In Which We Disseminate The Smell Of Shia LaBoeuf

Put American Before a Word And It's A Movie

by ETHAN PETERSON

American Honey
dir. Andrea Arnold
95 minutes

American Honey begins with Star (Sasha Lane) foraging in a dumpster with two young children she is monitoring for unknown reasons. They find what looks like a whole chicken. When expired and turning, chicken retains a most loathsome smell, like the dung of the living animal the corpse semiotically represents. If it ever occurred to you to consider what Shia LaBoeuf smells like, wonder no longer.

After he had spent some time in America, Alexis de Tocqueville reached a lot of important conclusions about what a more equal society meant for art, politics and nationalism. "When I arrive in a country where I find some of the finest productions of the arts, I learn from this fact nothing of the social condition or of the political constitution of the country," de Tocqueville wrote. "But if I perceive that the productions of the arts are generally of an inferior quality, very abundant and very cheap, I am convinced that, amongst the people where this occurs, privilege is on the decline, and that ranks are beginning to intermingle, and will soon be confounded together."

Writer-director Andrea Arnold pulled a de Tocqueville and made a survey of the route Star and her sudden boyfriend Jake (LaBoeuf) take in American Honey, from Miami to California. It really feels like she does not exactly respect anything in this film, except for the kind of grudging solidarity young people experience without the presence of adults. Arnold has a gift for casting, and while Lane herself is clearly not experienced enough a performer to pull off this role (Arnold found her on a beach in Florida), the unknowns Arnold surrounds her with give American Honey such a unique feel that at times it approaches the thrill of obscured and secret documentary.

In between these real-seeming sequences is the story of Star herself as she sells magazines door-to-door with the rest of the group. Mostly she encounters misogyny, rape and violence, sometimes she experiences a kindness that is mostly incidental. Arnold is effective at creating teens who actually behave in a realistic manner: not just as miniature adults or larger sized children. Rap music plays a substantial role in the film's soundtrack, and its embrace by a group of mostly white teens is somewhat tone-deaf, and the music overall is substantially disappointing.

LaBoeuf himself at first seems completely engaged with his character. His moments with the group's leader Krystal (Riley Keough, in a breakout role) are particularly nuanced and compelling. At other times he seems frustrated to be playing opposite Lane, who like most untrained actors is only capable of projecting emotion at a surface level. Romance blossoms anyway, although for the many excitements and dramas that take place on this road trip, American Honey is duller than almost any project of its type.

The sex scenes themselves consume a copious amount of time. They are a depressingly tame reminder of Arnold's fakery, and are no more real-seeming than when Bridget Jones makes it with Colin Firth. It seems disappointing and revealing that LaBoeuf's eccentricities are completely contrived. As he once admitted in an interview, he plans out his entire funky look in every aspect. His artistic side is no more legit: LaBoeuf's writing career mostly consisted of rewriting Daniel Clowes comics. (Eventually Clowes' attorney ended this through a cease-and-desist.)

Unfortunately, and not unlike most of Arnold's movies, American Honey is too real to be fake and too fake to be real. Its various views of the American south make the place seem like a disturbed and unfocused wasteland, and the understanding of society itself is limited at best. I don't think that Arnold means to be condescending about what she depicts; she sincerely empathizes with these abandoned teens. But her concern is more overwrought than not – there is nothing wrong with living whatever way you want, and suffering the consequences.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which Rory Gilmore Contemplates A Voyage Into The Known

Yale Was Not A Good Choice

by ETHAN PETERSON

Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life
creators Daniel Palladino and Amy Sherman-Palladino
Netflix

That last season of Gilmore Girls, when Amy Sherman-Palladino was no longer working on the show, was quite depressing. Nothing, however, could be as sad as the condition these women find themselves in when Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life begins. Lorelai was the brightest light in a cute but sometimes grim New England town. Now she looks completely bored by the place she selected to raise her daughter so long ago. Even the most mediocre people seek appropriately-sized challenges for themselves, but Lorelai doesn't want kids, or a new job, or anything more from her boyfriend than to lie next to her as she watches the Hallmark Channel. An inspirational mother and hotelier has given up.

Things are even worse for Rory Gilmore. She has not found one man of any persistent intelligence. It is far more believable that Rory would be stuck in an endless loop, given that the only male figure she had to look up to during her childhood was barely ever there at all. Her relationships with men conform to the only way of interacting she knows: babbling endlessly to her mother. Some men like a woman who talks a lot, but most do not like to be talked to like the girl's mother.

Rory's Yale boyfriend Logan was always a problematic and underwritten character. His wealthy father made a point of putting Rory down, and she weirdly accepted this determination. Somehow, it seemed to enhance her view of the man's son. Logan lives in London, and when Rory is there she stays in his apartment. He promises not to discuss the other women he is schtupping, and she is cautious about prying too much in his drawers and closets. When we learn he is not really serious about Rory, it is expected and reflects even more poorly on her judgment.

Emily, the girls' mother and grandmother, is the only one who time has altered at all. The role played by Edward Herrmann of Lorelai's awful, distant father was one of the best characters on the show. It seems strange to eulogize his passing given that he was pretty much a monster to Lorelai and nothing like the loving father he should have been. We witness a long funeral scene with sweeping music, and various other lawyers talking about what an irreverent piece of shit Richard was. In the wake of the death, Emily lives in a massive house with an entire Portuguese family who has presumed on her grief.

Minority characters are always completely subservient to the white ones in Palladino-Sherman's writing, and Rory's friend Lane never got half the scenes she deserved during the run of the original show. She has had two children with her husband, but we never even get to learn the names of the boys or speculate on the kind of relationship Rory might have with them. Kids have changed everyone I know, but they don't seem to alter Lane or Rory's other friend Paris, who ironically runs a fertility clinic.

Everyone on Gilmore Girls look none the worse for wear, unless you probe deeper. Lauren Graham in particular is still a vibrant and beautiful woman; even though Luke still has a certain mercurial charm, it feels like she has not completely found the right man. Alexis Bledel enters middle age even more self-possessed; it seems a mystery that she cannot find a man who complements her. They really should have cast her real life husband on this joint, and maybe they still will.

One running joke has Rory ignoring a boy with no self-respect, who believes he is dating her and getting to know her family, named Paul. It is cruel in the way that jokes on Gilmore Girls always were. One character would make fun of another, and this seemingly offhand jibe would represent some deeper unhappiness, and the immensity of the problem would balloon when you least expected it. Sherman-Palladino excelled at writing scenes like this, which ostensibly started as one thing but because something completely different through the flow of his signature patter.

We are supposed to believe that Rory has seen some of the world: the parts that her mother was never able to. At one point, Rory romanticizes a vagabond life, and we realize how much she needs this valuable perspective, a journey that would allow her to see what kind of man she could love who would love her back. Instead by the end of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, she is tied down exactly like her mother. God this show made me want to cry.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which We Regret Every Relationship But One

A Very Good Year

by ETHAN PETERSON

Red Oaks
creators Joe Gangemi and Gregory Jacobs
Amazon

The women in Red Oaks are completely variegated. Their desires are manifold; they have men at their beck and call. How to choose just one man? It is a difficult task, but one they take up with aplomb. Karen (Gage Golightly) falls in love with a creepy photographer who is really into magic after she and David (Craig Roberts) break up. Their wedding takes place late in the second season of Red Oaks, after he makes her give away her cat.

David's mother is a divorcee who dates a lesbian comic but can't take things past second base. One of the great pleasures of Red Oaks is that her son is exactly like her: this accomodating but resolute person who takes other people's wishes into account — just below her own. Jennifer Grey still looks fantastic, and her scenes are filled with an elegant authenticity. Her ex-husband (Richard Kind) is completely miserable now that he is alone, although he was not exactly super-enthused by married life either.

At the end of the 1980s, everything else is great. 1986 was such a special year. The men in Red Oaks do not seem to realize this. They are constantly unhappy — they feel they are not getting enough from the women in their lives, that these women are not overly committed to them, or at least not as much as they should be. 

One night Misty (Alexandra Turshen) realizes she wants to be with a Jewish guy. As soon as Wheeler (Oliver Cooper) finds out that the woman of his dreams actually wants to be with him, he makes every excuse not to be with her. He considers going to school upstate to avoid life with a lifeguard.

Craig Roberts was a bit stiff during the first season, but he comes into his own during Red Oaks' Paris episode. His girlfriend Skye (Alexandra Socha) is the most unlikable, most pretentious person in this entire milieu. In his heart, he pretty much loathes her. She constantly abandons him to snort cocaine and paint the worst portraits anyone has ever seen. When they break up, he gives her a movie he made of her smoking in a bed. It is very derivative.

Her mother (Gina Gershon) has some serious difficulty holding her alcohol. She has been married to Paul Reiser for twenty-five years, showing us the real outcome of Mad About You. Reiser is on trial for financial crimes, being prosecuted by a young Rudolph Giuliani. Some of the season's final episodes are directed by Gregg Araki, and they do a fantastic job of widening the frame of Red Oaks. The show is at its most dull when it takes place in the restrictive country club environment it became tired of satirizing. Ultimately the show's creators made the difficult choice — to take this all very, very seriously.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.