At the end of every month of 2021, I’m going to be posting five of my best reviews from my Letterboxd here. In January, my girlfriend and I watched a ton of directorial debuts, celebrating the first month of the year with our favorite filmmakers’ first films. The first three short pieces here are for three of the my favorite debuts.
This is My Life
Nora Ephron’s shockingly undervalued directorial debut follows a single mother in pursuit of stand-up comedy stardom, and her career’s impact on her two young daughters. Many of the filmmaker’s best movies reflect the power of words, and This is My Life is the Ephron movie that best explores the relational consequences of her signature quick wit. Throughout her career, the filmmaker consistently creates charming, chattery characters who constantly deliver perfectly poetic dialogue, full of humor and poignance. Here, Ephron confronts the interpersonal strain of a sharp tongue — if every character can perfectly articulate their rage, fear, and distress into brilliant one-liners, how can those characters tolerate one another, let alone build a loving relationship?
Even though the director didn’t have daughters, her debut still feels deeply personal. The matriarch of the film utilizes her Ephronic mastery over the English language to build a comedy career — like the screenwriter, the character makes her living by finding the humor from her everyday life and channeling it into an art form. Her public weaponization of private family anecdotes turns her kids against her, creating magnificent tension between the desperation of a working mom and the heightened emotional drama of her adolescent daughters.
Julie Kavner is perfect as Dottie Ingels, and Samantha Mathis nicely embodies the youthful angst of her older daughter. The indisputable MVP, however, is ten-year-old Gaby Hoffmann as the youngest member of the family — she’s hilarious, sweet, and feels natural despite her overwritten part.
Ephron doesn’t knock every dramatic beat out of the park, but every scene of this movie is incredibly funny, thanks to the cleverness of the dialogue and the electric chemistry of the actors. It’s a pretty great coming-of-age comedy and an equally great family drama, and if you like any of Nora Ephron’s other work, I highly recommend giving this one a spin.
Bottle Rocket
There’s an odd feeling that I miss deeply nine months into quarantine: a feeling that isn’t even a good one in the moment, but makes for a great story after it’s over. It’s the strange vibe when a distant acquaintance tells you about their preposterously unlikely future plans at a party and you just nod along, confidently assuming it will never happen. Wes Anderson distills that feeling and creates an entire movie about it, wondering what would happen if somebody actually followed through with every absurd idea that came into their head.
In his unsurprisingly snappy debut, Anderson immediately proves his ability to bring together a peculiar cast of memorable characters with fantastic style. Bottle Rocket is an ode to arrogant, youthful stupidity in which practically every character bites off far more than they can chew but refuses to accept their failure. Why not pull a heist, or go for the girl, or steal a car? Anderson’s characters don’t seem to find their lack of success (or even experience) in these fields as inhibitors to their repeated attempts.
In later films, Anderson precisely crafts entire worlds that could only exist within his films and populates them with fitting people; here, he puts particularly eccentric personalities into a more realistic world, instead allowing their personal illusions of grandeur (or even mere competence) to create their own personal fantasy versions of reality. Luke and Owen Wilson both flawlessly sell their respective alternate realities with immense clarity, and top-notch editing heightens their sense of constant mania that makes even the film’s quietest moments feel exhilarating. All in all, it’s a great first effort from a magnificent American artist and his talented collaborators.
Who’s That Knocking at My Door?
Martin Scorsese’s debut feature opens with a warm, comforting image: an Italian woman, played by the director’s mother preparing a meal for her family, surrounded by religious paraphernalia and smiling kids. It’s an understated way to open a movie about youthful angst, and a beautiful choice for a first-time director to kickstart his career — the sequence gently establishes the Italian-American context that’s so integral to the movie and its characters while also paying tribute to the upbringing that made the filmmaker’s career possible. The next scene shows a group of young men kicking the crap out of another young man, with a pop song replacing the violent sounds of the altercation.
These first two sequences quickly set the table for both the remainder of the film and the stylistic and thematic inclinations that define its director’s career — the intersections of faith, friendship, and family that contribute to unhealthy masculinity, as seen with a distinct sense of dark humor and particular pop culture literacy.
The rest of the movie doesn’t quite live up to the strength of the opening. It’s technically dazzling, with wild editing from Thelma Schoonmaker and marvelous camerawork from Richard Coll and Michael Wadleigh, but narratively and thematically loose. Harvey Keitel plays a confused young guy with a love for movies and a severely underdeveloped view of women, almost certainly based on Scorsese himself. Aside from a well-crafted but misplaced sex montage (as mandated by distributors), the protagonist’s various experiences all feel very genuine but disconnected from one another.
As a result, the project essentially exists as a collection of individually well-made scenes that never quite come together with much narrative or thematic cohesion — a strong stylistic introduction to an all-time great filmmaker whose storytelling ability grew exponentially after his debut.
Other intriguing debuts I watched in January: Steven Spielberg’s Duel, Alfonso Cuarón’s Sólo con tu pareja, Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Bong Joon-ho’s Barking Dogs Never Bite, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, George Lucas’ THX-1138, Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire, Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Albert Brooks’ Real Life, Taika Waititi’s Two Cars, One Night, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Dirk Diggler Story, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Doña Lupe.
I’ve also been moving through my watchlist chronologically, which brought me to one of the best and one of the worst movies from 1931. See if you can figure out which is which from my tone.
City Lights
While not my favorite work from Chaplin, nor his funniest feature (a title that I believe belongs to The Circus), nor his most impressive project as a director (The Gold Rush), nor even his most emotional (The Kid), City Lights deserves recognition as the most fundamental Charlie Chaplin movie because it so perfectly reflects the essence of the Tramp. Like the character, it’s good-natured but fully aware of the world’s bleakness, precise in its clumsiness and constantly lovable.
Chaplin utilizes the Tramp to his greatest effect yet by building an entire movie around his class-status tug-of-war. The character has always resonated humorously and emotionally because he’s a dejected person on the fringes of society who carries himself as one of its most respectable elites. Here, the wealthiest character recognizes the Tramp as poor, and unintentionally teases him by dangling riches and status in front of his face with drunken volatility. Meanwhile, the poorest character perceives him as her wealthy savior, further pressuring him to attain the position she presumes he already has. No prior story had suited the Tramp better than this one because City Lights gives unparalleled narrative and thematic priority to the social-status conflict at his core. Yet the ultimate trick of the Tramp is that he’s so well-realized and accessible that he transcends social systems and whatever labels we throw at him — the character operates on a different plane of reality than the rest of the players in his movies, which makes him endearing and resonant across time, space, and class.
The film strikes a fascinating tonal balance: it’s romantic but never romanticizing. The Tramp embodies sacrificial love for the people around him, yet his motives still seem somewhat selfish in their ultimate endgame. And although the film thrives off of the power of sweeping romantic gestures, it recognizes their limitations, showing that they frequently fail, and sometimes leave the gesturer worse off when they succeed. I don’t know if this is the best Chaplin film, but it’s the most Chaplin film.
Cimarron
A dreadful cinematic manifestation of manifest destiny, Cimarron tells the story of the United States frontier through the journey of a mythical American couple. The central figure, Yancey Cravat, excels at literally everything that he tries — over the course of the film’s forty-odd years, he serves as a settler, a newspaper editor, a gunslinger, a preacher, a lawyer, and a political activist. Domesticity proves to be his only weakness, as no moment of tranquil security at home can tame his restless American spirit — he must keep pushing his glorious country toward new endeavors.
His wife Sabra hails from a deeply racist family, whom she rebels against by joining her husband on the frontier. This act of defiance ultimately does her character little good, as Yancey quickly abandons her for adventure, and she remains incredibly racist in her words and actions — until she’s elected to Congress, when she publicly praises her once-reviled indigenous daughter-in-law for political capital.
In case you haven’t realized it yet, these characters are absolutely despicable, and their escapades make for atrocious filmmaking. The film actually succeeds at presenting its central couple as incarnations of essential American values — since they’re openly racist, almost exclusively act in their own self-interest, and settle on other people’s land, they do reflect many fundamental tenets of white American culture. The problem is that the film treats their atrocious behavior as acts of admirable heroism, and only presents flaws (like being a bad dad) as the natural consequences of their strengths. Picture a movie like There Will Be Blood where the Daniel Plainview character is unapologetically framed as a hero.
Aside from its moral corruption, this movie also fails to create any meaningful stakes. Yancey is the best at every single task that he tries his hand at, so there’s never an inkling of conflict because we know that he’ll succeed at whatever he’s doing. Its semi-episodic Western structure, wherein the protagonist faces a new “challenge” with a new set of characters and promptly solves it, grows stale and repetitive after about thirty minutes, and then the movie proceeds for another ninety.
In sum, this movie embodies the worst aspects of the Western genre — and the United States in general — by framing prejudice, imperialism, and selfishness as acts of nobility, and creates no sense of conflict or intrigue whatsoever.
