Tag Archives: Julianne Moore

dark comedy, Netflix

When You Finish Saving the World: Gen Z vs Boomer

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Movie poster: When You Finish Saving the World

When You Finish Saving the World, Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut and based on his own novel, stars Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard as a mother and son with serious social and communication issues, both with each other and the rest of the world. This is an insightful, sometimes funny, sometimes cringeworthy depiction of a conflict between two generational stereotypes: self-satisfied, affluent liberal Boomers and self-absorbed Gen-Zers who are more comfortable interacting online than in person. To its credit, the film doesn’t really take a side as both generations are lampooned.

Julianne Moore plays Evelyn, the director of a woman’s shelter in Indiana. Her teenage son, Ziggy, spends all his free time live streaming a music program that is broadcast globally to, he can’t stop announcing to everyone, 20,000 fans. Jay O. Sanders takes a back seat as Ziggy’s father, whose low key presence mainly consists of drinking wine, retreating with a book to his bedroom, and avoiding conflict as much as possible.

Ziggy is the kind of part Eisenberg himself would have played 20 or so years ago. In fact, this film vaguely evokes a 90s film in which he appeared, The Squid and the Whale, as both depict highly dysfunctional upper middle class families. Wolfhard is very effective in this role as a character who is often less than sympathetic. He’s both awkward and self-centered, oblivious of how off-putting his behavior often is.

Despite his apparent popularity online, Ziggy is socially awkward with his peers. He becomes infatuated with Lila (Alisha Boe), a politically active classmate who reads poetry at a local radical community center. Ziggy makes some ill-planned attempts to impress her. He turns one of her poems about oppressed people into a song and then brags how much money he made online with it. Ziggy suffers from the delusion that social media posturing is the equivalent of making a real difference in the world.

Evelyn is equally uncomfortable to watch. One of Julianne Moore’s strengths is playing characters who try to put on a brave front while barely hanging on emotionally. We saw this recently in May December, where she plays a woman living in the aftermath of a scandal. Here, she is equally off balance at home with Ziggy and her uncommunicative husband and at work, where she awkwardly tries to balance her role as supervisor with her egalitarian values. In one scene, her efforts to get friendly with a receptionist results in the other woman asking if Evelyn is planning to fire her.

Evelyn becomes obsessed with Kyle (Billy Bryk), a teen who goes to school with Ziggy (though the two are not acquainted) who is staying at the shelter with his mother. At first, she appears to take a maternal interest in Kyle, who seems more grounded and easier to communicate with than her own son. However, it starts to go in a queasier direction when she takes him out to dinner and gets giggly and flirty with him.

We need to look beyond Ziggy and his parents to find characters who are relatively normal and well adjusted. We see their foibles through the eyes of Lila and Kyle. The film’s major weakness is probably that the nearly perfect symmetry between Ziggy and Evelyn’s awkward interactions stretches credibility.

What I liked best about the film were some of the casual and offhanded observations. For example, we see Evelyn and Ziggy squeezing into an ostentatiously tiny Smart car, which is parked in one of the neighborhood’s larger and more ornate homes. This perfectly captures Evelyn’s need to be seen as a socially conscious activist while living a comfortable life in an upscale suburb. Then there’s the everyday hostility between Ziggy and his parents, who casually hurl obscenities at one another. This might be shocking to anyone not familiar with the norms of many liberal middle class families. Ziggy is especially territorial about no one disturbing him while he’s vlogging.

When You Finish Saving the World reveals how difficult communication can be in the modern world. . But overall, Eisenberg and the actors do an admirable job of sending up people whose self-importance and grandiosity can overshadow good intentions.

 

dark comedy, Indie film directors, indie films, Netflix

May December -Complex Handling of a Tabloid Topic

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May December deals with the kind of tabloid-type topic you’d expect to see in a Lifetime movie or, going further back,  a TV movie of the week. The kind of movie that superficially condemns the scandalous behavior of its characters while titillating the audience.

Now imagine such a topic as handled by a director known for his insightful and complex approach such as Todd Haynes, and you have May December, a made for Netflix production. To be clear, May December does titillate the audience, but in a way that’s intended to make you feel guilty or at least uncomfortable for this.

May December is loosely based on a real incident of a teacher’s affair with a student.

Gracie (Julianne Moore) is a woman whose life has been defined by a scandal. When she was in her thirties, she seduced a 7th grade kid named Joe (Charles Melton), for which she went to prison. However, after she was released, Grace and Joe married and had kids. As the setting is a respectable suburb in Savannah, Grace’s standing in the community is ambiguous at best.

A strange detail to note is that the family, apparently supported by modest local jobs, somehow live in a grand home that could be called a mansion on a scenic lake. Perhaps Grace inherited it or had family money? Characters living above their realistic means is a common trope of movies and television but doesn’t really fit into  this otherwise more sophisticated film.

Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) is an actress who is playing Grace in a movie. She arranges a visit, staying in town, so she can get to know the family and learn more about the character.

May December is all about the troubled and ambivalent interactions between characters, especially between Grace and Elizabeth but also between Grace and Joe and between Joe and Elizabeth. There are also the nuanced interactions between Grace and Joe and their just-grown children.

In some ways, Grace still treats Joe like a child, even while insisting he was “in charge” in their earlier relationship. Considering his reticent and basically passive nature, this interpretation seems unlikely. Joe retreats to his hobby of raising monarch butterflies, which no doubt has symbolism as he seems trapped in a situation he fell into while still a child.

Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) is a strange case herself. She seems more fascinated and turned on than shocked by Grace and Joe’s history. In one scene, she visits the back room of the pet shop where the couple used to meet and re-enacts a seduction scene.

As with most Todd Haynes films, May December doesn’t answer many questions definitively. All of the characters are troubled and we can’t necessarily trust any of their motives. Elizabeth may have designs on Joe, but to what end remains unclear. Is she an actor who is obsessively dedicated to her craft or more of a voyeur reveling in other people’s scandals? Or perhaps the film is suggesting that these two are not mutually exclusive.

Grace may have been sexually assaulted by a brother growing up, which may partly explain her own behavior. She denies this ever happened and we are left wondering.

The film is alternately dramatic, tragic, and comedic, not giving us a chance to fall into a predictable mood. Haynes directed one of my favorite films, Safe, which came out in 1995 and also starred Julianne Moore.  Like May December, it deals with some heavy issues -in this case, health and how the world can make some people ill- in a disturbing and ambiguous manner. May December is a similarly complex exploration of issues that tend to get oversimplified.

See my review of Safe

films from the 90s, Indie film directors, indie films

Safe (1995), When life Makes You Sick

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6uwjhkFu1o

Safe is one of those low-key films it’s easy to miss even though it received quite a bit of acclaim when it was released in 1995. Directed by Todd Haynes, this is a stark and understated psychological drama starring Julianne Moore as a suburban housewife who becomes increasingly distraught over symptoms and chemical sensitivity.

Safe is the kind of film that raises more questions than it answers. Anyone who suffers from an autoimmune disease such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (or a host of other conditions) may identify with Carol. On the other hand, you can also interpret her situation in a more existentialist way. Is Carol actually physically sick, or is she suffering from a kind of societal malaise that leaves supposedly successful people feeling empty and at odds with an increasingly alienating environment?

In the early scenes of Safe, Carol is shown shopping, having coffee with friends, and driving her Mercedes around nondescript, affluent suburban California neighborhoods. When she first describes her symptoms, she mentions being under stress. Yet her life contains very little stress, at least as conventionally defined. What we can see is that she moves through her life in a robotic way, barely connecting with her unsympathetic husband and her friends from the gym. Her perpetually blase affect is contrasted not by her bland surroundings but by references to the more dangerous and passionate wider world, as when her son excitedly talks about gangs or she hears a fundamentalist preacher on the radio.

As Carol’s symptoms worsen and she doesn’t get help from doctors, she visits Wrenwood, a retreat center that’s run by a self-help guru named Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman). Wrenwood, like Carol’s illness, is hard to pin down. Friedman’s new age rhetoric is meant to be inspirational but it also emphasizes that people are responsible for their own conditions. Is Dunning helping people reach their potential and heal themselves or is he a huckster taking their money while mouthing cliches? As with Carols’s illness, you have to make up your own mind.

At one point, Carol makes a halting, confused speech about how much Wrenwood has helped her. Julianne Moore does a superb job of playing a character whose words are often incongruous with what she’s actually feeling. Soon even the isolated retreat center isn’t sufficient escape from the encroaching pollution and chemicals as Carol starts to believe that fumes from the nearest highway are reaching her.

As Safe has little in the way of a linear plot, I don’t think discussing the ending really qualifies as a spoiler. The final scene (from which I’ve posted a clip from YouTube) reveals that Carol has retreated still further, to an isolated igloo where she’s alone, breathing through a gas mask. The final scene has her repeating “I love you” into the mirror with an utterly hollow expression that belies this affirmation.

Safe, as you can probably gather, isn’t an uplifting film. It has a protagonist with an undefined problem with no apparent solution. With such murky material, I feel entitled to my own interpretation, which centers on the film’s title.

I actually started thinking about this film partly because in 2020 we’re living in a time when the word “safe” is repeated endlessly and people are widely concerned about symptoms, even if from a virus rather than the more nebulous environmental contaminants faced by Carol. The whole idea of being safe brings up the eternal dilemma of living in a world that is inherently unsafe and suggests that when we place too much value on safety it turns us into prisoners at odds with the very fabric of life. The latter, of course, is only one possible interpretation. To me, the film is elegantly ambiguous, leaving us to take from it what we will.