No year that sees the deaths of Sean Connery, Olivia de Havilland, and Chadwick Boseman can be hailed as a time of unbroken happiness. Private viewings of “Goldfinger,” “The Heiress,” and “Get On Up” could do only so much to attenuate our grief. But shadows even murkier and more prolonged fell across the landscape of 2020; in many countries, the making, releasing, and watching of films either stopped dead or slowed to a dismal crawl. It would be ludicrous to claim that this unnerving standstill was the worst aspect of the coronavirus pandemic; nobody has perished from a chronic lack of James Bond. But the resulting loss of livelihoods is no small matter, as Tom Cruise has pointed out, in a voice of thunder; and the loss of liveliness, in the souls and the social schedules of ordinary moviegoers, has added to the burden of a terrible year.
The irony is that it made such a promising start, with a little help from the French. If you cast your mind all the way back to the belle époque, otherwise known as January, you may remember Ladj Ly’s “Les Misérables,” which follows a trio of cops through a combustible suburb of Paris. The police are neither heroes nor outright villains. They know their patch, with its wealth of problems, all too well, and not for a second do you mistake their job for an easy ride; nonetheless, it is their overbearing actions that light the fuse. For any idealists out there who still believe in cinema as an international language, here is rousing proof: it fell to a French director to foretell the rage and the unrest that would define the American summer.
An equal grip is exerted by Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” although its setting—remotest Brittany, in the late eighteenth century—is a world away from the burbs. The movie, having had a brief outing at the end of 2019, enjoyed a wider and more appropriate release on Valentine’s Day. As a demonstration of Cupid’s aim, it is unerring: the tale of a painter who falls in love with her sitter, a well-bred woman named Héloïse. (For a French audience, no name carries a greater amatory charge.) So lovestruck are the two of them that they have neither the will nor the ability to remove the barbs, and, as a viewer, you are similarly transfixed.
And that, pretty much, was that. It would be many months before a film—any film, of any size or school—left such a mark. As early spring arrived, so did COVID-19, an affliction that, like a notable Burgundy, will forever bear the date of its vintage. The majority of cinemas went dark; the larger and more densely packed your city, the less inclined you were to sally forth in search of films. Any historian of the medium can reel off the various forces that have threatened its existence over the past century, including the advent of sound, the Second World War, the monstrous march of television, the VCR, the DVD, and “Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach.” (You know, the one that even Steve Guttenberg didn’t show up for.) This year, however, saw a cunning and unprecedented pincer movement, as moviegoers found themselves beset not by one menace but by two separate foes. On the left flank was the coronavirus, whose spike proteins would be delighted to hitch a ride on your popcorn. On the right lay the streaming revolution, which had been gathering strength for some time. Now came its moment to attack.
This turn of events is a flat-out catastrophe, though not for everybody. I happen to love being a groundling, stuck in the pit of an auditorium and staring stupidly upward. Millions of people, though, will exercise the sane and risk-free option—staying home, staying safe, and deciding what to watch and when to watch it, at an hour of their delicious choosing. Or, in the case of Netflix, a complete night of their choosing, from suppertime till dawn. Across the land, up goes the plaintive cry: “Just one more episode!”
What matters here is not what we watched in 2020 but how we watched it, and whether our new methods and mores of watching are here to stay. A change of dimensions, countless viewers will say, is no big deal, nor is the switch to the domestic arena: a film is a film is a film, wheresoe’er it blooms, just as a rose is a rose. Not so. A wild film and a hothouse film are very different things. One is tangled up in the public gaze, out of our control; we cannot stop it or curtail it as it runs. The other is transplanted to TV, as if grown under glass, and, humongous though our screen may be, much of the fragrance is gone. What’s more, we can lop the story off at any time.
Take a movie like Cory Finley’s “Bad Education.” It’s a drama, grounded in real events, about a school superintendent on Long Island, who is congenial, handsome, highly respected, and even more highly fraudulent, embezzling millions as he strolls the path to success. He is played by Hugh Jackman, and, when I caught the movie at a film festival, in late 2019, I reckoned that it was the best work that Jackman had ever done, as if he were testing the resilience of his own blessings; that famous smile was stretched to the cracking point. “Bad Education” never made it into American cinemas; it had to settle for homeschooling, with a slot on HBO, in April. Jackman wound up with an Emmy nomination instead of an Oscar nod, but that’s not the issue. Seen again on the small screen, the film looks a little seedier, and the precise balance that the actor found between fraudulence and bonhomie—truth or dare, so to speak—is lost.
The other performances that stayed with me this year were all female. In no particular order: Cristin Milioti, in “Palm Springs,” remaining upbeat even when she hit the downside; Kate Winslet, in “Ammonite”; Diane Lane, in “Let Him Go”; Amanda Seyfried, glittering amid the gloom of “Mank”; and someone named Meryl Streep, for whom, on the basis of her efforts in “Let Them All Talk,” I predict a bright future. The last and the youngest on the list is Helena Zengel, the German actress who holds her own against Tom Hanks in “News of the World,” Paul Greengrass’s new Western, which comes out on Christmas Day. Zengel is now twelve years old, and what’s remarkable is that, though armed with blond hair, blue eyes, and, God help us, freckles, she is formidably uncute throughout the film. At times, indeed, she nears the brink of the feral; we see her roped by the ankle to a stake, like an untamable dog. Shirley Temple would take one look and scream.
In each instance, those performances are more forceful than the films in which they occur. (Such an imbalance can come in handy, when awards are being dished out.) Only in Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland,” I think, is the glow of the star—Frances McDormand, who appears in almost every scene—matched by the sky of the whole movie. It tells of a widow who quits a dead town in Nevada and travels around, living in her van, in search of seasonal employment. Beet-picking pays O.K., as does the pre-Christmas spell at an Amazon warehouse. The pull of the narrative, like McDormand’s presence among her fellow-wanderers, seems neither willed nor forced, and the heroine’s plight, though particular to the economics of now, has the timeless texture of a fable. Some folks are made to drift.
I was lucky enough to see “Nomadland” at the Venice Film Festival, which, by some miracle, went ahead as planned, at the start of September. Naturally, some of the plans were tweaked, in line with precautions. The standard red-carpet hoopla, outside premières, was cooled to a minimum. (Scarcely the most painful of sacrifices.) Viewers were spaced apart at screenings; unoccupied seats were taped off; and, as you entered the movie theatre, your temperature was taken with a thermometer held to your forehead. If this made you feel like a cow lining up for the stun gun, so what? The opportunity to see films emblazoned upon wide screens, in the company of other enthusiasts, was a gift to be grateful for—as, heaven knows, was the chance to be in Venice, a paradise with a lengthy record of plague. I felt like a criminal, freed on parole. Nearly two weeks of visual feasting, and then it was back to the slammer.
The city was not empty, by any means, but neither was it swamped by the human flood. Now, if ever, was the time to pay tribute to the obvious. In the dusk of a three-movie day, I took solace in a visit to the Ducal Palace: a couple of hours, alone but for the guards, in a succession of vast halls, which are usually so thronged that you can’t spot your own toes, still less the Tintorettos on the far wall. (Mind you, that artist does present a constant challenge to the Film Festival. Not only are his paintings better than almost every movie you will see, but some of them, dense with dramatic gesture, are better movies than the movies.) If this was the state of the city in the fall, what on earth was it like in March, during the initial lockdown, when there were no tourists whatsoever, and when the residents, too, had all but vanished from the streets? The answer was provided in style by the Festival’s pre-opening film, Andrea Segre’s “Molecole.” It’s a documentary, shot in Venice during that compulsory suspension of regular life—an interlude of mournful and mirrorlike tranquillity, as Segre shows, when rowers could skim along the Grand Canal without being rocked by the wake of passing boats. His film is also a diary, soaked in personal reminiscence. If it ever shows in New York, take the plunge.
