The Year of the Small Movie

If you like “small” films, 2020 was your year.  Next week the 93rd Academy Awards will take place – with people present, no less – celebrating the movies of 2020, a strange year in so many ways that it seems fitting that the film industry wasn’t exempt.  With theaters closed or sparsely attended in 2020, many movies were held back for release in 2021 or were released with little fanfare on streaming services.  I missed seeing previews – often the biggest indicator for me on what to see – and instead had to trust that I was getting wind of good films despite abbreviated or non-existent theatrical runs. Ultimately, I watched twenty-two movies released in 2020, including all eight Best Picture nominees, and while many of them were really good, the mood and feel of many of them were – for lack of a better word – “small.”  I was struck with a maddening desire to watch some honest-to-goodness plot-twisting Hollywood creations, words I never thought I’d utter. 

In 2018 when I saw The Florida Project, I was blown away.  I wrote then, “The Florida Project is one of those rare films that I gravitate toward – short on plot, long on characters and realistic slices of life.”  And while that’s still true, it turns out that if you watch a dozen Florida Project-type films in a row, suddenly small slices of life don’t seem so novel anymore.  In fact, they can seem downright infuriating.

In quick succession I watched Mank, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, One Night in Miami, The Forty-Year Old Version, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Dig, Malcolm & Marie, Sound of Metal, Supernova, Nomadland, Minari, First Cow and The Father.  Goodness.  Some of those films are excellent – of these, I liked One Night in Miami and The Forty-Year Old Version best – but by the end of that run I was practically begging for a plot.  A development.  A murder.  Something!  Something more than two guys surreptitiously milking a cow!  Too much of a good thing can in fact be too much of a good thing.

In the midst of all of these films, my wife and I also watched Promising Young Woman and Judas and the Black Messiah, and both of these nailed it.  Excellent films, and for us, a breath of fresh air to kick off the dust of our plotless movie run.  Sadly, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things and The Forty-Year Old Version garnered no Oscar nominations, and One Night In Miami was ignored for Best Picture and Director.  That’s the way these awards shows always go.

But when reviewing this year’s films to last year’s, it seems like a lifetime ago when we were cheering on Parasite, Ford V Ferrari, Jojo Rabbit, 1917 and Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood (plus Uncut Gems and Knives Out), a better batch of films than this year’s, in my opinion.  I’m holding out hope that the 94th Academy Awards will celebrate a terrific set of movies both small and large.

The Florida Project

A month ago, I lamented about this year’s best picture Oscar nominees and listed the few movies I saw in 2017 that I thought deserved recognition, only one of which made the Oscar cut: Get Out.  I’d like to add one more movie released in 2017 that should have been recognized for more than just a best supporting actor nomination for Willem Dafoe: The Florida Project, a low-budget film released last fall to rave reviews, though if you blinked, you might have missed its theatrical release.

The Florida Project is one of those rare films that I gravitate toward – short on plot, long on characters and realistic slices of life.  It brings to mind some other films like Beginners, Nebraska, Lovely and Amazing, The Squid and the Whale, Boyhood and the Joe Swanberg films (Drinking Buddies, Digging for Fire, All the Light in the Sky, and the like), though its portrayal of the American poor through children’s eyes has almost nothing in common with those films.  In that sense, it’s like no other film I’ve seen.

Director Sean Baker’s portrait of poor families living in a rundown motel outside of Disney World is captivating, largely due to the amazing talents of child actors Brooklynn Prince, Christopher Rivera, Aiden Malik and Valeria Cotto.  Much of the film is shown through their perspective, as they stroll from motel to ice cream stand to waffle house to cow pasture to abandoned homes.  I marveled at some of the dialogue between the children and am curious about how much was scripted and how much was simply kids being kids, as they express wonderment of a fallen tree that’s kept growing or take delight in sharing an ice cream cone.

The adults are worthy of note too, and not just the incomparable Willem Dafoe – wonderful as the motel manager who, without sentiment, protects the lives of his poor tenants in ways large and small, a more important figure in their lives than the mobile food pantry volunteers who hand out bread in the motel parking lot.  Bria Vinaite, who plays mom to Prince’s Halley, is also a standout as an aimless adult doing whatever she needs to do to pay next week’s rent, including using her daughter to hawk wholesale perfume in a country club parking lot.  Yes, she’s a neglectful parent, but I found her also to be sympathetic, as her love for Halley shines through at times, though not always in the most conventional way.

The film shows a side of life that we don’t often get to see – the American poor, eking out a living, relying on each other for basic niceties, not having the luxury of caring about politics or the environment or the economy.  Surviving is all they have time for.  Like my experience watching the film Boyhood, I kept waiting for the Hollywood dramatic turn: a car crash, a molestation or a murder.  There were times when the kids were running through a parking lot or crossing a street, and I winced, expecting one of the children to land on the hood of a car.  But like Boyhood, The Florida Project doesn’t take the easy way out.  Many lives are crushingly difficult, not because of life-altering events, but because of the harsh, daily grind, when one day bleeds into the next, never exercising the difficulties of the day preceding it.

Often, I value a movie on how much I’d like to see it again, and I was taken with something Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun Times wrote about the movie.  He was more harsh in his assessment of the characters the film portrays, but he still loved the film.  He writes: ”…you’ll most likely not want to see (it) twice, but seeing it once is an experience you’ll not soon forget.”

I think he and I agree on this point.  I’m not sure I’ll be eager to rent this movie again, even for all it’s attributes.  But if you haven’t seen it once, you’re missing out.