When Times Get Rough

Around the time I wrote the Beatriz at Dinner post last year, life threw me a curve ball. I didn’t duck on time. I was left stunned and unable to write. So, I turned off the lights and my blog went silent.

But I never stopped going to the movies. Surviving by film literally became what I did.

When the person whose been by your side for thirty-seven years suddenly leaves his half of the bed empty, when relationships you’ve had since you were old enough to talk get tangled in knots impossible to unravel, and you find yourself in a country where everything that is wrong is overtaking what should be, in this up-side down world of the new Demogorgons, there is still that big screen. The lights dim, the excitement of being transported away from everything that is troubling or scary or sad runs through your veins, and there they are: the films you love. For when times get rough.

 I would like to break my silence with five marvelous films that have brought different elements of understanding, solace, and wonder to my life: Gullermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina’s Coco, and Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. These films excel in all aspects. They are directed with tremendous creativity and mastery; the cinematography, set design, score and especially the acting in all the films are extraordinary, and maybe most of all they touch on issues, provide insights, and bring forth positive values and hope to probably some of the darkest times this nation has faced in years.

Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour

Darkest Hour, by the director of one of my favorite romance movies, Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, is the story of how close the British Empire came to caving to Nazi Germany and the variables that led Winston Churchill, played majestically by Gary Oldman, to resist by using the spirit of freedom and courage of its everyday citizens, the true heroes of World War II, changing the course of history. 

It is the soldiers that willingly gave their lives in Calais, the civilians who brought home the soldiers from Dunkirk, the men and women who withstood the blitz and were willing to persist that bring the tears to your eyes in Joe Wright’s masterful telling of this dark hour.  It is an inspiring film that speaks to leadership, made all the more striking as we live through these times where it is so lacking.

Christopher Plummer as John Paul Getty in All the Money in the World

In All the Money in the World, Ridley Scott has impressively opened the doors to an understanding or, at the very least, a glimpse of the minds of people who are born to wealth and for whom wealth has become a disease of the soul. Again, a parable to our times where greed has overtaken human compassion and empathy, where billionaires aspire to trillions while destroying the welfare, health and lives of many ordinary folk. The film uses the kidnapping of J. Paul Getty’s grandson as the story by which to represent the slow dehumanization to which these dangerous levels of greed lead.

Michelle Williams and Mark Wahlberg in All the Money in the World

Christopher Plummer and Ridley Scott both showed how experienced artists are able to do something as impressive as re-shoot 22 scenes in nine days, which Scott chose to do after the sexual harassment allegations against Kevin Spacey, who originally played Getty. Scott  stands out in any genre film he chooses to direct and always brings out the best in his collaborators, in this film that includes Michelle Williams and even rather unexceptional actors like Mark Wahlberg.

Bria Vinaite as Halley and Brooklyn Prince as Moonee in The Florida Project

At the other end of the wealth spectrum we find The Florida Project, which depicts the hopeless and abandoned poor in America, personified in the abandoned children we follow through a neighborhood in Florida. Director Sean Baker, who excels at bringing the marginal worlds of this nation to the screen, like he previously did so well in his film Tangerine about a transgender sex worker, shot entirely with iPhone smartphones, in this film takes us into the life of Moonee, a six-year-old girl and her single mother, Halley, who are just barely surviving in a budget motel near the Disney empire. Moonee and her friends run free and wild through these motels and abandoned houses, full of low-income families in a permanent state of transition.

Willem Dafoe and Brooklyn Prince in The Florida Project

This is more than just poverty in America, it is despair. Halley embodies the product of a society that has ceased to care about its citizens, leaving them to a day-by-day existence, where the world is pretty much reduced to a room in a motel, alcohol, drugs, anger and desolation. Willem Dafoe has been praised for his role as Bobby, the manager at the motel, although both Brooklyn Prince, who plays Moonee, and Bria Vinaite, who is Halley, are just as impressive or maybe more so. Bobby is sort of the remnant of a time where compassion and empathy towards those less fortunate was a little more prevalent, or at least where concern for the welfare of children still existed. But even Bobby, with all his good intentions, is faced with the very real and inevitable outcome for Moonee and her mother.

I’ve left the two films full of hopefulness for last. At a time when democrats in Congress are fighting for “dreamers” to remain in the country where they’ve grown, and are opposing the monstrosity that would be a wall with Mexico, Disney pictures released their most recent animated film: Coco, which takes place in just this neighbor country. Luckily the heads at Disney were wise in choosing a stellar Latino cast for the voices of Coco and his family, turned to Latino consultants for the screenplay, and used a Latino director to co-direct a movie that brings the beauty of Mexican traditions and values to the screen in a high quality artistic and moving way. 

Anthony Gonzales as the voice of  Miguel and Ana Ofelia Murguía as the voice of Mamá Coco in Coco

Will it give some of the racist supporters of this administration’s immigration policies pause? Who knows. It is a film that melts hearts, but one can’t help but wonder if those who support the current administration even have one. It did, in any case, not only melt mine but made me once again so proud to be Latina, ready to stand up for the beautiful cultures to the south of the Rio Grande, some of which are now part of this diverse nation to the North. Basing themselves on Mexican art and traditions, Coco exalts the values of honoring family and tradition, respecting our elders, carrying and caring for those loved ones that are no longer with us. It does this through music, art, and undying love.

Sally Hawkins and Octavia Spencer in The Shape of Water

The best for last. The Shape of Water. A caveat: you will love this movie if you love Guillermo del Toro movies. Del Toro is a singular artist who happens to love monsters. “Well –he’s said- the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.” His characters in many movies are inter-species and he braves the boundaries of the “normal”. In his films, the true monsters - those dark, dangerous, violent things we traditionally call monsters- are the human beings incapable of humanity. They are Vidal, the fascist general in Pan’s Labyrinth, or Richard Strickland, the government agent in The Shape of Water. Del Toro also blurs the lines between reality and a world of magic, sometimes supernatural, sometimes science fiction, always splendorous in its details and imagination, reaffirming that there is so much more to our world than meets the eye. He is the director of magical realism in film.

Richard Jenkins and Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water

The Shape of Water, like Pan’s Labyrinth before it, has at its core a heroine who appears to all as someone society considers “weak”, but who proves, through the strength of her love, that she is just the person to overpower the forces of darkness contained in the authoritarian, fascist-like figures that are the men-monsters in these movies. In Pan’s that was the young girl Ofelia, stepdaughter to the fascist Vidal, and in The Shape of Water it is Eliza, a mute cleaning woman, played brilliantly by Sally Hawkins, who confronts Strickland.

There are people in our modern world that want to reduce us to flat, one-dimensional individuals, easily stereotyped, stockpiled in binary, polarized boxes. For these people, almost everyone is completely dispensable. Del Toro’s movie demonstrates the fallacy of their proposition, how impossible it is given how very complex humans really are, how infinite our world and our imagination can be, and how through friendship and love we can break all imposed boundaries and not only resist, but become the remarkable beings we were created to be.