Holofcener: Walking and Talking (1996)

The debut film from Nicole Holofcener, Walking and Talking is slight and casual enough to be almost proto-mumblecore – it doesn’t feel like it’s really courting an audience beyond the director’s personal circle of friends, or the actors themselves. What little narrative occurs revolves around a pair of friends, Amelia (Catherine Keener) and Laura (Anne Heche), who find their friendship tested by Laura’s engagement to Frank (Todd Field) and Amelia’s brief affair with Bill (Kevin Corrigan), a video store clerk. In that sense, it fits into a time-worn tradition of insular New York films about relationships, reflecting Holofcener’s production work and apprenticeship on Woody Allen’s comedies of the 80s and early 90s. However, it’s insular in a different way from Allen – a more literal way, since it often feels as if vast segments of the film are missing, or reserved for the actual people who inspired these characters, meaning that what the average audience member gets is closer to neorealism than romantic comedy, a vision of average, middle-class New Yorkers, with average, middle-class anxieties, going about their day in a fairly unremarkable, quotidian way. More than anything else, it suggests that being a single New Yorker, and being compelled to endlessly talk about being a single New Yorker, is boring – and the film’s often strongest when it replaces the ennui of Allen with a franker, more dispersed boredom, the boredom that, sooner or later, drives everyone to the video store, where the most vibrant moments and encounters tend to constellate. In that sense, it perhaps makes most sense as a feminist corrective to Allen, or a feminist counterpart to Tom DiCillo’s indie New York, which was also starting to launch Keener’s career around this time, since, above all, Holofcener’s women are bored with being endless objects of scrutiny and observation, endless epicentres of romantic and conversational minutiae. Perhaps that’s why it often feels like it’s about to leave conversation behind altogether, and just drift into the way Amelia drifts through her surroundings, or drifts in and out of her unspoken, instinctive connection with Laura – a connection that feels more and more lesbian as the film goes on, or at least more and more like a lesbian cult movie in the making, as Heche transitions into denim, and friendship edges into romance.

Eastwood: A Perfect World (1993)

Of all Clint Eastwood’s variations on the road trip film, A Perfect World is probably the most perfectly realised. Set in 1963, it’s about an escaped convict, Butch Haynes (Kevin Costner), who takes 11-year old Phillip Perry (T.J. Lowther) hostage, and travels with him across Texas, where he’s pursued by Texas Ranger Red Garnett (Eastwood) and criminologist Sally Gerber (Laura Dern). For the most part, the film alternates between Butch and Red’s trajectories, as they travel ever deeper into the Texas panhandle – a region, we’re frequently reminded, where roads outnumber people; a vast, sprawling delta of dead ends and unfinished highways. Perhaps that’s why the action disperses, slackens and relaxes as the film progresses – by the time the film ends, both Butch and Red have imperceptibly moved from traversing these highways and byways to inhabiting them, meaning there’s no apprehension in any conventional, procedural sense, just a steady, gradual absorption into the rhythms of the road. That creates quite a timeless, ethereal atmosphere, as Eastwood embroiders and embellishes his taste for ageless Americana more than any of his period excursions to date. In particular, as Butch’s posse gathers more and more accessories and hangers-on – part of what slackens its momentum – it often feels like a revival of the carnivalesque troupe of Bronco Billy, especially since Butch is forced to use one of the Mayor’s electoral vehicles in place of his police car, imbuing his pursuit with all the picaresque merriment of the campaign trail. And, as a road trip back in time, a journey to the nostalgic American heartland, it’s probably the closest Eastwood’s come to Spielberg – in a way, that’s what makes it so different from Honkytonk Man, the closest film in Eastwood’s oeuvre in narrative, pace and period detail. Where Honkytonk Man was earthy, heartfelt, autobiographical – Kyle Eastwood’s debut role – here’s there’s a more fantastic, fantasmatic quality – Phillip’s taken on Halloween Eve – as the road trip takes Butch and Red towards the fathers they never had, and the fathers they never managed to be. All in all, that makes for one of Eastwood’s most mystical, visionary films, a companion piece to White Hunter Black Heart in the way it allows him to meditate on his masculinity and his legacy, and a perfect transition from Unforgiven into the next epoch in his career.

Fassbinder: Despair (1978)

Adapted from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel by Tom Stoppard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s only English film displays a bizarre, surreal mix of influences and styles. A period drama revolving around a Russian exile, Hermann Karlovich (Dirk Bogarde), who sets himself up as a chocolate manufacturer in Weimar Germany, it feels confected more than directed, as Fassbinder crafts a series of pedantically partitioned micro-spaces, minute distinctions in spatial flavour. Most of his mise-en-scenes are compartmentalised to at least four or five subsidiary zones and lit by at least four or five sources and colours of light, which are then reflected and refracted through a kaleidoscopic sea of glass, mirrors and fabric. Even when there is a single source of light, it flickers or oscillates, or the camera circles it too quickly for it to orient or anchor what it’s illuminating, while the camera’s own movements are similarly compartmentalised, as Fassbinder wraps hushed, subliminal zooms in baroque tracking-shots, surrounding those, in turn, with orchestral, circular pans. As a result, there’s such a wealth of internal montage that regular montage and linear editing starts to feel incongruous or irrelevant – the mise-en-scenes are so cluttered that they almost feel superimposed, perhaps explaining why Hermann attempts to escape from this constrictive, cloistered world through a kind of psychological superimposition, dissociating from himself by claiming to have found his double in a local tramp, even though nobody else can really see the resemblance. Most of the film follows this obsession, as Hermann attempts to commune with the tramp in ever more extreme ways, until it feels as if he – and the film – is literally trying to occupy two spaces at once, producing a kind of schizoid space that works well against the rise of Nazi doublethink, but also often feels like a meditation on bisexuality, especially given Bogarde’s history and his character’s fateful, final words. Culminating, in true paranoid gothic fashion, with a murder “that happened but was never committed, a murder where the victim did it,” it’s a stunning example of how melodrama can subliminally shift into science fiction, as Fassbinder mines the Weimar period for all its lost futures, the exact moment before expressionism hardened and migrated into noir. 

Collet-Serra: Non-Stop (2014)

All in all, Non-Stop is probably Liam Neeson’s best film since Taken, or at least the first film to really recapture the same steady, unremitting sense of purpose and conviction. Set on a translatlantic flight from New York to London, it’s about what happens when U.S. Marshall Bill Marks (Liam Neeson) finds his security network breached by a terrorist who threatens to kill one person every twenty minutes unless his demands are met. In many ways, it’s the definitive post-9/11 hijacking film, not just because of a peculiarly ingenious twist, but because it’s clear that this terrorist is no longer invested in the plane as an isolation chamber. Far from trying to cut off or even control communication with the ground, this terrorist is aware that the people on the plane are going to be sharing their experiences on social media, and watching it all unfold in real time on the plane’s television screens. Where earlier hijacking films focused on the terrorist’s efforts to extricate the plane from all networks of communication, here it’s just accepted that the plane’s already fully networked – in fact, it’s a critical part of the plan. Perhaps that’s why the direction’s so consistent and suspenseful – at times, it feels as if Collet-Serra’s trying to evoke the experience of being networked more than anything else, collapsing the limbic tides of social media into the wee small hours of air travel, the long, lonely shift of the air marshall. Certainly, there are are moments of explicit, visceral action, but, until the final showdown, they tend to be quite fleeting, or localised to micro-spaces within the plane, such as the toilet, or the cabin crew quarters. And even when the showdown does occurs, it’s not that carthartic – it doesn’t feel commensurate to the perfectly modulated panic that’s built over the course of the film, the dawning, subliminal awareness that something is not quite right. Part of the power of a film about networking is that it can afford to include great performances in incidental, almost accidental ways – and Julianne Moore makes one of the most understated appearances of her career, as a fellow passenger with a condition that means her heart might give way at any second. She’s determined to live life to the full, even or especially during the hijacking, but her condition also testifies to a general unease and malaise that’s become too dispersed to be assuaged by any single counter-terrorist gesture - the exact terror that drives this brooding, illbient mood piece.

Westfeldt: Friends With Kids (2011)

Friends With Kids was marketed as a kind of sequel to Bridesmaids - it features four of the core cast members (Kristen Wiig, Chris O’Dowd, Jon Hamm and Maya Rudolph) and is also about thirtysomethings navigating marriage, parenthood and middle class life. Those similarities aren’t the whole story though, since all four of these actors are placed quite far in the background, where they form a backdrop for the unusual relationship that develops between Julie Keller (Jennifer Westfeldt) and Adam Fryman (Adam Scott). Julie and Adam have been friends for years, they’re both hitting forty and they both want a kid, so they decide to have a child together, as friends, and to continue living their single lives in the same way they always have. A more conventional film might be about the way Julie and Adam’s friendship devolves into romance, and there are hints of that, especially towards the end, but it’s never clear that that’s what occurs. Instead, most of the film involves them happily raising their child as friends, if unconventional friends, which provokes an extraordinary response from Wiig, O’Down, Hamm and Rudolph, who are pretty much fused into a single chorus. All of them are deeply unhappy with their own marriages, and their rage at Julie and Adam’s happiness – or comparative happiness – expands out into a series of unbelivable diatribes against alternative models of marriage, family and parenthood, with a viciousness that makes Polanski’s Carnage look positively civilised by comparison. At times, it’s hard not to see the film as an allegory of gay marriage and parenthood – after all, Westfeldt’s first film was Kissing Jessica Stein – or at least an effort to show how apparently liberal, open-minded couples can become conservative under the miserable pressure and status anxiety of their own marriages. That makes for quite an unusual tone – too hateful, at times, to really make sense as a consistent comedy, it feels more like an exposure of the drawbridge mentality that so many open-minded romantic comedies really espouse. That’s not to say it’s a parodic gesture either, but that it feels like a work in progress, as Westfeldt takes stock of all the familiar romantic structures and strictures, trying to figure out what to keep and what to leave behind, as we move towards a new kind of family, and a new era of family values.