Christopher Schroeder

Category: reviews

  • Sorry Yet Not

    Sorry, Baby takes its title from a comment at its end by Agnes, its protagonist and a full-time college English instructor who had been sexually assaulted when she was a graduate student at the same institution.

    This movie is organized by chapters as a series of flashbacks interspersed with Agnes’s struggle to overcome the effects of this assault with the help of her grad school friend Lydie and her neighbor Gavin. In it, Agnes is groomed by her professor and assailant Decker, who describes her as brilliant and reschedules their appointment ostensibly as a result of a sick child for a more private conversation in his home.

    Its story seems less about the assault than its aftermath, including her efforts to cope with its effects. The actual incident is more suggested, and is depicted as occurring behind the closed door of her assailant’s house. Moreover, the details, which Agnes reports, are hesitant and even ambiguous, and in her report, involve consent and intent.

    Agnes as a result is sifting through this experience and her reactions, and needs Lydie to interpret it for her. Lydie also helps her for example confront an insensitive ED physician, who says that her bath likely washed away any evidence, and a former fellow grad student and current passive-aggressive colleague Natasha at a dinner with other former students in Natasha’s new home.

    Agnes’s efforts are complicated when Lydie moves to New York City after their graduation although she returns to support her friend. On one visit, Lydie tells Agnes that she is pregnant, and she returns with the baby and her wife Fran, which is where the movie ends, and from where the title comes.

    All three in this scene cannot go to the lighthouse after the baby has a restless night, so Agnes sends her friend and her wife while she babysits for the twenty minutes or so that they’re gone. In this time, she discovers that she can comfort a fussy baby, and tells her that she will always listen to her but cannot protect her from bad experiences, for which she apologizes.

    The film received mostly positive responses from credible critics, and has a 98% aggregated positive rating, but it feels unfinished to me. One possible reason is that it’s the directorial debut of Eva Victor, and Victor also plays the role of Agnes, which could be a second reason. A third might be that it seems semi-autobiographical, which seems plausible especially given my own grad school experiences.

    Whatever the reason, the result is that it stops short of the most challenging content. The obvious central question is one about intent, consent, power, and intimacy — intellectual, emotional, and physical — among adults in such situation, which the movie mostly glosses over as if it doesn’t have anything to explore.

    Such a possibility can be illustrated by the tension between Agnes and Natasha, the passive-agressive colleague who studied in the same program and then stayed after graduation. Natasha tells Agnes that she wanted the full-time teaching position that Agnes received perhaps as a way of purchasing her silence about the assault or at least compensate her for her discretion.

    This confrontation occurs in Agnes’s new office, which was her former assailant’s, and centers upon Natasha’s claim that Agnes took what was rightfully hers. This claim is based in part upon Natasha’s belief that Agnes is insufficiently sympathetic toward those, including Natasha, who encounter more challenges than Agnes does.

    This exchange also includes the revelation that Natasha had sex with Agnes’s assailant in an effort to obtain his attention and other rewards, such as good grades or even a full-time position. That made me wonder whether Natasha is culpable or at least complicity in any way for Agnes’s assault.

    Such a question in no way suggests that her assailant isn’t, or shouldn’t be, liable. He assaulted Agnes assuming her account is accurate, and should be held accountable for that and any other prohibited or otherwise inappropriate actions.

    This dimension could be a moral trap set by the filmmaker, who obviously offers Natasha as a contrast, but it seems more like a missed opportunity. Natasha constantly simmers, and sometimes boils over, whereas Agnes seems unaware of her own anger, and almost needs Lydie to perform it for her. In this resides many possible, and provocative, interpretations.

    Regardless, the movie will remain in my memory as a model for alternative ways to address trauma. Nowhere is this alternative more evident than a conversation near its end between Agnes and Pete, a sandwich shop proprietor.

    Agnes has had a panic attack after her office conversation with Natasha on her drive home, and pulls into a parking lot to recover. Pete gruffly tells her that she cannot park there because his shop is closed but quickly recognizes her symptoms — his son, whom he later explains he doesn’t particularly like, has similar experiences — and helps her breathe through it.

    Agnes and Pete are later sitting in the parking lot after Pete made her a sandwich from his closed shop. As they talk, he shares his opinions of the adjacent business and his adult son. In their exchange, he also affirms her experience and encourages her efforts, and does so without compromising his own perspective.

    This exchange again could be another moral trap insofar that the contrast between her assailant and Pete is obvious. However, I think it affirms Agnes’s awkward attempt to address this trauma in an alternative way.

    Agnes has persisted even after her friend departs after graduation for her own life. She has persevered in the uncertainty of an institutional environment in which administrators perform alliance yet are clearly more concerned about the institution and its previous employees than its former student.

    Others might have exploded in similar situations. Agnes instead searches for support and sustenance around her. She rescues an abandoned kitten for example in addition to accepting a gruff stranger’s kindness.

    And Agnes turns to her awkward neighbor Gavin, who she discovers is also imperfect yet quite human. They have awkward sex in her bed and awkward intimacy in her tub, and yet they persist, which Agnes also does when Lydie later appears with her new wife Fran and their new baby. Fran inappropriately advises Agnes how to babysit, and yet Agnes responds with gentleness and kindness.

    Some might suggest that Agnes is dangerously disconnected from her emotions, but I think she offers another option for responding to such awful moments. Such a response is admirable, and one worth emulating, which makes this movie more than enough.

  • Sensibility and Sense

    She Rides Shotgun was better than expected but ultimately unsatisfying.

    Polly is approached after school by a seeming stranger, who is her biological father, and recently released inmate, Nate. Nate wants to protect her from the gang that has already killed Polly’s mother and step-father, and that is searching for them, by taking her to Mexico. Detective John Park, whom Polly called the news hotline from the hotel where they were hiding, promises to care for her if Nate doesn’t survive his confrontation from the gang leader, whom Nate and John both want.

    This crime-thriller emotional center is clearly the father-daughter relationship. Nate, who has been mostly absent, has returned to protect her, and they have a couple of days to learn about each other. Nate in his role as father teaches Polly to bash knees and brains with an aluminum bat for example and also remembers to grab Polly’s candy bar while robbing a gas station to finance their escape.

    This movie has a 91% positive rating from top critics. Several cite the performances of Taron Egerton as Nate and Ana Sophia Heger as Polly. For instance, the NPR critic describes Egerton as “ripped and terrifying” and Heger as “flat-out terrific.”

    Heger’s performance as Polly while impressive for a kid offers little insight into her motivation. Polly can escape a detective’s squad car, evade armed federal, state, and local officers, avoid any stray bullets, fool and outrun an agitated dog, and cut down her father, who is someone she barely knows, and someone who is shown her more mayhem and murder than most will ever witness.

    Edgerton’s as Nick might be more plausible — a parent could care about preventing his actions from harming his child even if he abandoned her — but still is insufficient. He must vacillate between hardened criminal and loving parent, but the emotional distances as a result of the plot demands are too much for specific scenes and the entire story.

    This movie succumbs to the crime thriller cinematic allure, and repeatedly returns the focus from this relationship to the chase. It might intend to challenge these conventions, or at least humanize this genre, which is intriguing but never realized in this adaptation.

    Perhaps the novel does that better.

  • Wanting and Waiting

    I decided after listening to an actor interview to see The Life of Chuck but left the movie theater frustrated and confused.

    This movie uses reverse chronology to tell Chuck’s life story from losing his parents and unborn sister in a car crash as a young boy and later his grandparents who raised him to his death from a brain tumor before his fortieth birthday. Between these events, he learns to dance first with his grandmother in her kitchen and later in middle school in an after-school club, follows his grandfather’s advice and becomes an accountant, and recalls just before his diagnosis his love of dance, a recollection he later shares in the hospital with his wife as the tumor consumes more and more of his consciousness and ultimately his life.

    I generally agree with other reviewers about the gimmicky structure, the unrealized dread, and the clichéd plot. To these, I would add the central theme seems forced, which makes it ultimately unsatisfying.

    This problem begins with the title, which misrepresents the focus of this film. This movie is less about Chuck and more about how humans should live as its structure suggests.

    The first act, which is the conclusion of Chuck’s life, suggests the end of the world. No one seems to know why it is ending. The second act, in which Chuck remembers his dancing passion, consists of a series of interactions while he is attending an accounting conference first with a street-corner drummer and later a jilted young woman. These three spend several hours performing and later reveling in, and reflecting upon, their spontaneous intimacy.

    The final act, which spans Chuck’s childhood, features a debate about how to live, and what his experiences suggest. Here is when Chuck’s grandfather Albie offers an argument that ultimately conditions so much of Chuck’s life.

    Chuck has already been recognized by his peers and the after-school club teacher as the best male dancer and has agreed to dance with the best female dancer at the upcoming school event. Dance not only allows him to be seen and to connect at school but also connects him to his late grandmother, who would dance with him in her kitchen while she cooked.

    Albie urges Chuck instead to follow his lead, and to have a life of numbers, which according to his grandfather is one of greater honesty and also with artistry. Numbers don’t lie, Albie insists, and yet can be creatively used, which his how he saved others’ businesses and livelihoods.

    The second act — the accountant who remembers his lost artistic self — had already framed this debate as a predictable head-heart conflict. The performances suggest the characters’ infectious joy, yet the setting and the scenario do little to offset its predictability.

    The problem is that it also establishes that Chuck has followed his grandfather’s advice, and that he later in this encounter with the street-corner drummer and the jilted woman, found something missing in his life, something he had lost or hadn’t maintained. His life in other words has been one of objectivity, and predictability, and one without passion or imagination, which is difficult to reconcile with his grandfather’s claim about the superiority of numbers.

    This problem is exacerbated by the realization that the end times from the first part is in fact the end of Chuck’s world, or the subjective, imaginative one he has constructed. Chuck as a child has been told that he is varied and vast — that he contains Whitman’s “multitudes” — but seems to have forgotten at least until that fateful accounting conference day when he meets the drummer and the lover. Or maybe he hasn’t as he has been repeatedly thanked for thirty-nine years, which is obviously the length of his life.

    Albie in other words has claimed that numbers don’t life and can be artfully deployed. That suggests that life as an accountant would be the best of both worlds, and a more reliable one for Chuck Albie adds than a world of dance where earning an income is difficult if not impossible. This more reliable life however has been dissatisfying or at least incomplete, Chuck has realized just before his life with the terminal diagnosis begins its end.

    Neither Albie nor Chuck though can address, not then and not ever, the visions Albie sees in the cupola of his house, which only adds to the inconsistencies and incompleteness. Can Albie foresee the future because his numerical facility enables him to create or at least challenge it or because the cupola, which he claims is haunted, gives him glimpses of it?

    Does Chuck regret his accounting choice? He seems in following his grandfather’s advice to have lost something. Nothing from his nearly four decades has enabled him to add, or at least retain, artistic aspects, or at least enough to prevent him from longing for his past, which includes his finger-waving grandmother who listens to rock and teaches him to dance while pursuing her own cooking passion.

    The movie appears to reject Albie’s, and Chuck’s, choice in the way the world dies as Chuck does. At the same time, it insists near its end that Albie was right, or at least that Albie did use numbers, which don’t lie, in ways that enabled his clients, such as the funeral home family that handles his wake and burial for Chuck, to retain their businesses.

    Maybe the movie means to suggest that life is a mystery. Chuck’s wife after all seems not to object to his marriage-long lie about the scar on his hand, which is a regular reminder to him that he reveled in his middle school suggest alone under the stars. Chuck is, as his wife acknowledges, a person of secrets.

    If so, this secret could be one this movie is keeping from itself. It aspires to a great truth, something about the reconciliation of numbers and images or scientific confirmation and artistic imagination, and in so doing comment on a larger and longer cultural conversation. However, its inconsistencies and oversimplification — the head-heart binary for example — inhibit its efforts to arrive at any insights about math and art or objectivity and subjectivity or intellect and emotion.

    Some certainly have been moved. One I observed was sobbing as the house lights reappeared, which was a reassuring reminder. I just couldn’t find any satisfaction in it for me.