Other Films Based on Mansfield Park
Mansfield Park (Rozema, 1999)

Mansfield Park (MacDonald, 2007)