Issue #83: Opaque Intentions ♠️
Saltburn + May December
It’s the end of the year; we’re deep in catching up on the big movies of the (end of) 2023 and steeling ourselves for the long dark winter ahead — made easier by having a parade of movies to watch on a bright screen after the sun goes down waaay too early.
This week we bring you two movies that we caught up with this week and immediately felt compelled to write on. First up, Zosha with the shallow reflections of Saltburn, and then Cate on the “iconic” May December.
Zosha on Saltburn
I want to start this review off by making the depths of my displeasure unknown: How dare Saltburn give me the first ever bad Barry Keoghan performance.
Keoghan has always been a soulful performer, even at his most deranged. You can look to the depths of his performance in Banshees of Inisherin for that; the butt of the joke that turns small embarrassments into tragically poignant scenes. Though his face may be the most prototypical “punchable” (The Killing of the Sacred Deer, The Green Knight), his eyes are emotional, and he is able to find the humanity in any little weirdo he plays (he’s one of the only people who actually manage to effectively emote in Eternals, and maybe one of three who make use of it). Which is all to say that for Saltburn to give Keoghan no chance to find the nuance of his latest little creep seems like a problem.
Keoghan plays Oliver, a lonely kid who’s made it to Oxford but hasn’t managed to make any friends — at least, until he manages to catch the eye of Felix (Jacob Elordi), a rich and popular charmer. Ultimately, Felix invites Oliver to spend the summer at his family’s home (Saltburn, more aptly described as a “small castle”), and before too long tragedy, intrigue, and class politics are all swirling to change both of their lives forever.
When the movie is working it is gliding entirely on the charm of its cast. Elordi’s performance feels most notable as the central gravitational pull upon which Saltburn must orbit, and he’s not bad. His turn as Felix feels a bit airy, but so does Felix’s life; it’s the sort of turn that doesn’t quite cohere the whole time, but set against the density of his brooding on Euphoria (I haven’t seen Prisicilla yet, don’t yell at me) it’s always clear what work he’s doing to make Felix feel incandescent. At its best the movie is engaging at the level Rosamund Pike is (and pretty much every good moment comes from or around her), who fully understands and embodies the frothy venom that the rich can engage in when they are thoughtlessly parading through their lives. In her role as Felix’s mother — and matched by Richard E. Grant, playing his father — Saltburn makes a stab towards coherent message.
Still, the movie is left to run on these actors’ fumes in the hand of Emerald Fennell’s script and direction. And ultimately its attempts at provocation simply feel punctured, like hearing a child attempting to make a cuss word sound normal. The first part at school will make you long for The Secret History, and even the more delightful bits at Saltburn feel like a pale imitation of The Talented Mr. Ripley. The trick of the latter is that Ripley’s character was always clear; we could see him be normal, but only he was surprised by the depths of his desperation and depravity as he sought out wealth. Saltburn wants Oliver’s descent into money to be a hat trick, but it’s barely even a secret. And because the characters — Oliver especially — feel too thinly drawn, it’s all too easy to find the hollowness on the other side of the story.
The movie is filled with imagery that Fennell clearly thinks is titillating and taboo, but mostly just seems kind of unearned; repeatedly Saltburn makes stabs at kink, but it too literally drives these points to the ground. What I want is the movie that deserves those moments, that felt brave enough to take them on and grapple with the characters that would have wrought them. I didn’t find them at Saltburn, with all its quiet moments that one imagines were supposed to be pregnant with meaning but mostly felt meticulously hushed. And, sadly, didn’t find it with Keoghan, who’s left to say the Themes™ of the movie clumsily out loud. This was never the only way the movie had to make its aims clear, but it was always the route it was going to take. Saltburn is a movie that wants to make its displeasure known; if only it had managed to have anything to say.
Cate on May December
This review contains discussion of child sexual abuse. Please read carefully.
The thing about May December is that it isn’t really about either of two characters most prominently featured in its marketing. And that may in fact be the point.
May December — starring Julianne Moore (Gracie), Natalie Portman (Elizabeth) and Charles Melton (Joe) — is a not-so-subtle pirouette in triplicate. The three circle each other like wolves in the night, their emotional triptych fighting for dominance as psychological truths are discovered.
But it’s hard to ignore that Joe is the one whose story is really being told. And yet again, it is happening without his consent. Twenty-six years after the reveal of his habitual rape as a teen by his now wife, Joe has settled into a quiet suburban life. He and Gracie have college-aged children. He has a beer gut and a preference for grilling. He’s older and rounder, just like any other suburban dad. So when Elizabeth comes to town — in the hopes of spending time with Gracie so that she can better play her in a movie — it is notable the way she engages with each half of the couple.
Gracie’s resistance is evident from the start. She feels her space invaded, and she’s defensive about recalling her misdeeds — up to and including her prison sentence and then ongoing tabloid appearances. But importantly, she is not repentant. There is no shame to be found. Joe however, is hesitant and pliant — a lifetime of subservience kicking into gear.
And while these two women dance around the crime Gracie committed against Joe, they mostly cut him out of the process. The power play over his life, and his trauma largely happens without him. That fact is made even more stark when looking at the situation through the frame of race — two white women entertaining themselves by twirling in the sandbox of an Asian-American man’s pain. Was Joe consulted before Gracie’s decision to allow Elizabeth into their home? Would he have been heard if he had objected?
The perversity of the situation is further spotlighted by Melton’s incredible performance. Already in conversations as an Oscar contender, Melton surfaces the shame and trauma of a boy who was failed by every adult around him, and forced to take responsibility for their mistakes. Initially, Joe keeps his distance from Elizabeth, letting Gracie take the lead. But as he grows more comfortable with her — a woman his own age — he begins to let his walls down. Which of course, in turn, Elizabeth exploits.
But one thing her attention does do for him is open the lid on the well of deep repression he has been burying for what may as well be his entire life. As the film progresses, Melton — in an incredible physical performance — demonstrates Joe’s regression into the boy he once was. His voice, posture, speaking pattern all work together to build a clear portrait of a 13-year-old stuck in a man’s body. A child unsure of how to protect himself or his own children.
And Melton’s youth plays a big factor in the success of his performance. In a critical scene on the roof with his son Gabriel (Charlie Atherton-Yoo) Joe, at 36, looks barely older than his teenaged child. In fact, as Gabriel indulges in some classic teen rebellion with a joint, it is he who has to teach his father how to participate. These routine milestones of burgeoning adulthood were stolen from Joe. He and his some are effectively, emotional contemporaries. And when Joe breaks down, he is hyper-conscious that he risks perpetuating the same trauma on his son that was once inflicted on him.
And at the other end of the room, Gracie is leading Elizabeth into a kind of storm. It’s easy to see why the latter is so fascinated by the former. Moore plays her as a not -so-covert narcissist intent on sticking to the fiction of her story. Her great love — with a literal child — is the only narrative she’s willing to acknowledge.
But even Gracie’s dynamic with Joe reveals the truth. She orders him around like a child being reminded to do chores. She is very much the one in control of the relationship. Their dynamic will always be that of a teenager, and an adult who should have known better.
That’s what makes it so much more worse when, late in the film, in a deeply upsetting scene, Gracie blames Joe for his own abuse. Upset and nearly shaking, he comes to her asking why they never talk about what happened between them. Was he really old enough to be making those kinds of decisions?
“Who was the boss?” Gracie repeats in a direct reference to the attitude of her progenitor. “Who was the boss?” Not even in the privacy of their marital bed will she drop the façade. He pursued her. He was the aggressor. He seduced her.
A tactic Gracie uses repeatedly throughout the film is to “introduce” a lisp in any circumstance where she is defending her decision to rape her now husband when he was a teen. It turns up in a charged conversation with Elizabeth about her emotional maturity at the time (“I am naive”) and it reappears here, is the scene with Melton. Her intent is clear: I was a child too. We were the same.
But the lines and wrinkles etched into her face tell a different story. Gracie blew up her marriage, embarrassed her family and traumatized her children, because she is pedophile and a narcissist, and there’s really nothing more to the story. Even her younger children with Joe all openly despise her. She has tainted them by association, and it’s a stain they didn’t ask for and will never be able to wash out.
And the evidence of Joe’s grooming seeps into Ellizabeth’s choices too. She manipulates him into a sexual encounter (presumably as research?) and lets herself slip further and further into a mindset that justifies Gracie’s abuse. She uses him exactly the way Gracie did then and continues to do now. But, “that’s just what adults do.” Joe’s utility to Elizabeth ends at his ability to inform her own continued tabloid fascination with the pain he has suffered. Nothing more, nothing less.
When Elizabth is sent headshots for teen actors who might play Joe in the film, she dismisses them, saying they need “sexier teens.” Even in this passive and likely grotesque approximation of his abuse, the (white) people around him are tacitly trying to normalize what happened to him by representing him as “older” than he was. Of course Gracie fell for him. He seduced her with his “exotic” looks. He was practically a grown man!
Gracie ruined Joe’s life, stole his childhood and left him with trauma he may never unpack. On the surface he is happy with his life. But it’s only over the course of the film do we see him question if that is actually true. He never chose this life. Did he ever have any other options?
And are we, the audience complicit for desperately wanting the know the answer?
Assorted Internet Detritus
ZOSHA: The terrain Scorsese couldn’t traverse in Killers of a Flower Moon. Why won’t musicals admit they are musicals in the trailer? 2023 was the year of Megan Thee Stallion, that’s a rock fact. Deinfluencing isn’t the end of consumerist influencer culture.
CATE: Joaquin Phoenix is a sad boi, nobody goes to college in books, and they’re not horny in the movies either, oh to be the jobless employed, the best movies of 2023 (until we tell you otherwise), and camp is good actually.
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Zosha + Cate <3
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