In Which We Feel Ill Yet Considerably More Appealing Than Usual

Completely Organic

by ELEANOR MORROW

The Big Sick
dir. Michael Showalter
124 minutes

At one point, Kumail Nanjiani makes a short speech detailing what he likes about the woman named Emily (Zoe Kazan) he picked up at a comedy club in The Big Sick. (He does not mention that he liked that she was sick, but it is implied.) The things he primarily mentions are that she is in fact a woman, and that she is very fond of birds. When he finds out that she has an infection in her lungs, he has no reaction to it until he sees a graphic tee in her closet and remembers her wearing it. You see, a woman's personality is probably mainly a function of whatever clothing she donned at the time you chose her as your wife.

In other scenes, Kumail is made very upset by a series of Muslim women forced upon him by his mother (Zenobia Shroff). They are all quite lovely people and one even does an amazing magic trick; he never takes the time to get to know any of them. American culture, we may infer, has trained him to select a partner as alike to Zooey Deschanel as one can possibly manage.

In real life, Emily V. Gordon clearly has some talent outside of her passion for water fowl. She hosts a podcast for Christ's sake – do you think Saint Peter would dare look askance at her at the pearly gates? We never learn about that part of Emily except what the alarmingly engaging Zoe Kazan implies non-verbally. Instead we know only that she is a psychology student with very little grasp of basic human psychology. When Emily is placed in a medically induced coma during The Big Sick, part of us is greatly relieved, because watching two people have nothing in common except Whole Foods is not the most thrilling use of two hours.

The Big Sick picks up when Emily's mother Beth (Holly Hunter) and her father Terry (Ray Romano) come on the scene. It is suggested that Beth comes from a deeply anti-Semitic North Carolina family, and that Terry's ability to ignore their various taunts is what endeared him to her. Because Terry recently cheated on her during a work conference, she is very critical of him during The Big Sick. When he tries to tell a joke, she immediately puts down his sense of humor, and she frequently heckles him by shouting "Terry!" but since she is Holly Hunter, I don't think he minded.

Kumail does not have much in the way of an inner life, but he knows he must bond with his girl's mother so that she will forgive him for telling her he wasn't sure they had a future together, which is apparently the most nightmarish thing one person can say to another. His plan is to eat with Beth, and he even sucks down whipped cream from a can. This is bonding across racial lines, I guess, but The Big Sick doesn't try to force any kind of mutual understanding. In Chicago, everyone relates to everyone else on what is basically a surface level.

Some things that Emily and Kumail enjoy doing together are reading. They make out on a couch, and sometimes have sex. Once, one of them takes a shit while the other waits patiently. This is apparently true compatibility? I really don't know, I guess whatever works, but it seems like these two are going to encounter some serious problems down the road given that the euphoria inherent in taking drugs and watching movies with someone else generally wears off by the end of an evening.

I don't know that there was ever really enough in this meet-cute to account for a feature length film. But it is Kumail Nanjiani who carries the entire thing on his shoulders. As he seems to realize, his stand-up comedy is not terribly funny, and The Big Sick makes his true calling abundantly clear – he is an actor, with a natural ability to deliver all kinds of lines in a spare and convincing manner. While Zoe Kazan gamely struggles with the various awkward speeches she has to make at times, Nanjiani takes them at his own pace, showing how explaining and articulating yourself, no matter what the substance of your talk is, remains a moral act.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which We Stare Down Alison Brie In The Past

Perils of Adam

by ELEANOR MORROW

The Little Hours
dir. Jeff Baena
90 minutes

You can tell how much writer-director Jeff Baena loves his girlfriend Aubrey Plaza in the opening moments of The Little Hours. Fernanda is a young witch posing as a nun in 15th century, and as she drags a donkey across a landscape that looks suspiciously un-European, the camera can barely hold its attention off of her. Baena writes his life partner into the most objectionable role, but this is a subtle message also esteemed in the source material of The Decameron: the unlikeliest things are also the holiest.

Plaza looks a lot like Alison Brie since for the most part all we see are their full-lipped, pouting faces and icy eyes. Even with her body obscured, there is something indecent about Alison, and no matter how prim she looks, we realize she will be disrobing at some point in every narrative. In The Little Hours, that comes in the garden of a convent, where she pounces on the mute gardener, Massetto (Dave Franco).

Even thought The Little Hours does not focus at all on the beauty of its female leads, it would be a hard thing to obscure it. Baena not only seems devoted to Brie and Plaza, but this is also the best Molly Shannon, also playing a nun, and John C. Reilly, as the local priest, have looked in years. Baena gives all of his actresses and actors a quiet dignity, except for one. 

Dave Franco was maybe not the best actor to begin with, but he is supposed to be the straight man here and in this role he fails miserably. Attempting not to draw undue attention to Franco's physical form, Baena makes a show of his considerable deficiences. First of all, the man's gargantuan adam's apple slides up and down his throat perilously for the entire film. I don't know what everyone involved might have been able to do about this, but preventing Franco from repeatedly swallowing during his scenes would have been a welcome start.

The Little Hours initially focuses on Alison Brie's desire to leave the convent against the wishes of her father Ilario (Paul Reiser) in order to select a husband, but it is quickly distracted by her embroidery. Reiser never appears in the movie again and Brie never does manage to find a husband. Instead of any plot per se, we receive a series of jokes involving the aggressive nature of Ms. Plaza. Some are funny, like when she assaults the convent's handyman and calls him a Jew. Others are not really as enlivening, since they involve her brandishing a knife repeatedly and saying 'fuck' more times than is really entertaining.

Baena's last directorial effort, Joshy, was a clone of The Big Chill that was very serious and depressing. In contrast, The Little Hours is even less significant or thematically memorable than a Mel Brooks movie. It is at least a great deal funnier, which is not actually saying a lot. It is obvious that the film was made on a considerably tiny budget, and it shows. The Little Hours avoids displaying the local town at all – we just see actors going and returning from the place. Even the props and costumes on this production are third or fourth rate.

Late in the film, Fred Armisen shows up as a bishop. His presence adds a striking focus to the proceedings, as if what we really required to enjoy the bad behavior of these purported adherents to the word of the lord was an antagonist who doubted their sincerity. It is a missed opportunity that he only receives a few scenes, and that they are the most amusing in the entire film reminds us that The Little Hours is about as meaningful as a Portlandia sketch.

I don't know what turned Baena off from making serious cinema instead of something this frivolous. He might taken a page out of the comparative success of The Big Sick and made something that comes a little more directly from his heart. He could make a movie about why Aubrey Plaza is interested him. Does he have a large penis or cooking skills that would otherwise explain why she lives in the house?

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which We Retreat From The Peaks Of Yore

On Ashley Judd Time

by ELEANOR MORROW

Twin Peaks
creators David Lynch & Mark Frost
Showtime

"I can't do this," a man tells a woman in a room they both know. From one corner of the room, possibly under a lamp's base, something indescribable is shaping their words and deeds. Twin Peaks: The Return is a show about the Schrodinger state of indeterminacy: not knowing whether you are alive or dead, whether the things these people – the Midwestern sort with salt in their beards and their minds – are experiencing exist in the true world or another.

In 370 B.C. Xenophon wrote down his story of Cyrus the Younger's invasion of Asia to depose his brother, the great king of Persia. He titled it Anabasis, and thereafter any military expedition from sea inland was also referred to by this term. Similarly, Twin Peaks: The Return begins on the eastern seaboard in a dark New York apartment, about as far from David Lynch's home in Los Angeles as you can get.

At one point, when Winston (Lynch himself), Diane (Laura Dern), Albert (Miguel Ferrer) and Tammy (Chrysta Bell) are flying over South Dakota on their way to Philadelphia, Winston has the plane suddenly reverse direction. They cannot, physically, head towards the coast. That would be like giving up, as lemmings do, on their short and lonely lives.

In a police station where the bloated body of Major Briggs sits, still fresh some thirty years after its presumed expiration date, the pieces begin to come together. You honestly need a scorecard to follow them all, but it all comes back to the day Agent Dale Cooper first heard of the existence of the White and Black Lodge. After that a lot of it is pretty murky, and if you want to figure everything out, you might be here awhile. There are podcasts to explain these connections better than I ever could, but Twin Peaks: The Return is about whether or not you can perceive the existence of a mythology behind your life. The details themselves are largely immaterial; the real evidence of another world is in the present moment, the one you currently inhabit.

What is astonishing about the world Mr. Lynch gives us from moment to moment is that certain things disappear from it completely, replaced by the sense of forboding that overwhelms the self. Gender is not really present, even though sexism is. These particulars are merely small forces exerting themselves on the world, while something larger and more earthly is really taking a tighter grip. In a way a man's wife (Naomi Watts) is a god, as much as anyone.

This democratization of self takes over as Lynch presents a series of people we would not normally identify as protagonists or antagonists. He brings them out of the background of these scenes, giving them their full duration in the sun. Whether it is a series of chuckling local federales or Tim Roth as Evil Cooper's accommodating henchmen, the way these people talk to each other makes us feel like mere observers. The last piece of television that properly managed such an arrangement was The Wire. I like to think of Twin Peaks as The Wire of rural America.

Ashley Judd had this great movie where she played the wife of Bruce Greenwood. Bruce was in a lot of debt, so he faked his own death and made her look like the killer. She served eight years in prison and was released on parole, for murder. The second she got out she went looking for Bruce, and when she found him, he was selling himself at a charity auction in New Orleans. She bid on him and won.

Imagine the world above us, where time moves more slowly than it does here. We could spend, say, twenty years ago in that place but it would feel like only months on Earth. Still, we would age, grey overtaking our temples and armpits, while the real world sped by. That is what it must have been like for Ashley Judd in prison. I hope she never went there, but in my heart I think I know that she did.

With the deliberate pace that Lynch has established with this revival, it seems almost fait accompli that Twin Peaks: The Return is in line for another season after it finishes this run on September 3rd. These episodes have seem so effortless, like poring over a children's picture book. Perhaps Lynch wants to return to other topics, challenge himself with different concepts and forms. This will be a loss for television — but it is not the only medium, only the most malleable one.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan.