#but i find it dull and milquetoast and bland

[violetsoup]

discovered a taylor swift song

it sucks lol

[glassmarcus]

Super Mario Bros 6

Naked and absolute disclosure here, Super Mario Bros 3 is my favorite side scrolling platformer and will always be my favorite side scrolling platformer. It is a load bearing game that my taste are built on top of. It's the first platformer that truly clicked with me. It is the gold standard for which I compare all games within the genre to. The jump arc, the momentum, the stage length, the density, the secrets, the art, the music. If a platformer doesn't land in the same ball park of quality in these areas, I'm going to want to play Super Mario Bros 3 again instead. Especially if it’s another Mario game. And it's not like I think it's a perfect game. OK, I actually do think that, but I understand that human beings are flawed and may not be able to comprehend its brilliance like I am able to. I know that there are theoretically things that it has been surpassed in, but in practice it has never felt that way. I’ve been playing 2D Mario games my whole life and never have I had the thought "Oh yea, this is better than Mario 3".

Super Mario World is not better than Mario 3. The movement is a bit too loose, the way power ups work is ass backwards, some of the more dull levels go on a bit too long, the spin jump being a separate button is an abject affront to nature, level motifs are sparse, and the game is kinda ugly looking. The game introduced a bunch of stuff I appreciate. The interconnected world map is brilliant and really pushes the exploration elements of the series with its use of secret exits. And it may seem like a small thing, but I adore being able to throw objects upwards. At the end of the day though, I'd rather just play Mario 3.

Super Mario Land 2 is not better than Mario 3. Again, the movement is too loose for me, Mario’s Sprite takes up a 5th of the screen real estate, and like all Game Boy Mario games, the OST pile drives its leitmotif into a cemetery of dead horses. Please Game Boy Mario games, I’m begging for you to have more than one song. It's a good song, but I'd rather there be 5 new songs than variants of the same thing Ad infinitum. The Non-linearity and the creative stage motifs are unparalleled among 2D Mario, but I'd still rather play Mario 3.

The New Super Mario Bros games are not better than Mario 3. Yes all of them. And it really just comes down to how bland those games are. They all have the same general look and vibe which I find to be the least interesting these games get aesthetically. I even prefer World visually over these games just because it's not milquetoast. The level design is solid in basically all of these games but they don't introduce much new ironically. I like the move set additions like the ground pound, wall jump, and mid air spin, but there's a reason I lump them all together. They could have called it Super Mario Bros 5 Episode 1-4 and the titles would make way more sense. Nothing stands out, so I'd rather just play Mario 3.

So recently I played Super Mario Bros Wonder. On a surface level, nothing seems amiss when playing this one. The visuals are different for the first time in 20 years. Every action has soulful flourish and the animations have weight and personality to them. There is a distinct color palette associated with this game and every level is brimming with visual ambition. Most importantly, you can play as Daisy which strongly distinguishes it from every existing Mario game. The game also controls exactly how a modern Mario game should. You have the same kit you had in New Super Mario Bros Wii, but you have the ability to move at a fast pace with minimal actions that decimate your momentum. Not once have I shamefully blamed the physics of this game for my shortcomings. It's that tight and fine tuned.

On a deeper level though, Wonder has a lot going on under the hood that solidifies it as one of the more impressive Mario titles. The level design is probably what stands out the most about Mario Wonder to me. Each stage is solidly design and slowly introduces its concepts and builds upon them throughout in fair and reasonable ways. This is what's expected of Mario games. Every Mario games since the first New Super Mario Bros has been like this. There's not much to take issue with, but also not much to sink your teeth into. That's to be expected when your levels are designed so carefully that they end up always playing it safe. I think what's been missing from Mario games for a while is flavor. Mario games are always nutritious, but they have no spice. I play them, and then shortly forget about them and don't desire to return, they are simply sustenance. I played New Super Mario Bros 2, liked it enough, and immediately wiped my brain of all data related to it. And I get why these games are made this way. I'm never frustrated by anything or dreading a specific part of these games, while there are some stages in others that I ignore if possible. But I still enjoy the more volatile titles because they take those wide swings and have more personality. I need my Mario games to have an unhinged idea every now and again.

From the soil that is the sturdy foundation of 2D Mario, sprouts the Wonder Flower, and with it, a garden of brilliant and deranged concepts for levels. Mario Wonder isn't about just completing levels, it's about collecting Wonder Seeds. It's more a kin to 3D Mario games where collectibles are used to unlock levels. Wonder Seeds are Power Stars, Shine Sprites, Moons, Cat shines etc. You find these seeds by completing objectives. This means not just beating the level or finding the secret exit, but also completing the Wonder Flower variation of the level. The Wonder Flower is a usually hidden object that distorts the current stage into a Salvador Dali Dreamscape. When this flower is in play, the framework the game is built within becomes far more malleable. The geography around you shifts and comes to life. The character you play as completely warps in how they function. Even the camera angle of this 2D sidescroller isn't safe from this floral menace. The Wonder Flower is a game changer and makes every level more interesting. And the fact that it's optional really leans into the replayability of the game. The Wonder Flower sort of turns the level into a B-side alternate version. Sometimes the Wonder Flower mechanic can be annoying or maybe get in the way of exploring a certain aspect of the level. So there are times where you won't want to activate it. I appreciate branching level structure being handled in this way. It feels more natural to come back to a level to see the Wonder version or Standard Version rather than just have hidden extra level planted inside.

Wonder is a game that gives you options in how you approach clearing a level and it extends beyond the decision to use the Wonder Flower or not. Far more options are available for how you move your character rather than how the level shifts. Throughout the game you will unlock and purchase badges that you can select before each level. This acts as a sort of load out you use per stage, similar to how you'd select a power from your inventory on Mario 3. Each badge modifies your movement in ways that can drastically change how you approach level design. There are badges that increase your speed that will aid you in clearing levels faster. Glides and double jumps to help in platforming. There are badges that are only really useful in certain situations like the one that gives you the ability to dash underwater. There are badges that aren't functionally super useful but are just fun to use like the grappling hook one. Baby badges that act as an easy mode; Unhinged badges that act as a hard mode. Badges spice up gameplay in a way that is unprecedented, and it's strange how it's unprecedented because this is not a complex or high concept idea. In fact I wish they went further with it. There are some difficult levels in the back half of the game that require expert badge use, but I would have liked to see more levels that were hard, but didn't require badge use. This makes the choice you have in badge selection feel like it matters more because your choice likely led to your victory rather than what it was in my play through: rigid challenge with no room for freedom, or easy levels where the badges were just a bonus.

Despite the level design being solid, it might be the one major mark I have against the game. They feel so meticulously designed that there's not a lot of freedom in what you do despite there being freedom in how you do it. Previously titles were linear for sure and had their fair share of secrets along the way, but those secrets were better spread out due there being more height. Linear only indicates the direction the level takes. It's doesn't have to be shaped like a thin line. Mario 3 and Mario World had more rectangular levels where you could explore high up areas at your leisure. Not just when the level allows it. This is because both of these games gave you ways to fly in some capacity. Mario 3 had the Raccoon power up while Mario World had the Super Cape. There's no power up like that in Wonder that needs accounting for its vertical mobility.

Don't get it twisted. All of these new power ups are winners. The elephant power is visually the most fun power up in the series and its utility leads to some fun puzzles. The bubble power up is offensively devastating and I can imagine bubble jumping being some high level skill within speed runs. The drill is the power up that takes full advantage of the more cramped level design and because if it, this game has hands down the best cave stages in the series. These are all welcome additions, but they don't replace the vertical exploration I found myself missing after I finished my playthrough.

I feel like if that vertical element was in place, this would likely be an all time favorite platformer for me. But it's missing that and a bit more. I feel like despite this being the most different Mario in years, there are some instances where it could have gone the extra mile. It's cool how secret exits and a roamable world are in play, but most of the exits don't lead to sequence breaking short cuts and the extra world being a measly 10 levels is super deflating. Another world of levels between piss easy and ball crushing difficulty would be more than welcome. But we never get that. The Wonder Flower modifications make levels more interesting, but the same motifs as always are being used here. The story being included is a nice change of pace, but it would be a nicer change if it was good. Wonder does a lot of things to impress, but doesn't really feel like its the best Mario game in any category. Except the final boss fight which elevates the franchise in that regard.

So in conclusion, it's pretty good. One of the best 2D Mario games overall. I'd rather play Mario 3 though.

[butyouvealwaysbeenthecaretaker]

To what extent are opinions about queerbaiting split by age?

I wonder if older people have a greater tolerance for it, because we grew up in that environment where all our media was narratives we made ourselves. Our sense of romance is to an extent intertwined with closeted narratives, occluded narratives, unspoken passion, subtle looks.

One wonders if this affect will diminish over time as younglings become more used to creators serving them explicit narratives where they are named and noticed.

One wonders the extent to which queerbaiting conversations are between older and younger people - the older defending an ancient, much-loved artform; the younger demanding their right to take up space and be seen.

I think a lot about Mark Gatiss' involvement in the new Sherlock - a show I *l o a t h e d* - and how accusations of queerbaiting interact with the presence of a queer creator who chose to put those narratives there. But then I think about my writing, which continues to be - I guess - baity as fuck, and it's because i find those stories sensuous and intense and representative of my experience in a way that "Kevin and Brian met two years ago; Kevin is an analyst but Brian is still trying to make it in art and it's causing tensions in their relationship" really can't.

I think the closet leaves something indelible, on me at least, that makes these narratives permanently endearing. Almost like, having lost my chance at a teenage romance, I've never grown out of that teenage lust of the forbidden; it doesn't matter that we are like on telly now, I don't connect to that kind of positive and complex representation in a way that I do to some meaty subtext.

At the same time, I wonder if this has always been true and the split is in fact between progressive/radical voices and moderate/conservative ones. Defences of queerbaiting are so milquetoast, like, we loved our table scraps, we werent hungry anyway. Compared to "where's our throne, where's our buffet laid out for us, why aren't we demanding a damn invitation?". And that split will be eternally true. I feel like representations of adult queer people navigating complex, dull, grown up relationships have existed for decades too - often quite bland because they're trying to deliberately make-ordinary our lives. and those representations have been knowingly political ones.

And both can be true, like, original Queer as Folk is both a representation of gay men living their lives, and also a big unrequited love story.

I feel like there are interesting meta-conversations here, beyond just "is this text queerbating".

[animebw]

Binge-Watching: Skip Beat, Episodes 23-25

Thank god, we’ve reached the end. In which I try to summarize my thoughts a bit, and Ren’s arc makes no real sense to me.

Back on my Bullshit

If nothing else, I guess I should at least be grateful that Skip Beat finished out its final stretch of episodes without aggravating me any more than it already has. I’ve pretty much been complaining nonstop about all the ways I feel this show fails ever since it began, but considering some of the more unfortunate implications that were beginning to crop up last time, it could have gone a lot worse. Yeah, it’s bizarre and kinda uncomfortable that the show’s started leaning so hard into the “Grown-ass man gets feelings for a high schooler and it’s treated as romantic” thing, but hey, Ren and Kyoko are only four years apart, which is less of an age gap than my own parents have, so whatever. They’ve both got plenty of time to grow up and get to a space where they can stand on equal footing as adults, and even if the story eventually does go to gross places, the anime fizzles out and reaches its non-conclusive conclusion before getting there, and I don’t judge adaptations by their source material. So even if this is kinda the worst part of Cardcaptor Sakura that Skip Beat is borrowing from here, it’s fine. I can roll with it. It doesn’t really leave that much of an impact. And if the rest of the show had been as good as Cardcaptor Sakura, or at least been a worthy pretender to the throne, I doubt I would have paid this particular plot point much mind at all. Skip Beat isn’t bad because it’s developing a relationship between a sixteen-year-old and a twenty-year-old, it’s bad for all the reasons I’ve been bitching about since day 1 that do nothing to sufficiently distract from that fact.

And on that note, man, what is there even left to say? I’ve complained about this show’s core flaws in so many different ways over the course of writing about it that it’s honestly remarkable I kept finding new ways to complain about them. But at this point, I’d just be repeating myself if I rehashed all that nonsense. Yes, the production is weak and dull to look at. Yes, there’s a constant tonal whiplash from a production that has no idea how to segway between comedy and drama naturally. I think the one new observation I can add to that front is how much of the problem stems from the performances as well; the seiyuus do not convincingly sell their goofy and serious sides as two parts of the same person. it just feels like they recorded one segment completely in goofy mode, then took a break and recorded the next segment completely in serious mode, with no thought put into how their character would actually transition between those two modes in context of the scene. They might as well be playing two completely different people at those points, not the same person in a continuous stream of conscious thought. Other than that, though, you’ve heard all these complaints before, and I want to spend this final post talking about something at least a little new. So let’s talk about Ren, the show’s best character whose arc I just can’t jive with.

Love Ain’t Complicated

I’ve had a soft spot for Ren pretty much since we first met him, and that continues here; his understated confidence allows him a degree of snark and personality that easily outshines his bland, aggravating, milquetoast peers (”I would’ve made you cry enough tears to last two to three years.”) He’s never been good enough to outright save this show, but he’s been regularly entertaining enough that I always look forward to him showing up on screen again. But man, I just can’t get invested with the direction Skip Beat decided to take him at the last moment. Maybe in the manga, his journey to experience love for the first time is fleshed out more and carries more weight, but as presented in the anime, it feels like such a nonsensical, unimportant nothing of a crisis. Part of this goes back to my being a stickler for portrayals of acting in fiction; one of the first things you learn as an actor is how to substitute for feelings and situations you haven’t experienced firsthand. Never been in love when you felt you shouldn’t be? Okay, but I’m sure you’ve wanted things in the past despite thinking you’re not supposed to have them. You’re taught to draw from your entire life experience to find feelings that connect you to the characters you’re playing, no matter how incidental. And I have serious trouble believing that Ren never once had a desire he wanted to suppress. Even something as simple as wanting cookies before dinner as a kid could work; heighten that emotion enough, and you’ve got yourself a solid enough starting point.

But that’s not the real problem going on here. The real issue is that Skip Beat is playing into the idea that Ren just hasn’t experienced love at all, and thus has no frame of reference for how to recognize it. And that just makes no sense to me. People are exposed to the idea of love on a near-constant basis; we’re taught by fiction, media, and society what it’s supposed to look and feel like. We’re often taught wrong, but we still are taught. As a result, even a dumb, socially stunted Aspie like me could very easily tell when my feelings for a particular girl in my life were intense and embarrassing enough to warrant being called a crush. And I know for a fact Japan isn’t that much different with how it glorifies romance as a concept; hell, a big part of the reason I love anime so much is that it’s so good at glorifying romance. So how does Ren, someone who’s been marinating in that same showbiz culture for at least a couple years, not have any frame of reference for what love feels like, to the point where he doesn’t even recognize that feeling perked up and revitalized when he sees someone might constitute love? I get Skip Beat’s trying to play into the fairytale romance aspect of the thing, where the emotionally distant prince has his heart awakened by true love’s arrival in his life, but the way Ren’s been written doesn’t suggest that he’s really that emotionally distant (nor that he’d take a major setback by sinking into a drunken stupor, for that matter; what a weird moment). This isn’t like Sawako in Kimi ni Todoke, who’s been so emotionally stunted that it makes sense how she has trouble recognizing emotions that come to other people easily. Ren just doesn’t read to me as being troubled in the same way, which makes it weird when the show tries to convince me that he is.

And I think that’s a microcosm of my problems with the show as a whole. Skip Beat awkwardly straddles the line between wanting to tear away the cheap facades and gimmicks of shojo romance while still wanting to play into the juvenile fantasy it entails, and the end result is a compromised, aggravating product too fake to be recognizably realistic and too dull to be entertainingly fake. What a colossal waste.

Odds and Ends

-”Fillet me, grill me, then cut me into thirds and serve me!” rofl

-”Don’t worry, that’s her hobby.” Can Ren just, like, be every character in this show?

-So, how old is Sho, exactly? Because I’m still super weirded out by his affair with his manager.

-Pictured: Sho not taking the news well at all.

-I forgot Kyoko was still doing the chicken gig.

-Credit where it’s due, that was a quality Strauss drop there.

-What even are those Lenny faces istg Yashiro

-Running away from your feelings like

And that’s another show done! Expect my series reflection later tonight, as well as what show will take its place!

[its-just-like-the-movies]

Tom & Viv (94, C+)

Why this film: Because it lined up so perfectly with this month’s Smackdown! So how could I not?

The Film: Who exactly was the predicted audience for Tom & Viv back in 1994? I don’t mean this exclusively as a dig on the source material or the finished product, but it’s hard to picture that the story of T.S. Eliot’s tumultuous marriage would’ve inspired that much fervor back in the day. The adaptation of the original play began nine years after it debuted on the West End, receiving one Laurence Olivier nomination before getting an off-Broadway run and vanishing from the stage for over twenty years. This lack of fanfare seems even more exasperated by its legacy nowadays, if it can be called that, saved from obscurity by way of two surprisingly high-profile Academy Award nominations that would still only attract those who’re deeply invested in either of the nominated women, Oscar completists who are doing it just cuz, folks who like watching period dramas about unstable women, or T.S. Eliot fans.

Of those groups, I’d imagine that the Eliot fans interested in a portrait of the artist would be the most consistently underwhelmed by the film, if only because his work is kept strictly in the film’s periphery. It’s talked about but rarely read aloud or shown, the focus on the Eliot’s marriage so predominant that his rising success and the income that comes with it is dramatized through their material wealth more that it is explicitly referenced, at least not to the degree of any of their personal lives. In fact, Eliot’s personal life and family ties don’t seem to exist outside of Viv until his fames grows, while Viv’s relationships to her family is one of the film’s central points of tension. The repercussions of Eliot’s fame are certainly discussed, as Viv worries that Tom is replacing her with his new poet friends and having affairs with  women in those circles who’re dazzled by his work. There’s also the complication that Viv frequently claims to be his muse, his editor, and his sounding board, demanding credit for having given The Wasteland its name. This is not a hagiography of the artist, but the film’s focus on Eliot’s marriage and interest in Viv’s artistic credentials might keep this from being the deep plumbing of the artist someone might be hunting for.

Then again, an even bigger preclusion for Eliot fans to get into the film is how unfathomably dull Willem Dafoe is in the part. Any potential into getting a portrait of the man alongside or even superseding a portrait of the artist is stopped in its tracks by Dafoe’s soft-spoken, milquetoast take on the part. The man simply comes off as boring and stuffy, never worthy of the intrigue posed by Viv, his fellow poets, adoring fans, or anyone who presumes him to be a worthwhile figure. Dafoe is so passionless in the part, speaking his lines as softly as possible while infusing them with zero emotion, refusing to cling to any sense of intellect or to make his accent sound remotely natural, that there’s simply no believing that he might be having an affair with any of the women Viv is terrified of and antagonistic towards. What on earth could have drawn Viv to him in the first place?

Dafoe’s performance represents one half of the dichotomy of problems that best defines what makes Tom & Viv such a palpably uneven experience. If he stands in for the moments where the film could easily shape itself up more, Miranda Richardson’s energized but dangerously overmannered take on Vivienne Eliot emblematizes the film’s worst indulgences into overstatement. Richardson is more than capable of conjuring an air of instability and roiling inner turmoil, writing our her character’s thoughts through the darting glances of her eyes and jittery movements, but her madness becomes so prescriptive that it loses almost all spontaneity. In her best moments, which see her being more clearly guided by the director or by her costars, Richardson is able to temper herself slightly without sacrificing her tics, though it’s clear in these moments how little modulation is actually in the performance, aside from the moments where she makes a point of showing us that she’s modulating the performance in a lower tempo. True, she genuinely calms down in the film’s last act, but her impact before this point is ultimately limited, her scene-by-scene choices too obvious for them to build in any interesting way.

The film itself seems to follow a trajectory from being too hopped-up on its own, sporadically ostentatious filmmaking techniques all the way to almost dangerously non-cinematic, not so much a filmed play as just unimaginatively put together. This is not to say that the film is ever a showcase for its makers - director Brian Gilbert seems more than happy to slap his actors in period wares and let them carry the picture - but it’s still noticeable when the editing or the score become the primary method for the film to goose our responses. Its earliest scenes are by far the worst, as the almost 40 year old Dafoe is so heavily made up to impersonate a college-aged youth that his face loses any and all distinguishing features. He looks like a doll whose face has had any gendered characteristics smoothed away, as if he were an uncanny valley animation of an androgynous doll. Richardson’s makeup is fine, but she’s forced to pantomime the free-spirited behavior of a young person by running around with her arms outstretched as though she were a plane, galavanting on a lawn with a sign asking passerby not to galavant on it. In the next scene they meet, and in the next they pack their bags to get married. These scenes are relatively calm, something the film compensates for by showing Viv undergoing an abject breakdown, destroying their hotel room and taking a lot of her prescribed medication after an unsuccessful roll in the honeymoon sack, dramatically cross-cut with Tom’s furrowed brow contemplatively paces the shoreline of a beach.

If the establishing third of Tom & Viv is ultimately its shakiest segment, there’s something to be said for the film’s middle third, as all the pieces start sparking against each other in unexpectedly bracing ways. Even if Dafoe is unforgivably bland and Richardson semi-predictable in her brazenness, the shifting textures of their relationship are more interesting to watch play out than expected. It helps that Brian Gilbert’s direction finds an appropriately undemonstrative but still semi-active mode of shaping his story. Neither truly imaginative nor fully perfunctory, he finds the right distance from Richardson’s whirlwinds that they become more impactful as character beats rather than harried actressing. Watching her mix a boiling vat of chocolate, grow more and more vocally irate at a dinner party, draw on a mannequin with lipstick, all these actions are more compelling for how they’re shot. Simple and effective, enhancing Richardson’s work and feeding into the story with unexpected poignancy as we start to grasp how threatened Vivienne must constantly feel by these invaders who can provide something for her husband she cannot, knowing all the while that they know it too and are talking about it behind her back. This is not to suggest too much of a sudden transformation in the film’s overall style or impact - Dafoe is still left to softly murmur on in his scenes, and the cadres of artists and admirers that pop up around him are never as distinct or entrancing as they might be. Especially as he starts to seriously consider kicking Viv in a sanitarium, growing increasingly weary of her behavior, Dafoe’s performance remains as damp and demure as ever. Her fears of adultery never ring as plausible, Dafoe even drags down Richardson and the script with as little effort as possible on his part. A hot-blooded Tom might’ve really tapped in to the script’s dramatic potential, but the sight of Viv fighting so hard against people who could all have a legitimate claim to her husband’s attention, borne from paranoia that doesn’t seem borne from absolutely nothing is frankly more compelling than it has any right to be. There’s clearly a version of this story about an unreliable man sending his unreliable wife to a sanitarium on dubious grounds, one stifled by a weak leading man and half-baked direction but still able to burst through the interpretation we’re getting at odd, unexpected angles.

There is at least one unabashed bright spot in the film, in the form of Rosemary Harris’s subtly affecting performance as the matriarch of the Haigh-Wood clan. Without ever working to undermine Tom & Viv’s leading actors, she nevertheless coaxes stronger, more consistent performances from Dafoe and especially Richardson, stabilizing the latter without forgoing Mrs. Haigh-Wood’s own characterization. The film is at its best when it follows the lead of her perfectly contained but still very palpable anxiety, and is never better than in the uncomfortable sequence of Tom having dinner with Vivienne’s immediate family for the first time. Viv spends most of the meal asking provocative, blatantly upsetting questions of her loved ones. Her family telegraph exhaustion at having had this kind of dinner table conversation too many times already but still irritated by her behavior, before Rose takes her daughter aside and gets her to actually calm down, only for her lucid confession about her feelings for Tom to startle her poor mother. It takes real intelligence to project a stable grasp of her daughter’s neuroses, worrying about her future with this new man while still finding room to be elated and disappointed by both of them without overacting. Particularly in her last scenes, hurt and confused after realizing that Viv tried to stab her - even if it was with a fake knife - but perhaps even more wounded that Tom packing Vivvie off to an asylum has proven how badly this man has failed Rose and her daughter, Harris proves herself an unfussy and emotionally sincere performer within a film less stable than its central marriage.

Harris is more of a face in the crowd in her second-to-last sequence, as one of several family members and doctors present for a verbal test to see if Vivienne is certifiable for sanitarium care. This is surprisingly the film’s weakest stretch, beginning with Tom trying to warn Viv before the doctors arrive as the two engage in unexpectedly romantic talk about the state of their relationship. Here, Richardson is the primary source of that romance, which comes across as sentimental and unearned considering that Viv is suddenly without her livewire physicality and higher pitched emotions. Now she speaks in a soft voice, speaks warmly, but she undermines any of the film’s complications by stating its theses in such a loving way. She’s not wrong to judge Tom for his own lies and put-ons and for not being able to face the music the way she wanted him to, but the fact that the Viv who’s saying this is so radically unlike the Viv we’ve spent the previous hour with undermines these ideas. And yet, her affectations return in an oddly performative key once the doctors arrive, as if she’s a deer caught in headlights and trying to hurl herself at them as the last defense mechanism she has left. That they even bother with the test instead of carting her right off after Viv attempts to stab her mother with a rubber knife is pretty bizarre in itself, but Richardson’s playing strips the scene of any dramatic potential or ambiguity as she intentionally answers one of the questions incorrectly. More than that, the filmmaking is complicit in romanticizing her last act of self-sabotage, as the score swells under close ups of Tom and Viv exchanging meaningful glances before she gives the wrong answer, the scene abruptly ending as if the test actually ended on the second question.

I said earlier that the film transitions from Viv-like over-enthusiasm to Tom-ish stultification, and though the scene above certainly fits that bill, a better description for the last third might be that they simply have no other function except as being the end to a story. Both partners, gracefully made up into middle age, speak of their devotion to each other despite the fact that Tom has not visited his wife or made any attempt to contact her at the sanitarium in ten years. Dafoe’s last scene is almost completely carried by the overwhelming, piano-heavy score as he gives the cold shoulder to an old friend Viv once said wanted to sleep with her. Meanwhile, Richardson finds the right tempo between containing the energy that’s defined her performance for most of the film while suggesting some genuine recovery over the past ten years. She’s relaxed and unsentimental in her final scene, giving a fond yet forceful line reading to “Chin up.”, as her brother tries not to cry, that’s more impactful than a line so blatantly structured as a farewell forever aimed at the heartstrings has a right to be. There’s little here that’s interesting in the way that the preceding half hour was, and Gilbert ranking the volume on that orchestra as the credits roll certified that I was far less moved than he was clearly expecting. If Tom & Viv ends as unevenly as it began, I’m not sure if what painfully doesn’t work is enough to dismiss the moments where it comes to some kind of bracing life. In the moments where Harris shows the pain of a mother watching her child implode, where Richardson’s neuroses click into place and the script’s darker subtexts are able to be furnished show the rich potential that this story ultimately has. Tom & Viv isn’t crying out for any retreads, and I’m not sure how much this story deserves to be saved from the unusual legacy of almost complete anonymity that only pedigreed English adaptations of biographies of poets resulting in two high-profile Oscar nominations can truly earn. But it’s not without its merits, and something this uneven has the kind of quiet but sturdy highs that can stand against its more visible and ungainly lows.