Movie of the Day: The Sky Is Everywhere

My daughter, Marta, and I just watched Josephine Decker's movie The Sky Is Everywhere. It’s a movie about a sister’s death and grief. But it’s also a movie about bright colors, nature (redwoods and crazy flowers), music (clarinet, guitar, and Bach), friendship and love. And floating and flying.

Decker's movie is definitely one that can be safely watched with a teenage girl. There are no scenes of violence or sexuality that might make you uncomfortable. However, it is very much a picture with a good story and a great sense of visual style.

The movie, as can probably be seen in the poster above, is available on Apple TV+. There are not a large number of movies on the service (fifteen according to my count), but they do have some good ones. Thus far I have seen and enjoyed On the Rocks, Finch, and CODA, as well as They Sky Is Everywhere. I have enjoyed all four of these pictures.

Thus far, I have only seen one other movie from the director, Josephine Decker: Shirley. I found that movie to be quite extraordinary in its blend of fiction and biography. It is quite fascinating how the movie is able to make it difficult to tell what is real and what is not. A bit dizzying, but fun, at least for me. After watching, I found myself reading a biography of Shirley Jackson and two of Jackson's books I was so moved by Decker's picture. I have not seen Madeline's Madeline, but I am curious to. I see that it is playing on Showtime, which I currently subscribe to, so, hopefully, I will see it in the near future. 

But back to The Sky I Everywhere.

Other than through Apple's promotional material, I first heard of this movie from Richard Brody's review in the New Yorker. Allow me to end this post by quoting the last two paragraphs of his mostly positive review.

Decker is one of the great choreographic filmmakers, and a fantasy dance sequence set on the streets of the town—Lennie’s imaginary view of Bailey’s lyrical presence and magical power—blends freely fluid motion with vigorously patterned dancing. The scene combines Bailey’s (and her many friends’) joy of movement with Lennie’s joy of observing them in motion, until it jolts Lennie back to bitter reality with a no less refined aesthetic twist. Decker’s uncommon vision of familiar events—her swooping camera, seemingly on a drone or a crane, that flies through the air to get to Lennie playing clarinet at her window; the whirling camera beneath the sunlit canopy of redwood branches—amps up its power by way of wild fantasies. A scene that’s dramatically treacly, in which Lennie and Joe lie together in the grass and listen to Bach through headphones, explodes with a primal fantasy of green-armed earth spirits who adorn the young lovers with flowers. A scene in which Lennie flees to be alone with her grief, explained in her torrential voice-over, is all the more intense and disturbing for the incongruity of its juxtapositions—heavy furniture drops and crashes all around her as her stride shifts to a flat-out run, and she saves herself by diving through a doorway of sun and sky.

“The Sky Is Everywhere” is a movie of inner vision, of fantasy and symbol, that coexists with the drama even when it doesn’t quite coalesce with it. Along with the inherent inhibitions of a commercial production come the equipment and the crew and the work time that make possible the movie’s more elaborate scenes of meticulously conceived and executed astonishment. Such moments flourish and flaunt the possibilities that open up for a director who approaches the toolbox of a decently budgeted production as a toy chest. They stand as a reproach to the directors of even more lavishly financed productions who, whether working overtly in fantasy or failing to find the element of fantasy in their realism, don’t even attempt the daring and dazzling inspirations that abound in Decker’s cinematic universe.