First-Time Views: February 2024

"Marriage has always been an economic proposition."

I’m going to do the list differently this month because I really didn’t watch many movies I hadn’t already seen. I had Covid a couple weeks ago, and when I’m really sick, I can’t handle anything new. Instead, I watched comfort films, and it really threw off my typical schedule. So instead of doing five first-time views and one rewatch, I’m going to flip that around. Hope that’s okay with you.

A few other notes: I have long promised more baseball movie coverage in the run-up to my book’s publication on May 14, and the time has come to finally make good on that promise. Starting next week, I’ll begin counting down my own personal top 50 baseball movies of all time. Are there 50, you might ask? Lord, yes. There are actually more than 50, but I’m not a fan of trashing the hard work of Matt Le Blanc or Freddie Prinze, Jr., so I’m going to stick to the movies that are actually good. 

Also next week, I’ll be publishing exciting new pieces at Decider and Uproxx. Stay tuned to my social media channel—okay, mostly Twitter—to be among the first to read them. I also just published a piece on 1938’s Holiday, which is playing today and most of next week at AFI Silver in Silver Spring, Maryland. If you’re anywhere close by, I highly recommend making the trip. It’s one of the greats.

Finally, don’t forget to sign up for my virtual talk on the Oscars through Smithsonian Associates on March 8. Don’t count on any of my predictions being correct, though.

And now, onto the movies.

Top Rewatches

1. Paterson

Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson falls into a category of film I like to call Quiet, Little Movies About People Just Going About Their Lives. I love this genre. Several of my favorite films of 2023—including Showing Up, Perfect Days, and maybe even The Killer—would qualify. But Paterson has some extra magic and mystery. It follows a bus driver played by Adam Driver. His name is Paterson, and he lives in Paterson, New Jersey. As he moves through his day, he keeps running across pairs of twins. The film never explains why, but you just kinda know. Paterson writes poetry about everyday things, including love. There are hints of past trauma in his life—a framed photo of him in military uniform, or the swift, decisive action he takes when a man begins waving a gun around in his favorite bar. But Jarmusch wisely backgrounds Paterson’s internal conflict, instead embodying the peace Paterson seeks through love, art, and appreciation of the small things, which are really much bigger than we give them credit for.

2. Spotlight

It’s strange, perhaps, that a film about the systemic abuse of children is one of my comfort films, but then again Spotlight isn’t really about the abuse. It’s about the people who cared enough to try and stop it. I find new things to admire in Spotlight every time I watch it. The workmanlike direction of Tom McCarthy, which is intelligent and insightful but never ostentatious. The performances by Billy Crudup and Stanley Tucci, as lawyers with diametrically opposed approaches to achieving justice. The way the film carefully leads us towards suspecting a grand cover-up at the Boston Globe before revealing a more complicated truth: the lack of coverage the abuse received was not due to a secret directive but instead came from an unconscious desire to bury that which implicates us. “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one,” says one character. I’ll be thinking about that one for a long time.

3. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

I swear this isn’t hindsight talking. I knew The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was the last film Joel and Ethan Coen would make together, and I was correct. They split up after this and went their separate ways, with Joel making the stuffy The Tragedy of Macbeth and Ethan teaming up with his wife Tricia Cooke for the just-released queer caper Drive-Away Dolls. Buster Scruggs, an anthology set in the Old West, felt slight to some critics, but I saw it as their summation on love, art, and the absurdity of life, with the final segment—in which a trio of stagecoach passengers gradually realize they’re being brought to the other side by a pair of reapers—among the most haunting scenes the Coens have ever put on film. The Western has always been a natural fit for the brothers, but their previous dalliances with the genre, No Country for Old Men and Raising Arizona, were set closer to modern day. In Buster Scruggs, they get to play with all the old archetypes: bank robbers, prospectors, wagon leaders, and gunslingers, and it creates the perfect landing spot for their trademark existential yearning. Buster Scruggs says it all, one last time.

4. Little Women

I really don’t want to hate on Barbie anymore, but I must point out that Little Women, Greta Gerwig’s previous film, paints an even richer portrait of the complexities and contradictions of womanhood as last year’s blockbuster and with far more elegance. It all comes down to the heart-stopping finale, in which a full-hearted Jo races to the train station to catch Friedrich, tell her she loves him, and kisses him under an umbrella, while simultaneously—with the aid of Gerwig’s precise cross-cutting—arguing with her editor over the ending of her first novel. She wants her heroine to stay unmarried. He insists she fall in love at the end. Eventually, Jo acquiesces, noting that “marriage has always been an economic proposition.” So are we meant to believe the kiss between Jo and Friedrich was real, or was it a fiction? Yes, exactly. It’s a movie, so it’s all fiction, and Gerwig uses that to her benefit, crafting an original conclusion to a classic text that gives her heroine independence and companionship at once. Being a woman is impossible, said someone in Barbie. Not in Little Women.

5. Glory

I don’t think I’d seen Glory since I was a kid, but it has been on my mind lately, since director Edward Zwick has been making the rounds promoting his new memoir. It’s far better than I remembered. The fear, of course, when you hear the story—it’s about a White colonel who led a Black regiment of soldiers in the Civil War—is that it would be a classic white savior story that filters a story of Black courage through a White protagonist and pushes them to the side of their own story. Zwick avoids that outcome through casting, performance, and emphasis. Matthew Broderick plays the colonel with a passable Massachusetts accent. He doesn’t quite have the gravitas for a film like that, but it somehow works to our benefit. Broderick recedes into the firmament, leaving room for the supporting actors—with names you might have heard of, like Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, and Andre Braugher—to create unusually rich portraits of Black lives. There is a wide variety of philosophy and experience on display in the film’s Black characters, and Zwick let their differences play out, creating and resolving their conflicts in full view of the camera. I’m not sure I’d seen anything like that the first time I saw Glory. 35 years later, it still feels rare.

Top First-Time View:

1. Win Win

As mentioned, there are precious few options here, but I really enjoyed Win Win. Also directed by Tom McCarthy, Win Win sat on my watchlist for over a decade because there was never any urgent need to watch it. It’s one of those movies. It doesn’t fit easily into any category. It wasn’t a blockbuster, and it had no Oscar operations. It’s just great. Paul Giamatti plays Mike, a high school wrestling coach and small-town lawyer, whose private practice is floundering until he comes up with a way to make some extra cash. He takes over paid guardianship of a client with dementia and sticks him in a home, since he doesn’t have time to actually care for him.

Things get complicated when the client’s grandson shows up, and Mike decides to take him in. Is it because he feels guilty over the way he has treated his grandfather? Or is it because the kid is a world-class wrestler who can help Mike’s team get back on track? Either way, it doesn’t reflect well on the grown-ups, but Giamatti’s innate likeability makes the film’s portrayal of adulthood all the more rich. Win Win is rich with compromised people making difficult choices in order to survive, and somehow finding space to love each other. We need more like it.