I Wake Up Streaming | May 2022

In this edition of “I Wake Up Streaming,” novelist William Boyle rounds up his top streaming picks for the month of May. 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.

’night, Mother (Criterion Channel)

A movie I somehow didn’t even know existed until a couple of months ago. Now it’s been added to the Criterion Channel as part of their essential Films of Endearment: A Mother’s Day Selection collection, a lineup inspired by Michael Koresky’s book Films of Endearment, which is about his “personal and historical journey with his mother to rewatch movies from the 1980s she had first introduced him to, igniting his love of film at a young age.” Adapted by Marsha Norman from her Pulitzer Prize–winning play and directed by Tom Moore, ’night, Mother is a delicate and profound movie featuring knockout performances by two of the all-time greats, Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft. Spacek plays Jessie Cates, who sits down and calmly tells her mother, Thelma (Bancroft, always astonishing), that she’s going to commit suicide before the morning. The movie takes place over the course of a single evening in the house that Jessie and Thelma share. Dialogue unravels between them, as Jessie gets her affairs in order. After she asks for her deceased father’s pistol, Thelma finally questions her strange behavior and Jessie makes her intentions clear, indicating that she’s grown tired of living. Thelma is horrified and falls into a state of denial. Jessie has had a tough life—an unhappy marriage, a son who’s turned into a criminal, epilepsy—and she’s seeking respite, solace, peace. It’s a harrowing two-hander powered by a remarkably emotional core. Kathy Bates played Jessie in the original play’s run, and I can imagine that she was terrific too, but it’s hard to imagine someone other than Spacek selling Jessie’s calmness so effectively. This will be a challenging watch for a lot of folks, especially given the subject matter, but it’s deeply empathetic and beautifully shot by Stephen M. Katz.

Frances (Criterion Channel)

As with many Gen Xers, my introduction to Frances Farmer was the Nirvana song “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle.” I was already seriously into movies when that song came out, though I hadn’t quite yet started reading about Old Hollywood. I knew Bogey and Bacall, I knew Cagney, I knew Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers, but that was really it. After first hearing that song, I remember reading up on Frances Farmer and tracking down this movie. It’s also featured as part of the Films of Endearment collection (I recommend all the movies included and have recently picked up Koresky’s book), and it’s also a tough watch. Jessica Lange stars as Farmer, tracing her life from her rebellious high school days to her experiences in Hollywood (where she also excelled at rebellion) and on Broadway, all the way through to her tragic treatment at the hands of producers and her family, who stomped out her individuality and sought to reform her through involuntary stints in psychiatric asylums, resulting in horrific abuses that dulled not only her creativity but her trust. Farmer emerged a shell of her former self, lobotomized, her flame extinguished. Another movie that centers a tortured mother/daughter relationship but well worth seeking out. You can see why Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love considered Farmer their “patron martyr.” Lange is at her breathtaking best here: fragile, brimming over with creativity and ambition, defeated, hopeful, defiant, eyes full of fire.

Blaze (IFC Films Unlimited)

When I moved to Austin in late 2001, one of my first discoveries was the music of Townes Van Zandt. It was through Townes’s song “Blaze’s Blues” that I came to learn about Blaze Foley and fall in love with his music too. For the year that I was in Austin, I was mostly in discovery mode and so I didn’t fully appreciate living with all those legends in the air around me. I wish I could go back and search out what I should’ve felt on so many of those streets and in so many of those bars. I absorbed a little of it, that’s true, but I should’ve absorbed more. Anyhow, even though I like Ethan Hawke’s work a lot, I put off watching his movie about the life of Blaze Foley, Blaze, for a while. Bad music biopics have soured me on music biopics in general, but this feels much closer in spirit to the great music biopics of the ’70s and ’80s. It never falls into the formulaic way of telling that Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story parodied so aptly. Instead, Hawke and Sybil Rosen manage to make it feel something like a legend or a tall tale. (The movie is based on Rosen’s memoir Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley, about her relationship with Foley, whose birth name was Michael Fuller and who variously went by handles like Deputy Dawg and Duct Tape Messiah.) There are multiple storylines—one tracing aspiring actress Rosen and aspiring musician Foley’s relationship; another involving Townes and Zee, Blaze’s sidekick (a composite of a few different musicians), talking about Blaze’s life in a radio interview; and a third that documents Foley’s performance at the Outhouse, an Austin dive bar, which was taped and was, for many years, the only available recording of Blaze. All of this leads to Blaze’s tragic and random death. Hawke treats Blaze as a legend but also humanizes him. He was the cause of many of his own problems, something he interrogated in his songs and something that the movie tackles in unique and sincere ways. The whole thing’s poetic and soft around the edges. It’s the movie that Blaze and Townes and Sybil Rosen deserve. A ton of heart. The performances are lovely. Ben Dickey’s great as Blaze. Alia Shawkat is revelatory as Sybil. And Charlie Sexton is spot-on as Townes. I also loved seeing Alynda Segarra (of Hurray for the Riff Raff) as Blaze’s sister and Kris Kristofferson as the shell of his old man. Bummed it took me so long to sit down and watch this but glad I finally did. I immediately ordered Rosen’s book.

A Fish in the Bathtub (Kanopy, Tubi)

In a just world, the recent restoration of Joan Micklin Silver’s A Fish in the Bathtub would’ve been a bigger deal. It’s a beautiful movie from one of our most undervalued directors, though it wasn’t well-received upon its initial release in 1999 and had mostly fallen off the map before the restoration premiered in late 2019 (Silver passed away the next year). In any case, I’m glad that the restoration is now widely available to stream. Jerry Stiller—in what is almost certainly his finest lead film performance—plays Sam, who goes to the store on a rainy night to get something for his wife of forty years, Molly (played by Stiller’s real-life wife and creative partner, Anne Meara), and winds up bringing home an oversized fish that he puts in the bathtub. From there, tensions in the marriage begin to boil over. Mark Ruffalo and Jane Adams play Joel and Ruthie, Sam and Molly’s grown kids, who are going through their own struggles in life, romantic and otherwise. The movie is light and funny and sweet and yet also emotional. If you’re a fan of Jerry Stiller yelling, you get plenty of that. My Seinfeld-obsessed eleven-year-old son couldn’t resist watching with me once he saw a bit of that unhinged Frank Costanza magic. But Stiller also shows another side of himself here—his scene with Meara at the end of the movie had me in tears. The movie’s also really beautiful to look at. Brightly colored and vivid, it almost manages to feel—tonally and aesthetically—like a wonderful blend of Douglas Sirk’s Technicolor melodramas of the ’50s and ’90s indie gems like The Daytrippers.

Ode (Vimeo)