[Hot Tea] August 10th - December 31st: Part One
Serving #26
O, readers. Let’s start again. Let’s start slow.
I know that it has now been quite some time since I’ve last invited you all for tea, as was our custom every few weeks or so for over 1.5 year.1 I regret the inability on my side to foster new invitations since the late summer (until now, of course), but I urge you to fear not, readers — despite not writing, I have nevertheless been as you know me: a careful and self-appointed cultural attaché of sorts, specifically to our current cinematic and televisual landscape. So, although we haven’t sat over a piping cup to discuss it, trust, reader, I’ve seen it.
In these next few servings, I hope to bring you a considerate remedy in digestible doses: the same stylized reviews of what have been the latest streaming films and TV series over the last four months of 2023, all sorted into small groups so that no one reading feels overly long or overly bearish to either create or receive. Hopefully, these personal takes will find you still in the throes of contemplation over some now perhaps slightly dated releases or — particularly for the cinematic year just now ending — over other now much applauded or derided current or forthcoming nominees.
So, even though I (like you, I am sure) have barely truly recovered from the end of the past calendar year or from Cynthia Erivo’s clarifying performance of the once Oscar-nominated song “Alfie” from the 1966 film of the same name (Gilbert [dir.] & Naughton [wri.]) in honor of the song’s original singer, Dionne Warwick, at her recent induction into the Kennedy Center’s ranks, let us nevertheless bravely begin. Cups up, readers; here’s a fresh pour.
Saltburn (2023)
Amazon Prime • Drama • Satyricon
Synopsis
An unassuming university first-year sees potential in a budding housemate, despite — or perhaps because of — a difference in social class between them.
My take
Readers, it feels only right, to begin this newest serving of Hot Tea with what I declare is the most discussed new film of this past cinematic year: Emerald Fennell’s strikingly decadent Saltburn. That Fennell’s Saltburn is decadent, a textual and visual feast of a certain kind, is, no doubt, what has made the film the subject of discussion: Audiences have no trouble with agreeing that the film is ambitious and iconoclastic, particularly against the violent excesses of the über-wealthy, the patriarchal halls of their inherited privilege, and the timeless fascinations of the male gaze onto specifically undressed female bodies, and can’t contain themselves from vaunting all vantages on such topics on social media; AND audiences then diverge sharply when confronting what those qualities mean, or indeed whether they mean anything, incidentally making Saltburn (somewhat beguilingly) the subject of mass and occasionally heated debate. Is Saltburn an “empty beauty,” all gaze-drunk panache with no purpose, or is it OK for beauty to exist for beauty’s sake alone? Of course, readers, we know that it’s never quite that simple.
Let’s start our response to this mass debate by defining Saltburn’s “decadence.” Working with cinematographer Linus Sandgren — whose work we may already know from his Oscar-winning La La Land (2016) or even his ASC-nominated First Man (2018) — Fennell delights our eyes with purposefully cropped, 4:3 overtures that she marks staccato with what would elsewhere be 16:9 études, to shape the tone of the film: a resonant series of chords vacillating on a knife’s edge between what is real and what is possible. Dreamy, fantastical images transfigure the real lives and grounds of especially the titular location, a countryside estate named ‘Saltburn’ where the central characters repose with family during holiday, into a byzantine, nearly chimerical, but always alluring paradise — particularly, a paradise of the sort many a person who’s long had to “sing for one’s supper” idealizes from the outside but fails to fully understand on the inside, perpetual thanks to its proprietors careful cuts around its borders. That end place, that haven, is the laboriously dull end to all actual labor, the full life of luxury on the backs of staff, the idyllic privacy of expansive personal holdings, that voluminous sacristy where everything is unequivocally at one’s disposal and no one else’s.
The critics, I’m sad to say, leap from receiving this “decadence” directly into claiming its insubstancy: how vapid the show is, a feast for the eyes but not the mind, even cultural pornography.
“If you see it as a lurid pulp fantasy rather than a penetrating satire, then Saltburn is deliriously enjoyable” (Barber [for the BBC], 2023). Translation: If you ransack the movie of all its substance and/or just turn off your brain, then it’s great!
“Saltburn looks divine […] but they’re working with paper-thin characters” (Butcher [for Empire], 2023).
“‘Saltburn’ is the sort of embarrassment you’ll put up with for 75 minutes. But not for 127. […] The thing […] doesn’t have many thoughts and even fewer feelings. […] It’s another music-video fantasia” (Morris [for The New York Times], 2023).
Perhaps worse, the advocates, on the other hand, decry affronts to the film’s quality on the feeble grounds that spectacle is spectacle and they should be allowed, if not encouraged, to see it.
“Saltburn is a really exciting and excited filmmaking piece. I didn't demand of it a moral fable- it was a skillful, audacious and obsessive grotesquerie- a Steadman, a Hogarth- a state of being, remembered by an unreliable narrator- heightened by his memory & desire.” -Guillermo del Toro
For my part, readers, both groups are missing the point. The whole debate is as if people read — no, not “read” — paged through The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1925) and then came away fervently with either the pro or the con side of the common take, “Wow, parties.” What am I even saying? People have done and continue to do exactly this kind of reduction in memory of Gatsby all the time; the mere existence of any Gatsby-themed party is sufficient to say so. So, perhaps I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am, to see almost no one taking a different view.
To both sides, I say unflinchingly, your reading of this film lacks awareness and attention. Knowing what I know about film and about our current culture, I actively applauded aloud in the theater the moment the credits started to roll. “Emerald did her homework!” I remember exclaiming and then instantly starting to jot down thoughts for this very take, thoughts starting and ending with a list of 12+ films I saw Fennell and her collaborators on this film actively referencing, to firmly plant this new film within existing conversations and to clearly document how and where it departs from those already available points of view.
The Talented Mr. Ripley (Minghella, 1999),
Get Out (Peele, 2017),
Lolita (Kubrick, 1962),
Maurice (Ivory [dir./wri.] & Hesketh-Harvey [wri.], 1987),
Call Me by Your Name (Guadagnino [dir.] & Ivory [wri.], 2017),
Dead Poets Society (Weir [dir.] & Schulman [wri.], 1989),
Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais [dir.] & Robbe-Grillet [wri.], 1961),
The Line of Beauty (Dibb [dir.], & Davies [wri.], 2006),
The Long Day Closes (Davies, 1992),
The Shining (Kubrick [dir./wri.] & Johnson [wri.], 1980),
Bright, Young Things (Fry, 2003),
Heartbeats (Dolan, 2010),
The Social Network (Fincher [dir.] & Sorkin [wri.], 2010), and
Parasite (Bong [dir./wri.] & Han [wri.], 2019)
— not to mention all the more classical or literary ancestors whose genetics also live within Salburn (e.g.,
Vanity Fair [Thackeray, 1847-1848],
A Midsummer Night’s Dream [Shakespeare, ca. 1595],
Theseus and the Minotaur [Ovid, 8 — or even Canova, 1781-1782]
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) — all have specific signatures Fennell and her team actively use to situate their protagonist’s story within a cultural lexicon of others like his, each time building on the memory of its forebears and each time responding to the stresses and priorities of its era. Specific visual memories such as The Talented Mr. Ripley’s bathtub, Lolita’s picnic, and Last Year at Marienbad’s built environment resurrect sociocultural dialogues about homosexual intimacy, the male gaze, and subjectivity in the lens, dialogues that Saltburn actively advances by writing each signature beyond mimicry, into legacy. Yes — spoiler alert — Barry Keoghan’s performance does show him cravenly slurping at the dregs of Jacob Elordi’s masturbatory bathwater BUT does so as a direct response to the silenced restraint Matt Damon’s performance requires despite his own lavatory desires for Jude Law’s drippings in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Yes, Sandgren’s camera lingers on Elordi’s character’s insouciant sunbathing with a popsicle BUT does so as a direct response to Oswald Morris’ camera’s lingering on Sue Lyon’s own summery repose with a lollipop in Lolita. Yes, Saltburn’s property and gardens loom and beckon pornographically (Morris, 2023) but do so in direct conversation with the subjectivity that lent grand mystery and complexity to the resort featured in Last Year at Marienbad. I could go on, but I won’t, because the point I think is already made: Not idly or subconsciously do these coincidences of textual if not visual memories arise in Saltburn; the film is actively engaged in provoking what comes next in both the core texts of these stories as metaphors for social practices and human motivations and the meta-text of the metaphors themselves as semiotics within a shared social consciousness.
Fennell’s greatest victory here then comes not merely from her scholarship and bibliography, which themselves are immensely praiseworthy, but rather directly from the fact that she speaks through Saltburn using a shared social lexicon that, by definition, we need not explicitly manifest to understand. The ‘trick’ for us in the audience is only to not forget to pay attention to it. So, yes, if you watch even just a 30-second advertisement of Saltburn you can already tell that it entails critiques of especially inherited wealth and stature; but if you watch the whole film, I can’t understand, how could you ever come away with thinking that that’s where the critique ends? Protagonist Oliver Quick is not — spoiler alert again — a noble character, Dickensian in any way, or laudable to anyone except those who read him like Jay Gatsby in a single flimsy glance. The audience isn’t supposed to like him or anyone in the entire film. Every single character is a terrible person, a tax on the social system, each uniquely awful in his or her own way and each then present for a similarly unique purpose in Saltburn’s true commentary on our times. Yes (among other points), Saltburn agrees, the generationally wealthy can very well be detached and ignorant BUT, it goes on, the greater culprits in our present world may actually be the bourgeoisie, the upward reaching middle and working classes whose members admire if not worship the generationally wealthy in the same breaths in which they revile them. Consequently, present obsessions with money, fame, and glamour eat away worse than anything else at the bedrock of a capitalistic society — and do so not least because desires for those ends are so pervasive and relatable as to literally pass notice of every Saltburn critic or advocate I’ve so far come across. So, while achieving any one of those ends in life may indeed call for a dance in the minds of most people, it is, Saltburn clearly argues, ultimately a danse macabre, performed alone.
I could say more — much more here, readers, about Pike’s exceptional performance, the deft costuming, the music… — but suffice it for us now, for me to say simply, Saltburn is easily the best film I have seen this year or expect to see the remainder of this awards season. Bravissima, Emerald! Please, don’t stop.
Temperature check
Steaming
May December (2023)
Netflix • Drama • Made for TV
Synopsis
An actress visits a homemaker in Savannah, GA, where her interests complicate long-standing intimacies.
My take
After Safe (1995), Far from Heaven (2002), and Carol (2015), it’s a formality to say that Todd Haynes is not just familiar with but moreover expert in especially American melodrama. Soaking his frame in the often syrupy trappings of curiously romanticized if not ambivalently dramatized domestic interiors, Haynes feels right at home behind the helm of May December, catching powerful female actresses in oblique tension with their intimates, whom they both secretly need and perhaps not so secretly revile (maybe even for needing them in return).
Coincidentally, like Moore and like Blanchett before her, Portman here takes the lead and Haynes’ favoring hand: Her performance is the more interesting of the two by far and receives the most focal attention of all characters in the film. She, a duplicitous actress morphing herself by will and perverse intention into the simulacrum of a notorious if superficially unassuming criminal-turned-caregiver, is never putting her foot down where she knows it’ll be safe but rather is constantly trying new approaches to everything in idle hope and self-delusion that something will not only stick but moreover transform her ambitious yet only tepidly successful career into legend. Portman nails the tight angles and dramaturgical tightropes Haynes lays out before her, and manages to cross them all while retaining that distinctly melodramatic flavor in her actions that Haynes so clearly insisted on using deliberately to permeate the full film. Moore, on the other hand, here flags; unable to exhibit as much dexterity within a character that clearly is meant to have two very different sides, viper and victim, and lacking clarity on which the more dominant, Moore flounders, resorting to dull vacancy where singing naïvèté turned scheming is really needed.
At least, despite the near total lack of reciprocal chemistry between Moore and Portman in this film, the editor and the composer knew exactly how to build this particular story, fresh with the intentionally adapted stunning chords and strings of Michel LeGrand’s original score for The Go-Between (Losey [dir.] & Pinter [wri.], 1971) and the visual links and cuts to match. These articulations keep May December faithfully on its inevitable path toward internal calamity, while underlining the profound connection the film has to especially made-for-TV melodramas of the late 1980s and 1990s.
If you, reader, feel especially akin to those stories of women’s dilemmata, then May December is right for you, no doubt. However, for the rest of us, there’s just something niggling, lacking, and ultimately flat about the piece — even after I account for its melodrama — that, I suspect, viewers won’t be able to shake.
Temperature check
Hot (just barely)
Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken (2023)
Peacock • Animation • Coming of Age
Synopsis
A 15-year-old introvert with a crush dips her curiosity about her family’s hidden identity into the murky waters of the sea.
My take
Despite being an offensively direct reskin hybrid of Disney’s excellent Turning Red (Shi [dir./wri.] & Cho [wri.], 2022) and popular The Princess Diaries (Marshall [dir.] & Wendkos [wri.], 2001) and a blatant knock on Disney’s iconic competitor-property The Little Mermaid (Musker & Clements, 1989), whose live-action remake found its theatrical release this past year aggressively coincidental with the theatrical release of this new film itself, Dreamworks’ Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken — thanks largely to its noteworthy voice cast and its uniquely inventive character and set design — manages to define a pleasant niche for itself as a coming-of-age fairy-tale narrative. While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anyone who saw and loved any of the original Disney stories I cite above (because at the end of the day it is simply more of the same), I can’t outright disapprove of the film’s quality, because — despite its cut-and-merged DNA and its blunt intercorporate aggression — it still manages to find a narrative balance that, especially in the luminescent garb in which it seems intent on dressing itself, can’t help but entertain like a merry-go-round: for at least one ride.
Temperature check
Tepid
The Killer (2023)
Netflix • Action • Spy, Dreadful Spy
Synopsis
The meticulous business of a private assassin becomes personal when chance thwarts his aim.
My take
Despite an applause-worthy late-game supporting performance from Tilda Swinton, David Fincher’s latest, The Killer, is a snooze from beginning to end. Almost entirely redundant voice-over plagues a film that doesn’t seem to know it’d have been much better silent. I don’t care how many fisting gloves Fassbender used.
Temperature check
Cold
Rebel Moon (2023)
Netflix • Action • “You son of a bitch, I’m in.”
Synopsis
A fascistic threat compels an otherwise covert young woman to assemble a team capable enough to successfully resist.
My take
It isn’t that Zach Snyder has no imagination; it’s only that what imagination Snyder does have appears capable of bearing only the hybrid children of other people. Rebel Moon is a derivative action film, baked potpourri from Tolkien, Kurosawa, Tarantino, and {your favorite heist film} in the shape of a fantasy epic like Dune (Villeneuve [dir./wri.], Spaihts, & Roth [wri.], 2021) or The Wheel of Time (Judkins [dev.], 2021-2022). Ill-paced, overly written yet simultaneously rife with plot holes, and lionistic of singularly impossible stock characters, the film is unlikely to please any but the most avaricious consumers of science fiction, fantasy, or visual effects who are in need of another lengthy dose, fie on that dose’s quality.
Temperature check
Frigid
And a sincere ‘thanks’ to all of you who so warmly asked about new servings and about the state of this Substack during the quiet period. I am touched by your thoughtfulness, interest, and support.
“Wow, parties.” 🎉 🎊 😑