The Parent Trap (1998) Dir. Nancy Meyers

That awkward moment when you and your twin both egregiously farted at the same time, but you've decided not to talk about it.

I think we can all agree that every Nancy Meyers movie is set in the alternate universe of White Nonsense Disneyland.  There is no such thing as class warfare in WND, because there is no such thing as class, because every person is ungodly rich and lives in the home of your sex dreams. There is no such thing as racism in WND; in fact Nancy Meyers characters' don't see race because there's literally never a single person of color in anything she does. We can profile the women of WND throughout the next two weeks as I watch the complete Nancy Meyers filmography, but if memory serves correctly, Meyers women rarely even manage to live up to the troubling standards of white feminism, though they're often confronted with what might be considered "white feminist" issues. So the women of WND always live on the precipice of "having it all," if only they could master work/life balance! or better assert themselves in their relationships! or realize they don't need just any relationship, but they absolutely need the right one! As for the men of WND, they're either children, womanizers, or white knights (the good kind-- not the KKK kind); all men in WND are essentially mascots, donning giant costume heads, working the shimmering park where everything brilliantly glows, even the reductive stereotypes.

I always have a mess of issues with Meyers films, and I leave the theater a little angered, a little charged, that the world is so narrowly portrayed and the women who run it are so broadly sketched. But I also leave charmed, tickled even, because Meyers knows what cinematic magic looks like. She makes impossibly-endearing movies where your heart melts while your mind rots. It's the Disneyland part of White Nonsense Disneyland, and if I'm in a forgiving mood, it makes the ride worth the trouble-laden waiting in line.

The Parent Trap is Nancy Meyers first film as a director, and the pairing makes perfect sense. At that time, she was an experienced and accomplished movie maker with writing credits dating back to Private Benjamin. She'd already proven her chops in adapting nostalgic family comedies to box office gold with the Father of the Bride remake and it's sequel. So after turning down a chance to direct some of the funniest females in comedy in The First Wives Club, she signed-on with Disney to direct and co-write with her then-husband and frequent collaborator Charles Shyer.

Meyers' remake makes no attempt to modernize The Parent Trap but instead fights to see it stitched with timelessness. It's apparent in the casting choices of Dennis Quaid, Natasha Richardson, and Elaine Henderson, with their romantic, old-Hollywood features. In the lavish, out-of-time estates where both families live. In the dreamy trans-Atlantic cruise that brings Quaid and Richardson together in the first place. In the film's laughably dated score and musical cues, especially the saxxy femme fatale music that plays any second Henderson's Meredith Blake is on screen. In the pranks the girls pull on each other, which are nearly identical to and no more advanced that what Haley Mills pulled on herself in the 1961 original. In fact, the banter and hijinx leading up to Lindsay Lohan's realization that she is her own twin are full of zippy "ha-cha-cha!" dialogue and Charlie Chaplin/Looney Tunes levels of comic violence. The film's lust for timelessness is perhaps most apparent in the cinematography and lighting; Meyers wanted to out-classic even the original The Parent Trap, infusing it with some 1930s/1940s romantic screwball comedy glamour. If critics and audiences scorned her 1994 love letter to Tracy-Hepburn movies with I Love Trouble, they were going to thank her for this.

Having seen her attempt at recreating or hearkening back to The Philadelphia Story and others of the era, I'm more curious than ever to watch her remaining filmography. Is Meyer's White Nonsense Disneyland actually just her trying to recreate Old Hollywood? Is it more nostalgic than it is mind-numbingly out-of-touch? It'll be fun to see, though no less problematic: 21st century romantic escapism can't look the same as Depression-Era and WWII escapist fare. It's too tone-deaf and too hurtful to suggest that today's rose-tinged utopia would be a world without black people, without day laborers, where people in need have either evaporated or been eviscerated.

But for now, a short list of the good/bad/and DUMB of Nancy Meyer's The Parent Trap:

1) The 90s were a different time for children's movies, you guys. All of the adults have a wicked alcohol dependency. Lindsay Lohan straight-up prison pierces her own ears. Natasha Richardson smokes when she's nervous, and her father smokes whenever the fuck he wants. Lohan knowingly talks to her father's fiancee about how she knows her dad is only marrying her so they can keep-on-fuckin'. We're also led to believe that as an 11-year-old, Lohan's Hallie regularly drinks wine, and in fact, has an advanced palette. Perhaps this movie was the birthplace of Lindsay's troubles and the deathbed of her refinement.

2) You guys, EVERYONE dips Oreos in Peanut Butter. That's not some freaky twin thing. It's called being a human being who isn't terrible.

3) It's hard not to feel bad for Meredith Blake. The kids straight up torture her and "affectionately" joke about pushing her off a cliff. She may be a single-minded gold-digger, but she's also someone who knows what she wants, and she works hard for the money. We're clearly supposed to think of her as some "greedy bitch," but Dennis Quaid was entering the arrangement pretty knowingly, aware that as someone half his age, he was getting sex and she was getting money. People enter these sorts of arrangements all the time; I don't think the answer is to celebrate the wealthy man and humiliate and torture the savvy woman.

4) What type of terrible human being separates twin sisters at birth, ignores and neglects their other daughter, and agrees to never tell their daughters about each other? How do they get their family members, friends, and servants to be complicit in the lie, and why is everyone so cool with it and never lets it slip? Why are the children not brimming with anger and bitterness when they realize this is what happened? And even after the twins are re-united, the parents proposed solution is still to keep the children separate from each other, except for holidays, without consulting their daughters.

5) The movie provides a pretty good primer for how not to talk to your daughter about your decision to remarry. She had literally been home for one day and only met her would-be mother-in-law once. Kind of setting yourself up for failure there, Dennis.

5) Natasha Richardson's character is the beta prototype of the Nancy Meyers woman.  She's still a wealthy, driven, fabulously accomplished, confident woman who is effortlessly unraveled when faced by a man, but her unraveling is less dramatic than in later models, and she very quickly regains control and poise. We ultimately see her clever, manipulative hand guiding her daughters in their conspiracy to get her back with her husband.

6) The women in this film are fabulous. Linsday Lohan is impossibly charming. Natasha Richardson is a melt-worthy vision of grace, beauty, confidence, and subtle humor. And Lisa Ann Walter as Chessy steals every scene, even in German.

7) Real missed opportunity for a cute musical number in here; DAMN IT, NANCY!

8) I have never had a maid, butler, chef, or nanny, but in reality, are they treated like part of the family? Are they smiley-and-happy to cater to your every need, including espousing life advice and entertaining your children, while being permanently separated from their own families? And when Natasha Richardson asks her butler to come along to the United States but "not as her Butler," was she actually treating him to an all-expenses paid vacation, or was she just clarifying she wasn't going to be paying him for his time?

9) How does NOBODY notice that these girls are identical looking until they fence each other like a week into camp? Why does nobody say "whoa, it's freaky, you're like twin sisters?" Also, are we supposed to believe that in the dramatic fury in which Natasha Richardson ran out on her marriage, she tore the photo of the night they met, neatly preserved her soon-to-be-ex-husband's face in her scrapbook, and made sure the half with her face was tucked away in some place where it would be well-preserved for her abandoned daughter?

10) Let's all agree to leave the pleather dresses and spaghetti straps in the 90s.

11) Would love to see this re-imagined as a horror film where one daughter is blatantly lying about how good her life is, takes advantage of finding her twin to build a new family and new identity for herself, and essentially throws her newfound sister into the uncertain pits of hell. "The Parent Trap" would literally be the name of cage her parent uses to confine her. Just saying, this could have just as likely been the scenario, so if you meet your twin, don't agree to let her take over your life because you could end up in an abusive household, and the more you screamed about it, the more likely it would be that you were committed.

12) OMIGOD TYPING ALL OF THAT NONSENSE IN THOUGHT 11 JUST MADE ME REALIZE THAT "I KNOW WHO KILLED ME" IS ESSENTIALLY THE THEMATIC SEQUEL TO THE PARENT TRAP.

As for your hot dude of the movie, Dennis Quaid and the butler don't really do it for me. So, I leave you with this smoldering picture of the late, tremendously talented, deeply beautiful, Natasha Richardson who stirs in me something so genuine that I have to wonder if I am, in fact, pansexual.

She doesn't even need a smokey eye to serve you smokey eye.

Dogfight (1991) Dir. Nancy Savoca

"Let me tell you something about bullshit. It's everywhere. You hit me with a little, I buy it. I hit you with a little, you buy it. It doesn't make us idiots. That's what makes us buddies... and that's what makes us Americans."- Berzin (Richard Panebianco)

There's less than 15 minutes left in Dogfight. Eddie Birdlace (River Phoenix) has just caught his Marine-buddy Berzin in a lie, and Berzin has in turn caught Eddie right back. Eddie knows that Berzin cheated in last night's dogfight, that he hired a prostitute to stand in as his date so that he could win the lucrative award of having brought the ugliest woman to the party. And Berzin knows that Eddie wasn't hooking up with an officer's sexy wife but that he spent the night with the painstakingly-plain Rose (Lili Taylor), his own date to the dogfight. Berzin delivers his diatribe on the unity and universalism of bullshit, and afterwards, Eddie and Berzin agree to not narc on each other but to instead perpetuate each other's fabrications. They're invested in that game-- in the appearance of things, in ignoring ugly realities--and they'll knowingly keep playing. 

We're led to believe that this is a type of innocence, or that appears to be the message in context. The story is set on the eve of the Vietnam War, a period held as an American loss of innocence/fall from grace in both the public and academic conscious. This contemporary historical narrative (problematically) reads that because we refused to see the world a certain way before the 1960s, that we were somehow a less jaded (and less accountable) nation, but as turmoil, upheaval, and change bred awareness and maturity, we uncovered blood on our hands that we can't seem to wash off. A similar setup is true for the young characters in the film. The players are all newly-legal adults, fresh to and scared of the world and arguably just now hitting an age of legal and moral culpability. Not to mention, don't we expect a certain wild, reckless cockiness of youth that somehow exempts young men from control; isn't that why "boys will be boys" exists, because we nurture the idea that being young and penis-wielding makes you incensurable for the harm you cause? Eddie especially is faced, perhaps for the first time, with his own wrongdoings, his own shortcomings, his own consciousness, his own mortality, and it is (is it?) as if he's responsible for himself and his place in the world for the first time. So is it so wrong, the film asks, to ignore the very real world going on around you in favor of the youthful perspective we've laid out for ourselves? Can young men maintain innocence by ignoring or denying the reasons we have to feel guilty?

Eddie somehow, admittedly, amazingly, doesn't seem to know any better at the time. He is angry, out-to-prove-something, out-to-be-someone, and he feels entitled to take what he wants because the Marine Corps told him if he became a Marine, he could do that. In truth, he's likely not entitled to much out of life; Birdlace is generally unskilled, ungraced, and charmless. Rose is the 4th or 5th girl he's taken to a dogfight, but this instance genuinely appears to be the first time he realized that women are human, that they have real and valid feelings, that the entire concept of the dogfight was unconscionable. And throughout the night they spend together, as she challenges and questions him, it truly seems as though no had ever told him that there was a rich, deserving world outside of making a show of dominating communists and women with his buddies. He is so blinded by traditions, by history, by power structures, by 19 years of his vision being unchallenged. Still, ultimately, it's hard to accept that any of this makes his actions excusable. Ignorance of the world, especially willful ignorance, doesn't hold water in the court of audience opinion. I can't say I sympathized, though much of, or felt much for Eddie Birdlace, a man who doesn't even have the swagger to be a he's-endearing-but-I-hate-him presence on screen.

As for Rose, we feel for her in all the ways she is wrongd and hope for her in all the ways she wants the world righted. Lili Taylor paradoxically plays a woman whose body seems so broken by the world when she walks, who has been victimized so much by society that she can't manage a brief gaze into a person's eyes, but who ultimately remains outspoken, courageous, and at least, by her own account, driven and ready to make a difference. When Rose learns about the dogfight, that she was selected for her plain appearance as a joke, we're heartbroken not only to see her feisty-and-earnest spirit broken but because Taylor so successfully pulls off the timeless embodiment of any of us let down when we were teenagers-- a surrender to bed, to Joan Baez, to making sure your mother never has to hear you cry. Her pain is palpable and relatable and her hope is moving and sweet. Yet it remains  difficult to not also hold her responsible for her own lack of groundedness and her own willful ignorance. Rose's purity is a naivety and an idealism that the only action required to fix the world is a great song she may write some day. While art is fundamental, playing folk records in your bedroom is not the same as action, and she, in her own ways, is a girl distancing herself from her responsibility to the world through action-less romance.  She sees that the world needs healing but denies that she should play a role of action in healing it, recluding to the lyrics of Bob Dylan instead. Whereas Eddie may be guilty of denying the problems of the world, Rose is, in some small way, guilty of denying herself an active role in the solutions.

While I hesitate to call remake on a 24-year-old film, great power potentially lies in a reimagining of the film in a contemporary context. The sense of entitlement & dehumanization of the dogfight is something we see in a lot of today's young male spaces--the military, the fraternity, the high school football team-- and one can easily assume that similar misogynist traditions continue in some of these environments today. But those men aren't innocent, right? Ignorant, sure, but are we willing to say those"boys will be boys" and these particular ones just have yet to learn their lesson? And in the world of that film, how would their lesson even be learned? What horrific event would simultaneously expose them to the unshakable ugliness of the world as well as thrust them into an oppressed social identity (i.e. a Vietnam War Vet) so that they realize they can't live in the smoke and mirrors, in the bullshit any longer? That's the roadblock I keep hitting. Angry, entitled young men are invested in Berzin's bullshit and they benefit from it, tangibly-- it propels their entitlement and power, distances them from harshness,  allows the "boys to be boys" unchecked. Which makes me wonder to what degree the Vietnam War  era should be a watershed for American revisionists if so many American men won't see the blood on our hands, won't accept the truths that "women and minorities are people" and "violence is trauma," won't see both the harm and the emptiness of "hitting each other with bullshit" in a world where terrible things are happening and no one is doing anything about it.

I know that Dogfight has often been discussed as a story of the power of love and goodness to heal and to overcome shitfuckery. But for me the story most powerfully communicates these questions of interpersonal and historical culpability. When and how are we as people and we as a nation no longer guiltless but answerable to the harm we cause? Why do we willfully ignore the ugly or hard things of the world, who benefits from the ignoring, and is it morally conscionable ? And for me, personally, why do we pretend like there was a "better era" before we were responsible for our actions socially, not just individually, and when the fuck are we going to claim accountability for the pain we cause when we deny that pain and that accountability in the first place?

For now, I leave you with the film's closest thing to a dreamboat, River Phoenix. Not that I don't think River has a gorgeous, sensual, earthy face--the "high and tight" haircut just did him no favors.

I can dig it.

BONUS ROUND:

1) The role of Rose was originally written as an overweight girl, but Lili Taylor so brilliantly articulated a plain, self-conscious, frightened-but-filled-with-dreams woman that Dir. Savoca had the role slightly altered.

2) Brendan Fraser's first film role. He's a navy guy who gets in a brawl with a few of the marines. So we have Nancy Savoca to thank for The Mummy and to blame for literally everything else.

3) Literally every detailed synopsis or extensive review of the film I've read makes a point of mentioning that that River Phoenix over time realizes that Lili Taylor isn't physically ugly, just plain-looking. I found this phenomenon so strange, which isn't to say that I think Lili Taylor looks terrible. I just don't remember the film ever directly articulating Eddie deciding Rose wasn't ugly or wasn't ugly enough. So the synopsis writers and reviewers focus on Rose really not being all that ugly seems to suggest that's a prerequisite to their night of romance and to Eddie realizing he shouldn't be subjecting Rose to the dogfight. That pokes a lot of holes in people's righteous indignation about the dogfight if they're suggesting that one of the reason's Rose is "worthy" is that she's actually not that ugly. Surely Eddie could be faced with the inhumanity of it, even if Rose was frightfully hideous? Perhaps he could even make himself vulnerable enough to see Rose's earnest and powerful spirit and still want to kiss and sleep with her? Gosh, we hope so.

The Wolfpack (2015) Dir. Crystal Moselle

The Wolfpack could have been so many movies that it wasn't, and that seems to have pissed off a number of critics. Given the stirring potential of a documentary that principally follows six male siblings effectively imprisoned in a Manhattan apartment throughout their childhood, you sometimes find yourself frustrated that director Crystal Moselle doesn't sink her teeth into the sinister abuse or mental-scarring narrative the scenario clearly lends to-- where's the Law and Order: SVU of it all? Or as we learn the boys have a penchant for recreating iconic films frame-by-frame, you might hope that Moselle compels the boys to re-enact their experience growing up with no social outlet or window to the world but Quentin Tarantino's filmography. At the very least, you presume Moselle will take command of the narrative and squarely tell us "this is a story of survival," or "this is a story of redemption," or "this is a story of love." You expect her to tell you how to feel about the whole tragic? inspiring? unlikeliness of it all.

Moselle never does any of that. And for my money, it is not because she is naive or inexperienced, as some reviewers have suggested. She's simply not interested in being a didactic or a dictatorial filmmaker; she has too much respect for her subjects and too much faith in her audience. She instead wants us to form a relationship with The Wolfpack, like the one that she has cultivated over the past 5 years. It's a well-nourished friendship that respects boundaries, that does not permit speaking over or speaking for friends, that does not wish to see a friend disgraced, that is more interested in getting to know a friend than in making decisions about him. Journalisticly, it's problematic, but as an audience member, it's refreshing to see something so naturalistic and so respectful of its subject matter that you know nothing is revealed that wasn't graciously and enthusiastically shared.

I will concede that there's a certain amount of "dumb luck" in Moselle's approach, but I insist it's a dumb luck only accessible to a director who is caring, compassionate, attentive, and patient. While it was serendipity that first-time filmmaker Moselle encountered these boys on one of their first ever independent outings in the city, it takes a great deal of kindness, courage, and persistence to turn that serendipity into a 5-year relationship and the opportunity to freely film a distrusting family. And perhaps its happenstance that the boys are so insightful and reflective, so forthcoming, so bursting-at-the-seams to tell a story and finally be in their own film. But people don't share and people don't trust if you don't give them reason to. The only true impossible kismet of the movie, the spark that would set the film ablaze for even the most inept director, is the boys' passion and talent for film-making. It's the organic answer to this summer's forced, over-polished Me and Earl and The Dying Girl: a movie for film lovers, by film lovers, about the transformative force of cinema and the highs-and-lows of seeing the world as a movie. It radiates so desperately from the boys that you can't help but see it.

There's much to respond to in the film, much to feel. As someone who, in a less literal sense, relied on movies to discover the world and still sees things through lenses cinematic and poetic, I saw myself in these boys. I know what it means to see each person you encounter as both an archetype and a rich, realized universe, as a narrative you could never reduce to "good" or "bad" or to anything, really. And there's the conflicted joy and unexpected jealousy that creeps up in seeing these boys so free of self-consciousness. They are afraid of a lot of things, but never of being embarrassed, of reading foolish or melodramatic, of making an ass of themselves-- when they're remaking The Dark Knight they're uninhibited hams and when they're meeting other people for the first time they're spirited, inquisitive, and forthright. Then there's the powerful reminder that the forces that literally controlled us as children can continue to bind us, even when the visible threat of them is gone. Some of the boys remain confined to their home into their legal adulthood, beyond the time their father directly forbids them, beyond the time when their father would, physically, be a barrier to their freedom. There is an ingrained fear, an ingrained understanding, and a lingering sense of impossibility that life beyond the apartment could or should exist any time soon. But once it happens, once the fear of their father and the fear of the world is faced and conquered, a whole new world exists for these boys where they can be free of their father's constraint and abuse.

But the emotional epicenter of the film, for me, is the un-unique wildfire of love the boys share with their mother. They worry about her freedom, her safety, her sense of self-worth, and she worries she's forever harmed them by staying in a relationship she clearly feels trapped in. When they're able to experience un-caged moments together, in an endless apple orchard outside of the watch of their paranoid, controlling father, there's a rapturous joy in watching them celebrate the freedom and chance for discovery in each other. The boys especially need to know that their mom can still experience the world and that she can build something for herself outside of her sad, abusive, drunk of a father. It's a delight to see the boys (and presumably Moselle) create spaces for this freedom for her, but it's ultimately painful to realize she seemingly has no intention-- or feels she has no right or agency-- to truly begin a life without their father.

Moselle's film is never as structured, complete, or compelling as it could be. The questions she asks, while significant, are asked quietly, and she never demands an answer to any of them. We never know the extent of the patriarch's abuse or have our morbid curiosities indulged about the cost of the boys' social isolation. Nor do we leave the film with a comprehensive sense of what it means to be raised by Quentin Tarantino (though the answer seems to be that it's less violent or reality-distorting than you might expect). Instead, we just get to know these boys and their family for 88 minutes. Never really as individuals, but a cohesive, creative unit that is smart, brave, supportive, curious, and full of spirit and love. We care for them, we worry for them, and we're inspired by their earnestness, perspective, and talent. As with all our good friends, we see in them a potential for amazing things. But unlike most of our friends,  the boys seems to see it in themselves, too, as if they've never imagined a world where people who put their mind to it don't achieve greatness. And in letting us see that, rather than pulling out any of a number of documentary framing tropes she could have wielded, Moselle has given us a real gift.

And, no disrespect, but there were no men in the film who I experienced as especially hot. So, instead, here's my apropos first childhood crush: Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf.

McFarland, USA (2015) Dir. Niki Caro

McFarland, USA is the type of movie where you have to watch dozens of non-singers perform the entirety of the national anthem, and you're made to feel guilty if you're annoyed by it. It's also a movie that asks you to plain-face accept that Mexican immigrants are built for long-distance running because "they carbo-load on rice and beans." So let's be clear: the only reason I watched McFarland is that every year, I try to see all of the well-reviewed films directed by women. I did not come to this one with a lot of enthusiasm or a lot of love.

I was interested, though, to see the director of Whale Rider and North Country take on a very male-centric sports drama peripherally (too peripherally) about Mexican immigrants. Not only do studios rarely choose female directors for predominantly male genres, but presumably there aren't a lot of Mexicans in Director Niki Caro's homeland of New Zealand; she's certainly not the most-savvy option as it relates to Anglo-Mexican relations in the US. 

But upon viewing, the choice made sense. Caro does have a knack for taking tired narratives and lazy tropes, recontextualizing them, and making them powerful again. And then there's her perspective as a meta-outsider. She's experienced in telling stories about communities she isn't part of, as she did with the Maori in Whale Rider. Here we see her, an outsider to the United States and to Mexican-Americans, telling a story that's about an outsider to a Mexican-American community, with tremendous intimacy...and an empathy that can grow patronizing. I suppose if we can suspend our anger about Disney's decision to a) not really make the story about the immigrant teens who actually won California's first cross-country title and b) not hire a Mexican director, then Caro is the closest thing to the right fit.

She's certainly a worthy filmmaker, especially when it comes to crafting powerful visual narrative. She sees human drama and human beauty in small, natural moments, and she knows you can take in a complete, lush story using only your eyes. As such, the movie's most successful narrative scenes are the cross-country team's wordless runs; here we see a 15-year-struggle for self-worth and a hundreds year struggle for racial and economic inequality play out in these boys without any dialogue and minimal preceding exposition. Even in that lingering moment in the second act, when they see and touch the ocean for the first time in their lives, the audience knows through Caro's visual direction that suddenly a whole knew way of being has become possible for these kids.

For someone who is looking for a familiar sports drama, especially of the race-relations variety, I'd say the film works. You'll cry when you're told to cry. You'll be charmed when you're told to be charmed. You'll decide that the fact you always root for the underdog means you're not a racist, and the films seems pretty content to let you off the hook with that. But as someone who thinks too much, I had a lot of questions and a lot of problems.

Overdone and problematic as it is, one expects to see growth in Kevin Costner's Coach White during the film as it relates to racism. We assume he'll start off apprehensive, insensitive, a tinge cagey and offensive, and by the end of the movie make some overreaching comment about how we're all the same. That's there, and fine, I'll live with it. But what about this problematic narrative where Coach White is an abusive asshole with anger issues and he's grateful he finally found a population who has suffered enough abuse to take it? White has been fired from several jobs before being "relegated" to McFarland because he gets in fights with parents and teachers, he intimidates his players, and at the beginning of the film, he throws a cleat at an insolent student's face and cuts him. Not only is the audience pushed to laugh it off and side with White, but the film becomes a forum for him to celebrate having found a community that has faced so much adversity that they aren't shaken when he can't slow down or stop his anger or his demands.

And for a movie that has decided Kevin Costner, not his team, is the protagonist, he consistently remains an unlikeable bully throughout the film. He's largely inattentive to his family and indifferent about how inattentive he is. He's invested in success but not very invested in his students and teammates. He "adorably" builds his track team by blackmailing, manipulating, and stalking all of his students. And in what is perhaps intended to be one of his redeeming moments, we're supposed to decide that Kevin Costner is an alright guy because he insists a student with a concussion shouldn't keeping playing football. Not only is that a very low threshold for human decency, but he doesn't even send the concussed student to the doctor-- he just tells him to go sit down.

And when it comes to those issues of race and ethnicity, the film's politics remain uneven, but perhaps still less problematic than white teacher savior narratives like Freedom Writers and Dangerous Minds. Caro does generally do a respectable job with a difficult balancing act; she needs to show tremendous respect for the community and the value of the work that they do--all community members in McFarland are day laborers--while also showing the community as a place a person would want out of, would want to "graduate" from. Those dual moments of respect but limitation are powerful. In one scene, Costner has the students practicing hills by running them up and down covered mounds of almonds that the Mexican laborers have farmed. One of his students beautifully flips out on Costner, not only shaken by how insulting and thoughtless the exercise was, but aware of the poetry in it, that the students are paving their way to a better life by stomping all over the work of their parents.

But there are many more problematic, less sensitive moments. The high school English teacher, after delivering an unprompted tirade on the school-to-prison pipeline in the community, praises Coach White for the change he has made in his students. Her evidence is a poem one of his athletes has written in which he highlights how, when running, he is no longer a "stupid Mexican" or a "dirty immigrant" but free like a bird. "Good job, Coach!" she tells him, when the moment isn't--or at least isn't exclusively--laudatory. Anyone who has ever been part of a stigmatized and oppressed population can tell you about the self-hatred that comes with it. I know it's something I've experienced as a gay man, and many friends of color have shared stories of more dramatic struggles to love their own identities and find beauty in their own skin in such a racist world. It's beautiful to know Coach White's students have discovered new opportunities for themselves and can imagine being a person they could love, but why share a poem that suggests this self-love comes at the expensive of renouncing or hating your heritage? I don't take issue with a film that identifies the struggle for self-love in the colonized mind, but I do take issue with a film that oversimplifies it and demands we celebrate it.

And then there's Coach White's final pep talk. In an effort to affirm his athletes, convince them that they're strong, disciplined, hard-working, and worthy, he goes a step too far. He literally says that Mexicans are "superhuman" and possess a strength and a work ethic that white people don't, and that they accomplish things as day laborers that no gringo could. And while it's important to celebrate the athletes and their parents' sacrifice and work, it starts playing into longstanding "noble savage" narratives when you use the words Costner chooses. It's as if he suggests that Mexicans are uniquely suited for day labor, that it's beyond anything white people are suited for, and in doing so, affirms the way the US labor force is structured with white people open to endless opportunity and "superhuman" Mexicans happily working away in the grape vineyards of California because it's the most appropriate work for them.

There were moments that I loved, many of them in fact. As someone who cries at any underdog story, I cried four-fold at this one. Not only were the running scenes moving, but there's a gorgeous equity in cross-country running because the person on your team who finishes 5th is just as important as the person who finishes 1st; it allows for multiple underdogs, multiple heroes, and tremendous unity. And all of the student-athletes in the film are charming, charismatic, earnest, and easy to love. Particularly charming is Coach White's eldest daughter, Julie, played by Morgan Saylor with innocence, sincerity, curiosity, and kindergarten romance chemistry with star athlete Carlos Pratts. There were even brief shining moments of gratitude and empathy with Kevin Costner's racist, ready-to-Hulk-out Coach White that touched me. In one such moving scene, he affirms and verbally "celebrates" his daughter's womanhood with a humble, respect-filled toast; of course, it just so happens to be the scene where they've culturally-appropriated the quinceañera, directly preceding the scene where he alienates himself from the entire community by deciding his daughter's skinned knee is a greater atrocity than the near-fatal stabbing of neighborhood Mexican teenage boys. Such is the world of McFarland, USA.

And here's your hot dude of the film: 

Carlos Pratts: Moody, Adorable, Approachable.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) Dir. Marielle Heller

There is a lot of sex in The Diary of a Teenage Girl. In fact, it's the most frankly sexual teen film I've ever seen, though unlike a standard teen sex comedy or indie erotic drama. For one, the sex never views as exploitive and the main character, Minnie, is never dangled in front of us to dominate, possess, or objectify. The gaze here is clearly female, perhaps even grown-up Minnie looking back on her 15th year with empathy, enthusiasm, and love. Director Marielle Heller cares about Minnie and wants her to love herself and own her sexuality; for the most part, Heller accomplishes this without moralizing or judgement, allowing a sexually curious and bold teenage girl to be a just-so reality and one worthy of its own narrative and of our attention.

Sex for Minnie begins to take on so many meanings and intentions that I found myself wanting to take issue, initially. Minnie sees herself as too fat to be beautiful, too ugly for a boyfriend, too awkward to ever find someone who would love her, who would stay; sex becomes a quest for self-esteem and validation. The need for validation from men becomes so extreme that she goes great lengths to objectify and demean herself to catch the attention of other men, including pretending to be a prostitute and later engaging in a threesome she has no desire to be a part of; both acts leave her feeling nervous and ill. Minnie is also a 15-year-old girl on a mission to find and know herself, who is caught in the middle of her pre-teen Disney wardrobe (an on-the-nose Minnie Mouse shirt) and whatever stable label adulthood holds. So, sex briefly becomes her identity and being a sexual person serves as an avenue for her to at least be a someone, a grownup someone. Her mother, played wounded, reckless and cagey by an understated Kristen Wiig, even encourages her to discover sex as power, but primarily as a commodifiable weapon or bargaining tool with men rather than an empowering practice for pleasure and agency. Wiig's character models a life for her daughter where relationships with men are necessary for meaning and where sex-- or being sexually desirable to men-- is necessary for self-love and personal fulfillment.  I found these interpretations of sex heartbreaking. I really wanted sex for Minnie to be about pleasure; or I wanted it to be about love. But I had to come to terms with the honesty and humanness of it, that sex is or can be all of these things for all of us. That we all have sex for the "wrong" reasons (insecurity, boredom, momentary connection) that aren't necessarily wrong at all. It's variations can be but are not necessarily problematic; often, they just are, and there's no sense in moralizing them. That realization helped me really appreciate the film's portrayal of Minnie as a woman with sexuality, just as complicated as anyone else's.

And Minnie does have moments where sex seems to be about pleasure and she's able to articulate her own needs in sex. In one unexpectedly endearing scene, Minnie goes home with a classmate and they proceed to have sex in a backyard playhouse after skinny-dipping together. His thrusts are short, frantic, and desperate, and Minnie looks like someone has attached cooked pasta to a high-speed fan and just kept whipping the outskirts of her vagina with it. Fed up and disappointed she tells him she wants to be on top, and she straddles him with slow, sensual, deliberate movements, bringing her to orgasm. It's a visual representation of her owning her sexuality and serving her needs; it is--and I'm not being facetious--the kind of sex we want our friends, our loved ones, our daughters to be having.

But otherwise, Heller seemingly operates between a neutral-but-compassionate stance on Minnie's articulations of sexuality and a quiet-but-paternalizing concern, perhaps in hopes of siding with her audience. Not only are we led to see Minnie's growing sexual pursuits as destructive compulsions, but the audience has to decide how to process statutory rape through the eyes of a 15-year-old girl who (like me, like you) desperately wants to be beautiful, important, and loved. The bulk of the story is Minnie's secret sexual (and romantic?) relationship with Monroe, her mother's boyfriend. Heller shows some affirmation, respect, and compassion for Minnie by largely showing the affair through Minnie's eyes. From her chaotic, youthful, exploratory, love-craving vantage point, we see real chemistry between Monroe and Minnie. Their flirtatious games shape dynamics that are all at once fatherly, brotherly, and movie-love romantic with noogies and tickle fights and relentless teasing. Early on, as an audience member, I had to remind myself that she was 15 and he was 30 and this was not a romance and this was not okay. But you simultaneously empathized with Minnie and wanted her to find a way to make love and sex work for her, and honestly, in time, when I did find myself wanting their affair to end, it was less because of issues of age-difference, manipulation, legality, and true consent, and mostly because Monroe reveals himself to be a sad, lonely asshole without much of a future. Just as I may have determined were she dating some boy in her class, I felt like Minnie could do better.

(Monroe, played brilliantly by a loses-himself-in-the-role Alexander Skarsgard,  leads me to believe this is our intended journey with the character. Skarsgard is relaxed and charming, and he enters the relationship seemingly more curious and confused than predatory... again, we keep having to remind ourselves that their relationship is not legally or ethically okay. But Monroe's mid-film drunken ramblings and his pitiful, childish, drug-induced declarations effectively reveal his character and disarm his charms. Skargard makes us want to, conflictedly, breathe Monroe in and then enthusiastically spit him out)

But if the director's point-of-view and the film's tone don't seem to directly condemn Minnie's eventually compulsive sexuality or illegal and unethical sexual relationship with Monroe, she certainly finds ways to work in a moral commentary. Firstly, there are the absurd and negative consequences of Minnie's sexuality. In one of the film's few ingenuine, far-reaching moments, Minnie's wounded and jealous mother learns of Minnie's relationship with her boyfriend and she tries to compel them to marry one another. This prompts Minnie to escape on a weeks-long drug binge with her short-lived lesbian lover who tries to SELL MINNIE AS A SEX SLAVE FOR DRUGS WITHOUT HER KNOWLEDGE OR PERMISSION. I'm not saying these things never happen, but when you take on one of the few moderately-visible films where a teenage girl gets to own and explore her sexuality through a largely affirming and earnest lens, it seems like an antiquated and thoughtless-to-cruel cautionary tale twist to suggest the extreme consequences of sex trafficking or forced marriage.Why can't her consequences be the same as they are for the rest of us when we're engaging with others sexually while not loving and respecting ourselves?

So that's Heller's more extreme tool for judgement/control of Minnie's sexuality. The more subtle motif is the recurring specter of Patty Hearst. Hearst comes up much too frequently to just be a device for placing the film in time, and besides, there would be more timely references to make to situate the film in San Fran 1976 (the Bicentennial, or more visually appealing and narratively compelling, the rare 1976 SF Blizzard). Our three main characters all provide telling perspectives on Hearst.  Minnie is incredulous that anyone could let such a thing-- kidnapping, manipulation, sexual exploitation, and possible Stockholm syndrome-- happen to themselves. Minnie's mother is outraged and sympathetic of Patty, convinced she's a victim. Monroe remains unconvinced that Patty Hearst was victimized at all, arguing she's complicit and responsible for all of her actions. It's an effective, though perhaps too esoteric of a device for showcasing each character's perspective of Minnie and Monroe's sexual relationship, but it also permits Heller to articulate a moral stance on the issue: that Patty Heart's abduction and Minnie's sexual awakening and statutory rape are comparable, that it was, indeed, an act of manipulation, that it may have compelled Minnie to permit crimes-- engage in escapist sexual pursuits-- that were not in her nature or best interest.

Minnie shows tremendous growth at the end of the film. She has ended her relationship with Monroe, rejected her mother's views of sex and romance that led her to seek touch or male approval for identity and self-esteem, and discovered and embraced her identity as an artist. Through brilliant cinematography and charming, surreal moments of animation, the audience has already come to know Minnie as a talented and fresh-eyed illustrator, so it's very fulfilling to see her make that discovery for herself. However, it would have been a more powerful and enjoyable message to know that Minnie was able to healthfully intergrate sex into her life, that she found ways to experience sex and articulate herself sexually beyond her art. Instead, I felt led to believe that Minnie momentarily abandoned sex in pursuit of her future and her artistic identity. While it's great to see her respecting, discovering, and knowing herself, I would have preferred knowing that those were also realities for her sexually and romantically as well.

I'll end with a random postscript on the strange and unfavorable use of black male sexuality in the film. Black men are absent from the film-- sadly not all that uncommon even in progressive indies-- except for in the form of stories meant to scandalize white girls and incite jealousy and anger in white men. Minnie's best friend, perhaps not wanting to be outshone by Minnie's juicy affair with her mom's boyfriend, tells Minnie that she has been sucking the "big black cock" of the guy she's babysitting for. The taboo of interracial sex seems to be put in the same arena as the taboo of statutory rape and infidelity, and in a film that was not otherwise that concerned with contextualizing sexual values within the film's setting, it felt like a distracting-to-shocking-to-offensive inclusion. The only other time a black man, or rather a "big black cock" is mentioned, is when Minnie is trying to make Monroe jealous enough to fuck her again. She fabricates a story about hooking up with a black guy with a painfully large dick in the back of his car, and the fact alone is enough to make Monroe feel like he has something to prove or regain ownership of. Because the film never addresses black sexuality or interacial sex elsewhere, one gets the impression that Heller is contributing to, or at least employing, centuries old narratives of protecting white women (and white masculinity) from black bodies rather than commenting on them, and certainly rather than challenging them. I found the inclusion of these narratives puzzling in a movie that otherwise seemed genuinely invested in validating people as sexual subjects with their own agency and right to pleasure.

PPS: Since I've established a precedent of ending the blog with the picture of a beautiful man:

You're welcome.