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My review of The Green Knight, adapted and directed by David Lowry.

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My review of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, which I believe to be a perfect film.

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Little Women (2019)

A first for the blog: a guest post! The following is a review of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019) by Carly Henderson.

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When creating a film version of a classic novel, one often wants to justify its existence by approaching the story with a new lens that appeals to its contemporary audience and differentiates it from previous film adaptations. The temptation with this approach, however, is to take a sub-theme and make it the overarching theme, or to misinterpret a theme altogether. The resulting film, then, is either off the mark or entirely antithetical to the source material. This is often what happens in modern adaptations of classic stories (Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina, Julian Jarrold’s Brideshead Revisited, and Netflix’s Anne with an E, to name a few), and is also the case for Greta Gerwig’s Little Women.

My opinion will be unpopular, as Gerwig’s adaption of Little Women has been widely received with praise for its creativity, innovation, liveliness, direction, and attention to the novel and its fresh resonance with a modern audience. And it’s true: it’s lovely to watch, overall well-acted, has an excellent score, and, I would argue, is the most bold and creative take on the classic story by Louisa May Alcott yet. Many commenters at the film’s release said that every generation deserves its own Little Women, and this version of Little Women is one that only a modern feminism could create and deserve (the film opens and closes with a salary negotiation between Jo and her publisher, the first scene ending with her acceptance of an unjust wage from her publisher, and the last ending with her fair negotiation, making her an equal player with the man). Even so, what makes it distinctive also makes it a denial of itself. Its modern lens overlooks and destroys the heart of the story, and its bold, artistic rendering ends up being a beautiful but empty shell, lovely to behold, but easily cracked and hollowed of its substance. And this is what we get with Gerwig’s Little Women: it’s a coming of age story that focuses on women’s empowerment, equal wages, opportunity, and creative genius at the expense of the growth and maturity of its characters. Alcott’s Little Women is certainly empowerment and creativity, but it is much more than this—it is at its core a story about growth, virtue, and a certain open receptivity before life that allows one to truly be creative and fruitful.

Though I may have criticism of the film overall, the acting in it is a masterclass: Saiorse Ronan is a force to be reckoned with; Florence Pugh makes the ever controversial Amy loveable (perhaps even more lovable than Jo, which is quite the feat), and Timothee Chalamet is a good Laurie, perhaps truer to the novel’s Laurie than Christian Bale’s portrayal in the 1994 adaptation (though his Laurie for me remains superior to all other Lauries). The film is not linear. It starts in “present” adult life, as Jo is in New York and Amy in France, and shifts back to childhood in flashbacks. This has a dizzying effect and can be difficult to follow, even for those familiar with the story. The advantage of this is twofold: on the one hand, the film seeks to take the adult versions of these characters seriously, where other film adaptations tend to give more time to their childhood; on the other hand, it bends the audience to favor a Laurie/Amy pairing from the beginning. This is a victory for sure, overcoming the long-held resentment about Amy, as many continue to think that Laurie should have ended up with Jo. And there is no doubt that Gerwig is technically excellent: the cinematography is beautiful, the music is beautiful, the costuming is beautiful.

But the film gets a great deal wrong about the novel, which should matter if one thinks that a film adaptation should try and capture the animating force of its original material, even if it is impossible to illustrate every aspect. I will limit myself to three points.

First, the film gets Beth all wrong. In the novel, Beth is the heart of the story. She is warm, sweet, and gentle, the one who has a special bond with Jo and the only one who can temper and correct her. Gerwig’s Beth is an odd recluse—apparently also a concert pianist—who is abnormally childlike and random, and without the warmth that is one of the defining traits of Beth’s character. She is often called “sweet one” by her sisters, but little is done in the film to communicate her sweetness. She whines and complains when no one will join her to visit the Hummels; she speaks like a 4 year old before the horses. And, above all, the warmth between her and Jo is not felt. Jo needs Beth to be herself to temper her fire and refine it to something more true, strong, and gentle. It feels as if Gerwig must reconstruct Beth because Beth’s quiet, gentle, and demure personality is not consistent with the idea of femininity as creative self-determination that Gerwig favors. Beth can’t be herself in this film because for Gerwig Jo needs no character arc: she has nothing to learn other than to be more forceful and direct. In fact, Jo seems to be the best of womanhood, forging her creative path and destiny with no need of anyone—not her father, not Prof. Bhaer, and not even Beth, which is in striking contrast to the book.

Aunt March’s character is similarly sacrificed to Gerwig’s particular ideal of femininity. Interestingly enough, Aunt March in this film becomes the aspirational model. In contrast to the book, in Gerwig’s film, Aunt March is the sister of Mr. March. This means she is not only unmarried and rich; she also has never been married, which for Gerwig means she has freedom and means. Let’s side step the question of how an unmarried sister inherits and keeps the family wealth, and note that the real problem here is that Gerwig’s Aunt March represents the only path to freedom for the March girls: money. Are we really prepared to declare that freedom simply is access to capital? That none of the girls’ artistic endeavors mean anything unless they indeed capitalize on them? Here it seems to me particularly clear that Gerwig unknowingly submits Alcott’s work to the architecture of late-stage capitalism.

Additionally, Streep’s Aunt March is a one-dimensional character, surprisingly enough for Streep. In the novel (and in the 2017 BBC adaptation by Helen Thomas), Aunt March is a tragic figure: a widow whose only child died in her youth, and one who says stupid things, but then later realizes it and has the humility to apologize. She therefore is a character of depth—that is, in the novel, she too grows and matures, whereas Streep’s Aunt March has no arc. Streep’s Aunt March is the woman to be: nothing to learn and dependent on no one.

These first two misinterpretations are ultimately the consequence of Gerwig’s misunderstanding of the novel, or perhaps better, her imposing her own (capitalist?) framework on Alcott’s work. In Gerwig’s Little Women, feminine agency is pure self-determination, self-construction, choice, and ambition (which is agency simply in a liberal, capitalist society). This is why Jo and Amy stand out in this film, and Meg and Beth only awkwardly fit in until they ultimately fade away (figuratively and literally, respectively). Indeed, the film’s overarching framework of women as creative, ambitious, self-directing and -constructing, cannot explain the beauty, dignity, meaning, and fruitfulness of both Meg and Beth’s lives apart from choice, precisely because their lives are very hidden, normal, and for all intents and purposes, without fiery ambition. Indeed, choice is the only way to understand Meg’s character in this framework (and which Emma Watson attested to in various interviews): Meg has chosen to be a wife, and this choice gives her life’s path purpose, meaning, and reconciles it with Gerwig’s feminism. Being a wife and mother in and of itself is not what gives her life dignity and purpose—rather it is her choice to do so that does. This problem also stands out in dramatic effect in Amy’s monologue (penned for this film) of marriage as an economic institution that depersonalizes women, as well as Jo’s similar understanding of marriage. Granted, marriage is an economic institution and this aspect of it was particularly felt in this time—but it is not solely an economic institution. It is a good in and of itself, formative for the person, and, above all, the form of love itself. In promoting the almighty reign of choice, the reality of love is undermined, and, ultimately, the true dynamism and variety of femininity is undermined.

But if domestic life is worthy of art and importance, as the characters reflect on at the end of the film, it isn’t because it is something merely chosen by women. We can make poor choices after all. It is rather because there is something inherently important and meaningful about domestic life itself. But if Gerwig were to admit this, it would undermine her framework of feminine agency, freedom, and choice, equality, and thereby, the whole theme of her film. We see this in the meta ending, which, despite the popular interpretation of the novel, is not ambiguous: in Gerwig’s retelling, Jo does not marry Bhaer. Why? Because she is told that she loves him; Gerwig’s Jo would never let anyone tell her how she feels and then stake her life on that (it is interesting to note that, in the book, Jo comes to realize, on her own, that she loves Bhaer, and her family gives her the space to discover this).

And while we are on the subject, I will add one final thing that the film gets wrong: Professor Bhaer. Sure, Louisa May Alcott may have written this character with tongue in cheek to stick it to her publisher for marrying Jo off at the end of the story—i.e., instead of a young, handsome man, Jo falls for an older immigrant, who is bear-like, awkward, yet sweetly endearing—but he is still a good and important character for Jo’s arc as both a woman and a writer. In casting (the strikingly beautiful, might I say) Louis Garrell as Professor Bhaer, Gerwig plays into the cliché ending that Alcott intentionally avoided. Gerwig’s point is clear, but made without the nuance and depth that Alcott gave both the character and the ending.

Whatever the case of Alcott’s original intention, the fact is, Jo becomes a true artist when she allows herself to be affected by others: i.e., when she allows Beth’s nature to temper hers, allows herself to be guided by the wisdom of her father, and allows herself to be moved by the wisdom and love of Professor Bhaer. This isn’t to say that she isn’t creative or independent; it is to say that creativity is always the fruit of relationship. Creativity does not come out of nothing; much like virtue and fruit, it is pruned out of us, sometimes painfully, by another and by life itself. This is what Gerwig’s tale misses, and this is ultimately why it is a deeply dissatisfying adaption.

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My review of the TV show The Good Place, published in Artefact.

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First Reformed (2017). Written and Directed by Paul Schrader.

First Reformed has absolutely no idea what it’s about.

The film starts out as a modern reinterpretation of Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest set in upstate New York, in a town similar to so many others in modern day America: depressed, economically and otherwise. Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) is the titular priest here who in this version is a Reformed pastor at a historic church with almost no parishioners. His life—reflected in the film’s cinematography—is sparse: his rectory, though beautiful and quite large, has almost no furniture in it, save a twin bed and a desk; he spends most of his time alone. The film begins with Toller writing the following words, the first half lifted almost verbatim from Diary of a Country Priest: “I have decided to keep a journal . . . in longhand, writing every word out so that every reflection of penmanship is recorded, every word chosen, scratched out, revised to set down all my thoughts . . . When writing about oneself, one should show no mercy. Who are you hiding from? God?”

A promising—if somewhat bleak���beginning. We soon find out that Toller’s parish is more or less funded by the much more well-attended Abundant Life ministries, a megachurch located nearby, with a pastor who bears some resemblance to Bernanos’s Curé de Torcy, who the country priest describes as “a good priest, very efficient, but . . . somewhat uninspiring”, which is an apt description for Joel Jeffers, Abundant Life’s head pastor. The contrast between Toller’s spare and austere, though beautiful, parish and Jeffers’s tacky megachurch is enough to fill an entire movie. Schrader does an excellent job showing the superficiality of such churches, in terms of their understanding of faith and Scripture, as well as their reliance on emotion and sentimentalism, which helps their parishioners to feel God’s presence, whatever that means. In watching Toller’s solitary and suffering existence, we are led to ask who really is close to God: those who feel satisfied and happy, or those who, like Toller, suffer a great deal and in fact often feel very distant from the Lord, while at the same time always searching for him? At one point in the film Jeffers says to Toller, by way of admonishment, “You’re always in the Garden!” Of Gethsemane, he means. I think Schrader questions whether that’s a bad thing, especially given the state of our world today.

The parallels to Diary of a Country Priest don’t stop with Toller’s keeping a journal or the question of a suffering versus a sentimental faith, but also with the pastor’s difficult parishioners. Early in the film, Toller is asked by a young woman, Mary, to speak with her husband, Michael. Mary is pregnant, and her husband, an environmentalist with radical leanings, thinks it is unjust to bring a child into a world which, as he says, will be unlivable by the time that child is an adult. The encounter between Toller and Michael is the most beautiful in the film; Toller doesn’t downplay Michael’s fear for the child, or his concern for the environment, but rather asks Michael to see that his framework for thinking about the question is wrong: that his hesitation isn’t ultimately a question about the environment, but rather a giving into despair. “It comes down to choice” says Toller, “We cannot avoid choosing. We are not free to not decide . . . Courage is the solution to despair.” It is a beautifully tense scene that addresses the hopelessness and cynicism that creeps up on us while living in a world such as ours that often seems to have no room in it for anything but vanity and power. Toller’s very presence is a reminder that there is space for more than that.

After that scene, I thought I was in for a film which addressed this theme in light of the sentimentality most faith in America has become, but sadly I was mistaken. Instead, Michael takes his own life shortly thereafter, and Toller somehow ends up becoming a radicalized environmentalist himself, to the point of contemplating eco-terrorism, though for the life of me, I cannot trace this arc for Toller in the film itself. Toller’s switch felt arbitrary and unearned. However, largely due to Ethan Hawke’s virtuosic performance, I was still on board. After Toller makes the switch to eco-radical, his similarity to Bernanos’s country priest becomes less homage or parallel and more grotesque image. The country priest, we find out late in the novel, has stomach cancer, and therefore eats only a little bread and drinks too much wine because he literally cannot stomach anything else; Toller likely has the same condition, but rather than his meals resembling the Eucharistic sacrifice, he drinks far too much whiskey, which leads to one of the more revolting scenes ever put to film (Toller pours Pepto Bismal into a glass of bourbon). Toller eventually plans to commit an act of eco-terrorism, taking his own life in the process, and then I thought I was watching a film about what happens when one allows this-worldly causes to become ideologies—that is, to take the place of the true transcendent horizon. But as it turns out, that’s not the film I was watching either.

Right after Toller straps on the suicide vest with which he plans to blow up his church and the large crowd gathered there for its reconsecration, he sees that Mary is there unexpectedly, and so decides against going through with his plan. Even here I was still skeptically on board, thinking maybe the movie was saying that the particularity of love (i.e., an actual person one loves versus loving “the whole world” generally speaking) is actually what saves and redeems us. But then Toller takes off the suicide vest, wraps himself in barbed wire, and is about to kill himself by drinking a glass of Drano when Mary appears and says his name, and the film ends with Mary and Toller (still wrapped in barbed wire) kissing and embracing, with an old hymn being sung in the background, so the last words of the movie are, “What have I to dread, what have I to fear, leaning on the everlasting arms? I have blessed peace with my Lord so near, leaning on the everlasting arms.”

After that, I was no longer on board. If Schrader is trying to comment on the meaninglessness of faith in the face of this seemingly hopeless world, he fails because he did too good of job—both in writing and direction—making the opposite argument in the first half of the film. If he was asking us to look at our “causes” and what lies beneath them, he fails, since he doesn’t follow this question through to the end. And if Schrader is trying to get us to take a hard look at the superficiality and sentimentalism of what passes for faith in America, he fails there too by placing Toller’s salvation in Mary as a romantic partner: this is the most sentimental of all sentimental tropes. Even the blocking of the last scene, with the camera circling around Toller and Mary while they are kissing, reminds one of the final moment of a romantic comedy where the two leads finally get together.

At the end of Diary of a Country Priest, the titular priest dies in the arms of an old friend who has taken up with a prostitute—a certainly embarrassing and seemingly hopeless situation not only in which to be, but to die. But one sees that the priest has died precisely for these two people, so that they might be saved. And his faith grows so much in his last moments of suffering that he sees clearly—perhaps for the first time—that “Everything is grace.” The emptiness and loneliness he has suffered throughout his life are revealed to be not meaningless at all, but in fact the means by which he helps to save others and participates in his own salvation. There is no such arc or fulfillment for Ernst Toller in First Reformed; rather, the sentimental ending puts into question everything Toller said to Michael in their beautiful conversation about despair, and makes it seem as though Michael was correct after all: there is no room in this world for hope. Despair wins the day, and our only ugly and incomplete answer to it is the superficiality of sentiment.

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A review of Bon Iver’s i,i published in Verily last year.

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Emma. (2020). Directed by Autumn de Wilde

Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. (2020) is unlike any Austen adaptation I’ve ever seen. It’s Austen by way of Wes Anderson.

Emma holds a special place in my heart as my favorite of Jane Austen’s novels, which, if my circle of friends and acquaintances is to be trusted as a decent sample of the population, does not seem to be a popular opinion in the least. Most favor the sparkle and wit of Pride and Prejudice or Anne Elliot’s deeply felt emotional life in Persuasion, but Austen famously wrote that she wanted to create a main character no one would like in Emma, and she seems to have succeeded. One picks up on Austen’s own attitude toward her heroine in the first line of the novel, in which she writes, “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich . . . had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” On the surface, this could appear as simply an accurate description of our main character (and it is), but if one knows Austen, one also knows there is always much more going on underneath the surface in her writing, and it takes some attention to see this. Here in the first line of the novel she is already making fun of poor Emma.

My appreciation of Austen’s sardonic side is not the only or even the main reason Emma is my favorite of her novels; it is rather the complexity of what Austen does in the novel and the seeming ease with which she accomplishes it. Like all who have genius, Austen makes it all look so effortless, which is one of the reasons her writing is often misinterpreted and misunderstood. When one looks past the surface of her novels, one sees that Austen explores foundational questions of human nature, which of course includes love and marriage, but also questions of being and appearance, and questions of family and community. It seems to me Austen has a particular interest in the question of paternity and authority, as father figures (or the lack thereof) all seem to bear special importance for her heroines.

In any case, in Emma, Austen weaves the novel around the self-important main character and two other supporting actors born in the town of Highbury the same year as Emma, Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. These latter two are seen relatively sparingly in the novel and instead act as specters of what Emma’s life could have been; the three are connected not just by birth year, but by the early losses each has suffered. Frank, born to the affable Mr. Weston, loses his mother around three years old, and as a result his father ships him off to live with an aunt and uncle, thinking he cannot take care of his young son himself. Jane is an orphan whose only living family are her very poor grandmother and very tiring aunt, Mrs. and Miss Bates, and who, despite her accomplishments and beauty, seems destined to become a governess because of her lack of family and connections. Finally, there is Emma herself, whose mother died when Emma was young, and was raised with her sister by her father. All three children born to gentlemen from the same town, and yet all three with very different fates. Throughout the novel Austen demonstrates just how deeply these familial losses have affected our trio without ever commenting on the situation directly. Frank feels somewhat torn between his two families; Jane seems to be the loneliest creature alive; Emma is rather more obnoxious than she should be with a father who indulges her every whim, so long as she stay at home with him where he is sure that she will be safe. Of course the story is told through the drama of who is going to marry whom, but the story Austen tells in Emma is more deeply one of loss, community, and friendship.

There is so much more here than romance. In fact, there is always more to Austen’s novels than romance, a fact that escapes many of her readers and I think, most of her adapters. I of course have my own private ranking of the different on-screen adaptions (with Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (2005) coming at the bottom of that list), but all tend to be both romantic and Romantic in tone—not only focusing on the love stories of the main characters, but also filled with picturesque set pieces of the English country side, awash with dark and moody color palettes, and when the final profession of love does come, it comes in dramatic and breathy fashion. I enjoy a fantastical profession of love as much as the next girl, but I think Austen herself might laugh quite a bit at these adaptations (and in particular the professions of love included therein), as one of the things she constantly points out in her novels is that because human nature is quite flawed, language is often the means of confusion as much as it is clarity. We need a community around us in order to understand both ourselves and other people because our own vision is incomplete without others. But again, because human nature is messy, the coming together of a community can also be quite messy. Humans are a bit absurd, after all. Austen doesn’t miss this, but her on-screen adaptations mostly do.

Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. does not miss this at all. Brightly lit and pastel-colored, one knows immediately one is in for an Austen adaptation unlike any other. Emma (Anya Taylor-Joy) is established immediately as simultaneously completely obnoxious—treating the servants poorly in her self-righteous manner—and sympathetic. The movie opens on the day of her long-time governess’s wedding, which not only will take Miss Taylor away from Emma’s day to day life, but also leave Emma the only person at home with her perpetually worried father, Mr. Woodhouse, here portrayed by Bill Nighy unlike I’ve ever seen before, not as fragile and eternally grieved, but as sprightly and absolutely absurd—terrified of drafts and ready to spring up from his seat at any moment to find and block their source.

This is the unexpected joy of de Wilde’s Emma. It picks up on and leans into Austen’s humor in ways I’ve never seen done before; I found myself laughing out loud at some of the blocking and visual jokes, and this led me to think about Austen’s novels and their adaptations in a new light. One of the reasons the Great Books can (and should) be read again and again is the almost infinite depth of these works, which leads to different aspects of the text shining through during different readings. Indeed, there is an almost Scriptural quality to great works of art, with something new coming to light each time one engages with them. Think of how we approach Shakespeare: his plays are infinitely fruitful, depending on the context in which one places the characters and the tone and emphasis given to each line. The plays stay the same and yet each rendition brings something new about reality to light. Couldn’t the same be said of Austen’s works?

De Wilde’s Emma. highlights humanity’s absurdity—and mines it for every bit of comedy it can—but also the loneliness we feel when our communities are broken. One of my favorite aspects of this adaption of Emma is its depiction of Mr. Knightley (Johnny Flynn), the Woodhouses’s neighbor, and one of the only corrective influences in Emma’s life. Adaptations of Emma often show Knightley as more or less having his shit together from the beginning and not having much of an emotional journey to make other than figuring out at some point he is in love with Emma because of his jealousy of Frank Churchill. But Emma. picks up on Knightley’s somewhat lonely existence—he spends his days taking care of his very grand estate alone and in conversation with no one else. As Knightley walks through his magnificently decorated hallways, we see that much of the art is covered; he lives there, but does not enjoy what he has for he has no one with which to enjoy it. De Wilde’s Knightley is alone most of the time and somewhat awkward, and he too must make an emotional journey to understand that he is not after all content with his current state of affairs.

I wrote above that Emma. is Austen by way of Wes Anderson. There are aesthetic similarities: brightly lit shots filled with pastels, a coherent color palette for each character’s costuming, head-on and intimate blocking that makes one feel one is in the room with the characters rather than observing them from some Archimedean point. But the similarities run deeper than just aesthetic interpretation: Anderson’s films tend to concentrate on some sort of wounded family-unit beginning to acknowledge the wound and starting to heal by coming together despite the difficulties our messy natures present for us in attempting such a task. And the comedy Anderson finds in this does not come from making fun of his characters, but rather in showing the absurdity that arises out of our attempts to answer our desire for communion. Both the people we love and we ourselves have shortcomings and so the task of community and communion is bound to be a bit messy—and also very funny. Anderson never laughs at his characters, but always with them, in a deeply felt recognition of the human condition. De Wilde’s Emma. is very similar, and highlights this theme of the desire for community and all its frustrating and absurd consequences in a way never before brought to life in an Austen adaption. At first the unfamiliar tone took me off guard, and I wasn’t sure if de Wilde was taking license with Austen’s work. Upon further reflection, however, I see now that de Wilde is perhaps truer to Austen than any who have come before her, for she sees past the surface level romance, which most do not get beyond, and in her adaptation of Emma points to the great tragedy and comedy of being human.