I Wake Up Streaming: December 2021
Movies
In this edition of “I Wake Up Streaming,” novelist William Boyle rounds up his top streaming picks for the month of December. The column’s name is a play on the 1941 film I Wake Up Screaming, starring Betty Grable, Victor Mature, and Carole Landis. While the film’s title hits a pleasing note of terror and despair, changing that one letter speaks to the joy of discovering new films and rediscovering old favorites, as well as the panic that comes with being overwhelmed by options.
Instead of jumping the gun and creating a favorites-of-the-year list before I’ve seen everything I want to see, I’ll stick with some movies that will almost certainly be at the top of any list I make:
The Power of the Dog (Netflix)
Based on a 1967 novel by Thomas Savage, Jane Campion’s newest movie is a western about two brothers (Phil and George, played by Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons) in Montana in the 1920s. When George marries “suicide widow” Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and brings her and her son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), to live at their ranch, relationships are strained. Peter is sensitive and lonely and feminine; he makes paper flowers and wants to be a surgeon. Phil is homophobic and cruel and full of secrets. George is aloof. Rose takes to drinking. The situation is rife with tension, but Campion manages to arrange these characters tenderly. The Power of the Dog is a staggering film—epic and lonely and profound, full of melancholy and pain. There are visual and emotional echoes of East of Eden, The Searchers, Days of Heaven, Brokeback Mountain, and There Will Be Blood, and this feels like a revisionist western in the best way—alive and crucial and full of searching humanity. I still have a bunch of films to catch up on, but right now this is my number one of the year and I’m not sure I can imagine anything dethroning it (though I have the highest hopes for The Tragedy of Macbeth, The Souvenir Part Two, Drive My Car, Licorice Pizza, and C’mon, C’mon).
Sweet Thing (MUBI)
Alexandre Rockwell’s Sweet Thing is one of the great hidden gems of the year, and its run on MUBI continues for another couple of weeks. Billie and Nico (played by Rockwell’s children, Lana and Nico) live with their father, Adam (Will Patton), a drunk who is mostly sweet but also has bouts of meanness and indifference toward his kids. Their mother, Eve (Karyn Parsons, Rockwell’s real-life wife), flitters in and out of their lives with her awful new boyfriend, Beaux. The kids fight against Beaux’s abusive behavior and go on the lam after lashing out at him. Their new pal, Jabari Watkins’s Malik, goes with them and they wander the Massachusetts landscape like classic American runaways—beaches and empty vacation houses and stolen cars. Sweet Thing is soulful, big-hearted, and gorgeous to look at (shot in high contrast black-and-white 16mm). It hearkens back to ’90s American indie cinema while also echoing a wide range of mythical masterpieces from other eras—there’s a little bit of Little Fugitive, a little Badlands, a little Beasts of the Southern Wild. Anchored by a bunch of knockout performances—Lana Rockwell is just incredible, and character actor Will Patton gives one of my favorite turns in recent memory as the Bukowski-ish old man. A sweet poem of a movie threaded with great songs—Van Morrison’s “Sweet Thing” is central, of course—and a story that presents timeworn themes in a beautiful way. Moody and erratic and full of genuine wonder.
Procession (Netflix)
Robert Greene is a filmmaker who’s not content with the status quo. Kate Plays Christine, Bisbee ’17, and Actress experiment within the realms of documentary. Procession is cut from the same cloth. Greene teams up with victims of Catholic Church sex abuse in the Kansas City diocese. Instead of simply telling their stories, he helps them create short films about their experiences to process the trauma. The film documents the making of these shorts. The men act in each other’s films, interrogating their memories and finding support from one another. The abuse itself haunts them, of course, but they’re also deeply scarred by the Church’s repudiation of their cries for justice or even just acknowledgment. It’s a painful watch but a profound and important one. Greene shakes loose the exploitative structures that infect so many documentaries. Procession is an excavation of trauma, a reckoning with evil, and it has a simple message at its core: Stories can save us. One of the very best films of the year.
The Harder They Fall (Netflix)
I tried to watch Jeymes Samuel’s western the day it was released, but I just couldn’t get into its rhythm and stopped it at about the ten-minute mark. Just bad timing on my part. I gave it another shot—prompted by hearing great things from some friends I really trust—and it clicked right away. The story plays around in the sandbox of western tropes—there’s nothing plot-wise that’s not familiar (Jonathan Majors’s Nat Love seeks vengeance against Idris Elba’s Rufus Buck for a crime committed many years before)—but there’s a new energy here, a freshness. I especially fell into it when Regina King’s Treacherous Trudy Smith and Lakeith Stanfield’s Cherokee Bill showed up to break Buck out of lockup during a prisoner transfer by train. They plowed through a wall of soldiers coldly, and I was reminded of the tone of the recent operatic punk western True History of the Kelly Gang. As if King, Stanfield, and Elba—three of the best, most electric actors in the world right now—weren’t enough, add Delroy Lindo to the proceedings as Bass Reeves, a marshal also intent on catching up with Buck. All of them are having a hell of a good time, chewing a little scenery, being brisk and sincere one minute, savage the next. The cast is full of other scene-stealers too—Danielle Deadwyler stands out as Cuffee, but RJ Cyler and Edi Gathegi are also memorable—and Zazie Beetz (Atlanta) is terrific as Stagecoach Mary, a riff on Joan Crawford’s Vienna in Johnny Guitar. This is fun material elevated by a knockout cast. Don’t go into it expecting authentic period detail—it has a heavily mythological edge, and it’s gory and pulpy. Samuel delights in taking the violence (and the dialogue) over the top. It’s a blues narrative, a way of reclaiming and reevaluating stories we’ve seen and heard predominantly one way for a long, long time. There’s also a supercharged soundtrack, and the movie occasionally drifts into resembling a musical. It’s long but doesn’t feel bloated—Samuel and co-screenwriter Boaz Yakin let their characters talk and wander a bit. Throw Thomasine and Bushrod, Posse, and Desperado in the blender with a classic spaghetti western like The Great Silence, and you might get close to what Samuel has pulled off here.
The Velvet Underground (Apple TV Plus)
For me as a high school kid, there was no more important musical discovery than The Velvet Underground. I owe them to my pal Anthony, who handed me a cassette copy of their self-titled third album from 1969. I went back and listened to the first album with Nico, to White Light/White Heat, and then I found Loaded, Lou Reed’s solo albums, John Cale’s solo albums, Moe Tucker’s solo albums, and my brain was switched all the way on. Growing up in New York City in the ’90s, I felt like I’d found a key to understanding everything—this was the sound of the sidewalks and the heaving buses and the pain people carried around everywhere. Even when I drifted upstate to a little hippie college, where there was lots of nostalgia for the peace-and-love generation, The Velvet Underground presented itself as an affront to that: avant-garde pop music that woke listeners up to a new way of seeing. Here, they get the documentary they deserve from visionary director Todd Haynes. Like Greene, Haynes is averse to approaching things in a bland, straightforward, pedantic way. Though his documentary is full of talking head interviews and biographical information, it’s a visual feast with a wide range of wild and intense footage, and—more importantly—it centers the music. It begs to be played LOUD.
William Boyle is the author of the novels Gravesend, The Lonely Witness, A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself, City of Margins, and Shoot the Moonlight Out, all available from Pegasus Crime. His novella Everything Is Broken was published in Southwest Review Volume 104, numbers 1–4. His website is williammichaelboyle.com.
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