In review: 2021
An emergent reality of my annual favorites list is that the category of Film: Drama/Comedy will be a tie.
In 2021, that tie is marked by two titles with animals in them. Michael Sarnoski’s mid-year release, Pig, is precisely the kind of film, that if you described it to me — Nicholas Cage plays a hermit widower chef who re-enters a seamy world of Portland restaurants to hunt for his stolen truffle pig — I’d probably have wished you good luck with all that. However, Pig is a miracle. It is a revelation in its exploration of grief and the power of a career to shape a life — and then the power of choices we make, sustaining or shattering that world. Pig is deeply interested in the holes created when powerful things and people are taken away and destroyed. At the same time, it is quietly steering us toward a moment of clarity when it comes to the power of memory. Cage captures that power in two ways: memory as mercy and the capacity to wield memory as a weapon.
Pig is primarily Cage’s triumph. His willingness to give to the role rather than the audience — no hamming it up in his typical fashion, this time out — fills the frame with his dirty, bloodied, blasted visage and his gargling-gravel slow burn rage. The film is also its director’s triumph in getting a version of the actor onto the screen that simmers but never comes to the splattering boil that unbalances and unravels so much of Cage’s character work.
The other film is The Power of the Dog, which brings Jane Campion’s vision of a weirded world on the edge of civilization — and of time — to us in the form of another story that I’d object to in advance based on its lead. Benedict Cumberbatch, who, like Cage, has spent his starring-role years trapped in the suit of his affectations, suddenly sheds the outer layers of himselfness and emerges — as he does several times in The Power of the Dog — as something naked, powerful, and vulnerable. Campion’s vision of the West in the early 20th Century is a place of secrets, a place where what we see is unhidden, and yet the import and implications of what is happening to these characters remain lethally invisible. Cumberbatch plays Phil Burbank, a man filled with the lava of his own life, capable of sudden violence and unwavering patience, wrapped in smoke and never clean of the ash with which his past fills the presence.
Orbiting Phil on the edges of the world, somewhere out there in the barren hills of Montana, his brother George and newly arrived sister-in-law Rose — a “suicide widow,” as Phil describes her — are both the keepers and unwanted guests of a house. It is a place haunted by abandoned opportunities, never-abandoned obsessions and at least one act in the past that has blurred the lines between betrayal and self-knowledge. Into the powder keg of the Burbank’s frontier mansion comes the match of Rose’s son Peter, just back from his first year of medical school. Translucent, misleadingly delicate, his sensitivity honed to the edge of a razor in its sharpness, Kodi Smit-McPhee enters into a dark and dangerous dance with Phil. The Power of the Dog follows the arc of their fates across the waning color of a landscape that will contain and reveal each man’s secrets, but by the time they are laid plain on a table — much in the way of Peter’s dissections — it is too late for us, the audience, to do anything but let it all sink in. Campion’s horror story unfolds so carefully that you can almost only see The Power of the Dog for what it is in retrospect. And even then, you can’t be sure that you know what you think you know; that is the director’s final triumph.
*
Secrets and families are also the threads of Sara Polley’s Stories We Tell, which I saw for the first time in 2021, nearly a decade after its release in 2012.
The documentary picks up in the middle of a life, that of its director, a Canadian child star who then bumped against the underside of the Hollywood machine before gliding back to Earth. She takes the lens into her own hands and casts her family as the characters in a plot, not of her own making, but one that she has discovered and cannot leave untold. As her siblings and relatives and friends release the details of the lives of a family in which the very origins of a person slowly come into focus — and into question — Polley’s screen shimmers with frustration, amusement, authenticity and re-creation.
Stories We Tell is a time machine, and we are watching its traveler at first tip-toe and then charge through a past she did not create, seeking to understand which parts of her own story she owns and which parts have been made by others.
*
It should be another tie, but the vessel is built to hold one, and so it’s Live; Live; Live by Jonathan Buckley in 2021. His quiet, slowly building chamber quartet of a novel is about a neighbor, the voices of the dead, a medium who (maybe) can speak with them and the truth of memory and its power over the living.
There’s a haze of wistfulness over everything in Live; Live; Live, and anger and sadness soaking into the fabric of Buckley’s characters. Their histories, their present and the nature of a universe that none of them can see — but that all of them can feel — fold together as young Joshua falls into the orbit of Lucas Judd, an older man who moves into the house next door with a woman very much his junior. As Lucas skims along the edge of a world in which spirits may well communicate to others through him, Joshua presses at the boundaries around Erin — who may be Lucas’s caretaker, lover, student or all three — just as he presses at the edges of his mother’s carefully packaged rage, her anger at times delivered to Joshua’s very local destination. Live; Live; Live manages all these opportunities, each a vector for what would be melodrama in a lesser author’s hands, by making time rather than narrative the dominant power at work in the novel. As time passes, the nature of the secrets and the truths these characters have to tell becomes less critical to the story — less vital to their stories. As criticality falls away, the permeability Joshua seeks emerges from the natural change that time creates in lives. Live; Live; Live is an observation on doing just such a thing, tinged with the existential question to which even Lucas can only offer partial answers — what is this spirit inside of a person, and how does it work?
The other novel, the contender? Zorrie by Laird Hunt.
Luminescent in more ways than one, it traces another character’s journey into the liminal, from a radium watch-face factory to the hardscrabble expanses of the Great Depression and a long life of white-knuckle work and survival. Hunt has captured the essence of the American psyche as Steinbeck first allowed readers to glimpse it — a specifically 20th Century American psyche. This quiet, sad, short and elegant book follows a life across decades, a story marked by soil, toil, and grace notes as well.