Recent Watching: On the Rocks and Flannery

 

In the last few days I have watched two very good movies on my television. 

The first movie, On the Rocks, is available through a subscription to Apple TV+ -- something that seems to come for free if you have bought an apple device recently.

Richard Brody, one of the film critics at the New Yorker, liked the movie very much. He wrote a longer review of the movie, but here is a shorter review he wrote in the same magazine.

Sofia Coppola’s new film displays less style than her other features, but its relative plainness is key to its substance: its gimlet gaze at the conveniences of wealth and the prerogatives of privilege. A New York writer named Laura (Rashida Jones), who lives in a lavish SoHo loft with her husband, Dean (Marlon Wayans), a tech entrepreneur, and their two young daughters, suspects that he’s cheating on her—a subject to which she’s especially sensitive because her own father, Felix (Bill Murray), a rich and grandiose art dealer, left her mother (Alva Chinn) for another woman. Getting wind of Laura’s suspicions, Felix breezes into town and, with dashingly romantic and acerbically witty flamboyance, lures Laura into a whirlwind adventure of espionage. Amid her marital strife and her creative frustrations, Laura must confront the substance of Felix’s style—the attitudes and assumptions of which his old-school charm and commanding manner reek. The movie’s movingly confessional, even penitent look at private and public abuses of power is a glance askance at Hollywood mythologies, too.

Brody also wrote an article about the movies released in 2020 that he thought deserved to be nominated for Oscars. Brody thinks Murray's acting was quite good. As he says,

Bill Murray never gets far from himself in any of his roles (and why should he?), but the very subject of “On the Rocks” is his screen persona, and his exuberant performance nonetheless stands apart from it with an infinitesimal yet critical distance.

I do agree that Murray's performance in the movie is quite remarkable. I was impressed by Murray's moments of quiet silence in the movie after he is asked to reflect on his flaws as a husband and father. As I said, I think Murray is great in On the Rocks.

Brody sees the movie as some sort of commentary on class and privilege as well as some sort of commentary on the myth of Hollywood. Maybe. Personally, I enjoyed the detective story element to the movie and how it twists the resolution of that mystery from what you might be expecting to something entirely different.

Moving on from On the Rocks, I would like to talk about the second movie I saw, Flannery. The movie is now showing on PBS as part of their American Masters series. And it is also timed to be a part of Women's History Month. The movie is a deep dive into the work of the still enigmatic -- nearly sixty years after her death -- writer Flannery O'Connor.

PBS summarizes the film on their website:

The first feature-length documentary with full access to the Flannery O’Connor trust, Flannery explores the life and legacy of the literary icon with never-before-seen archival footage, original animations, O’Connor’s newly discovered personal letters and excerpts from her stories read by actress Mary Steenburgen. Featuring new, original interviews with Mary Karr, Hilton Als, Alice Walker, Tobias Wolff, Tommy Lee Jones, Alice McDermott and others, alongside archival interviews of friends and family.

A devout Catholic who collected peacocks and walked with crutches due to lupus, O’Connor’s illness, religion and experience as a Southerner informed her provocative, sharply aware stories about outsiders, prophets and sinners seeking truth and redemption. With her distinctive Southern Gothic writing style and characteristic wit and irony, the film investigates how O’Connor didn’t shy away from examining timely themes of racism, religion, socioeconomic disparity and more. Over the course of her short but prolific writing career, she published two novels, 32 short stories, numerous columns and commentaries, and won many awards, including the National Book Award and three O. Henry Awards, the annual award given to short stories of exceptional merit.

 

As I expected, watching the movie gave me a burning desire to go and read some of O'Connor's stories. So, I have gotten a copy of A Good Man Is Hard to Find and plan to read a few of the stories this afternoon.