Christopher Schroeder

Category: reviews

  • The Kick We Might Need

    The recently released movie If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which is written and directed by Mary Bronstein, might not seem obviously relevant, but it’s worth the effort and the experience.

    A therapist named Linda (Rose Byrne) and her unnamed daughter (Delaney Quinn) who has an eating disorder return to their apartment to find a flood in their bathroom and soon thereafter a hole in a bedroom ceiling. Her husband Charles (Christian Slater) is sailing for two months, so Linda is responsible for coordinating these repairs and resettling her daughter in a nearby hotel without disrupting her treatment while maintaining her own private practice.

    Linda finds support in the hotel manager James (A$AP Rocky) and her own therapist (Conan O’Brien), who is also her supervisor. However, her shortcomings are exposed when Charles unexpectedly returns, so she runs to the beach and rushes into the ocean only to be repelled each time by crashing waves. She is found stretched out on the sand by her daughter, whom she promises that she will do better.

    The lead performance is particularly powerful, and according to Bronstein and Byrne purposely particular, which makes it a puzzle.

    For some, it represents the challenges confronting mothers who are told to lean in and have it all. Such an impression is obvious for example in the scene in which Linda challenges the physician (Bronstein) who is treating her daughter and other mothers’ children in a group session.

    This movie for others might be an account of the ways that men fail women. Such failures can be found for example in Linda’s husband Charles, who continually minimizes the challenges she is confronting, or her supervisor, who does help with a professional crisis but later terminates her therapy with him.

    It could be for still others a story about the ways that women cannot see and support each other. That in addition to the group session scene is also evident in the exchange between Linda and a client named Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), who after abandoning her newborn in Linda’s office later tells her that their recognition isn’t mutual.

    This exchange however suggests a larger link among these possibilities, which is the way that anyone can be unseen even by the people who could, and should, see us. Linda not only cannot see this client or for that matter others, but she also cannot recognize the humanity in the hotel manager James, whom she abandons in her damaged apartment after he fell through the ceiling hole and broke his leg.

    This movie in other words is more a cautionary tale about the ways that we can miss others’ suffering, and in so doing might make it worse. Even the parking lot attendant (Mark Stolzenberg) in his insistence upon the rules is yet one more person who cannot offer compassion to another suffering human.

    Suffering, which might be central to the human experience, is powerfully presented in this movie, which is why it cannot be a comedy even though some think it is. It’s less amusing and more unsettling, and certainly offers no connection or communion at its end.

    That isn’t funny or fun, and can never be, which could very well be why we all might need a kick in the pants.

  • Revolutionary Thinking

    I had been encouraged after a conference session to read Heather Ford’s (2022) Writing the Revolution, and can understand after having done so why this book was recommended.

    Ford in it offers her decade-long digital ethnography of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution Wikipedia entry from its emergence and through its evolution and uses it to challenge conventional ideas about facts in the digital world. To do so, she outlines a framework for facts that includes allies, or those who author or edit Wikipedia content, and companions, or sources that validate and verify these assertions.

    Ford uses these results to challenge conventional Wikipedia principles, such as neutral point of view, verifiability of facts, and prohibitions against primary research. Instead, she argues that facts are contested and change, and as such illustrate the reality that knowledge is not objective but rather situated, especially in a digital world.

    This account systematically examines her observations and consistently supports her claims. Moreover, it establishes context through interviews with central participants, including those who led early efforts to establish this page, and in so doing shaped the narrative around this event, such as whether, and when, to call it a revolution.

    I wanted more synthesis, implications, and even application, especially beyond the Wikipedia world, but I admit that at least the latter wasn’t the ostensible purpose of this book, which is a successful account of academic research. As such, it illustrates a way of bridging the academic and the public, and offers a way of thinking about more relevant research.

    And I found it to be useful in ways I didn’t expect. For me, its engaging style consistently demonstrated a grad school tenet — knowledge as situated — that seemed intuitively true, and yet to have wide-ranging implications, especially for institutionalized practices, which I could never confront.

    I think Ford’s account clearly illustrates an interim step in an effort to transform a grad school stipulation into a useful foundational principle.

  • Nothing Smashing

    Many credible critics liked The Smashing Machine, which I liked more than I expected yet couldn’t recommend.

    This sports biography focuses on several years (1997-2000) in the life of mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr as he confronts professional and personal challenges. These moments were also featured in a 2002 documentary, which seems to have been widely admired.

    I’m a fan of neither sports biographies nor Dwayne Johnson, who nonetheless attempts to go places in his Kerr performance that I’ve not seem him acknowledge in other roles. Johnson claims that this movie, which also changed his life, isn’t a “fight” film but a “life” movie perhaps in part because its subject is still alive, and even makes a cameo appearance in a grocery store at its end.

    Neither Johnson nor his co-start Emily Blunt, who plays Kerr’s girlfriend Dawn Staples, succeeds for similar and different reasons. For Blunt, the issue is less her ability — she makes the most of her role, and attempts to add dimensions but runs out of room in this script. Regardless, the effect limits the appeal of this movie.

    The bigger problem is the lack of a clear purpose. For example, I was curious why Kerr, whom I’d watched struggle with losing, could laugh after having done so in the shower while his friend, and manager / trainer Mark Coleman went on to win the “life-changing amount” of money. Both had mused about the possibility of fighting each other one day, which until this loss seemed inevitable in this tournament.

    The explanation suggested by this movie has something to do with Kerr’s newfound sobriety, including its effects upon his romantic relationship. His addiction had previously forced him to withdraw from a tournament, for which he had apologized, so his sobriety could be both why he can fight again and why he cannot maintain the ferocious professional reputation. Perhaps that also accounts for why he was showering while Coleman was fighting.

    Or maybe the purpose is more recognition for Kerr, who was a MMA pioneer but remained relatively unknown even after the 2002 documentary. The scrolling epilogue informs audiences that Kerr and Staples marry soon thereafter and later have a son — becoming parents is a conflict between them earlier in the movie — and that they were together for fifteen years, which seems life-changing enough.

    I’d guess if pressed that the writer and director Benny Safdie wanted to highlight a forgotten figure whom others could admire. Such a possibility, and parts of the plot, are easier to understand after reading about the previous documentary on which this version is based. Regardless, I think Safide gets bogged down in doing so as a box-office success, and cannot find the proper perspective to do both.

    Perhaps both are ultimately impossible, or at least seem so in this version of a biography of someone who might be admirable nonetheless. By its end, I had no greater interest in this sport, and didn’t learn anything about being human, even as I had been more entertained for a couple of hours than I expected, which at that point seemed enough.