Good morning, readers ☀️
Before we dive into this year’s ten ‘Best Picture’ Oscar nominees in our next serving of “Hot Tea,” let’s discuss some new tea so fresh it hasn’t even properly dried in the sun yet: the nine feature-length films I previewed during this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Though it may be some time yet before these films achieve mass distributions enough for you to screen them, let this serving of “Hot Tea” be a forward-looking anticipation of their eventual mass releases and an advanced guide of what worked and what didn’t in this year’s festival program.
Ponyboi (2024)
Sundance • Drama • Self-Realizations
Synopsis
An intersex laundr-o-mat worker clashes with the systems surrounding their life.
My take
I didn’t know Dylan o’Brien had this performance in him — a supporting performance, yes, but one that seals the central conflict of the film. Aggressive, cold, and violent in sudden bursts that dispel an otherwise constantly self-pleased demeanor that he wears like a medal, o’Brien’s Vinny resurrects the thinly veiled danger permeating the majority of Chase’s (1999-2007) The Sopranos. The impressive part is that, despite that obvious legacy, o’Brien still finds a way to make the character his own: impressing on him the same brand of naïveté and immaturity that made his Stiles Stilinski (from Davis’ [2011-2017] Teen Wolf) so endearing. It’s honestly compelling acting: light and dark, safety and danger, interestingly represented in one character who could be either the sanctuary or the ruin of the other characters in the story. I now actively look forward to more interesting characters from Mr. o’Brien in the future.
Outside o’Brien’s performance, however, Ponyboi struggles. Yes, the film’s intersex protagonist and their on-screen conversations about identity and gender are novel and therefore interesting philosophically — particularly when they separate the intersex experience from the trans experience, to spite their ostensible similarities in the minds of unfamiliar audiences. However, as elsewhere in the festival this year, a topic’s social or philosophical importance is insufficient to support an entire film on its own. Lead actor River Gallo’s performance, despite drawing from their own experiences, lacked the emotional resonance and attractive magnetism I needed in order to feel moved by the film’s story. As it was, only o’Brien’s performance here snapped my head toward the screen.
Temperature check
Cold
Nocturnes (2024)
Sundance • Documentary • Students in the Night
Synopsis
A researcher studies how elevation and moths interrelate in the eastern Himalayas.
My take
In a post-screening interview, co-directors Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan commented that their intent in making Nocturnes was to create an antidote for the bustle of a contemporary urban life. Their film lives up well to this intent: A meditation on the teeming accents of nature outside the bounds of a purely cosmopolitan existence, Nocturnes feels like a collection of études by an otherwise unassuming slice of the lower Himalayas, especially thanks to the brilliant sound work and helpful editing work on the film.
Tracing the in-field research efforts of a graduate student and her hired research assistants, the film reads like a polite admission of just how little we in our large cities truly know about the lives or even the routines of the many millions of insects and other creatures that have populated our “remote” areas for literal eras of geological time. Patience, openness, and a respect for ecological processes are therefore the film’s take-away virtues. In its cuts and reflections we recognize that, despite all our myriad inscrutable marks and edges that decorate our faces in a diversity as varied as the featured moths’ wings, we are not so detached from but rather clearly connected with these mini passages through the night.
Temperature check
Hot
Rob Peace (2024)
Sundance • Drama • Cycles of Trauma
Synopsis
A young Black student’s life is compromised by the imprisonment of his father.
My take
It’s hard to write that a film about the structural inequities that prevent many students of color from achieving professional and personal success is generally uninteresting; it is, after all, still more likely the case that mainstream audiences need to hear more, rather than less, about those systems of (dis)advantage that privilege the reach of some over others.
That said, it helps to be clear, while saying that this particular film is uninteresting, to emphasize that it’s the filmmaking to serve the topic and not the topic itself that falters here. David Oyelowo’s second film, following his relatively poor directorial début (The Water Man, 2020), follows the real life of Rob Peace, a Black student who during childhood lost his father to a criminal conviction and then during young adulthood lost himself to his own increasingly ill-advised attempts to successfully arrange his father’s acquittal. Peace’s tragic end — spoiler alert — at the receiving end of a territorial drug dealer’s gunshot highlights the senseless conclusions many otherwise promising young Black and Brown lives still meet while attempting to bridge where they come from with where they’re headed; but that ending and the journey to get there here feel less like the inspiringly moral tragedy of an original mind in a sea of prejudice than like the cut-and-paste cultural regurgitations of an AI film-maker trained on prior media like School Ties (Mandel [dir.], Wolf, & Ponicsan [wri.], 1992), Finding Forrester (van Sant [dir.] & Rich [wri.], 2000), Dear White People (Simien, 2014), and the “What Would You Do?” music video (City High, 2001). What I mean is, there is little to no invention or convincing passion in the piece, although Oyelowo in all his various capacities (i.e., writer, director, and actor this time) tries visibly to put it there. Unfortunately, all told, works of activism and advocacy in Peace’s name would have been far better honor to his memory than this disappointingly forgettable film.
Temperature check
Cold
Sebastian (2024)
Sundance • Drama • The Penis Mightier
Synopsis
A young writer in London compartmentalizes his day job at a magazine apart from his moonlighting as an escort in order to organize and not confront his life.
My take
Sebastian is a film that even on paper clearly relies on the performance of its leading character. The character, a young writer alternately known as Max or as Sebastian depending on context, is in nearly every scene and drives the plot through his duplicity and solitude, so much so that the actor who plays him must carry the film effectively single-handedly through its full narrative arc. To succeed, the actor must commit wholeheartedly to performing a hazily divided mental state and must convincingly portray that uncertainty often silently, while his character is literally writing on screen. Akin therefore to the requirements of Keanu Reeves’ Scott Favor in Gus van Sant’s (1993) My Own Private Idaho, Riley Keough’s Christine Reade in Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz’ (2016-2017) The Girlfriend Experience, and even Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw in especially the earliest seasons of Darren Star’s (1998-2004) Sex and the City, Sebastian needs an actor that can storytell in moments of silence as well as in moments of passion. Ruaridh Mollica is not really that actor. Adequate in the role, Mollica ultimately delivers what an image maker would call a “low-contrast portrayal” of the film’s central figure. Without purchase on the real sentiments driving Max’ / Sebastian’s actions, Mollica’s choices surrender us to backtracing Max’ / Sebastian’s intentions through retrospection once we learn ‘what happens next.’ Ultimately, this “catch-up” dynamic ends the film without an organic ability for the audience to understand the final scene as the celebratory closure it apparently is, or so the celebratory music and the fact that it is the final scene insist to us. For me, this disconnect of the visual storytelling from the audience is the film’s primary shortcoming as a narrative fiction.
That said, not all is lost here. Jonathan Hyde’s sensitive supporting performance as the older client in whose companionship Max finds a greater comfort than he otherwise expected brings comfort and spirit to Sebastian where a lesser performance would have lost (as the text of the film itself self-consciously admits) “the heart” of the piece. Bravo, then, to Hyde, whose careful paternal touches have now run the gamut in our enduring memories: from the frosty and distant Mr. Parrish in Jumanji (Johnston [dir.], Hensleigh, Taylor, & Strain [wri.], 1995) to the tender and reinforcing Nicholas here.
Overall, for a much better look at the precepts of sex (specifically gay sex) in the digital age, watch Harry Dickinson beautifully carry off Beach Rats (Hittman, 2017).
Temperature check
Tepid (thanks to Hyde)
Thelma (2024)
Sundance • Comedy • Mission: Impossible
Synopsis
A telephone scam ignites a single grandmother to seek restorative justice (by force, if necessary).
My take
A single, gaping plot hole sullies this otherwise delightful ‘lite parody’ of high-stakes capers like Mission: Impossible (de Palma [dir.], Koepp, Towne, & Zaillian [wri.], 1996). Featuring a strong leading performance from Oscar nominee June Squibb and charmingly comic supporting performances from the actors who play the members of her character’s frenetic but concerned family, Thelma rings with an authenticity of characterization only an attentive screenwriter drawing from real-life experience could muster.1
For all its charm, however, Thelma’s stark plot hole is a fatal wound to the quality of the screenplay and therefore to the lasting quality of the film. Small and quick in terms of runtime, but glaring in terms of narrative significance, the oversight, I hope, can be mended — even if only by post hoc voice-over — prior to film’s wide distribution.
Temperature check
Hot (because I guarantee you’ll like watching it)
Desire Lines (2024)
Sundance • Mixed Media • Trans-elation
Synopsis
An Iranian archivist and a young librarian develop a tentative friendship while attempting to recover the history of especially the female-to-male trans community in terms of both possessed and expressed sexuality and gender.
My take
Intermixing documentary footage and documentary sensibilities within a strictly fictional plot, director Jules Rosskam’s Desire Lines functions partially as an homage to honored figures of the past and partially as a model of interrogative compassion for the future. Thus a cross-section of especially the female-to-male trans identity in its largest social sense, the film is best when it surfaces rarely centralized concerns over the manifest independence of gender and sexuality during interviews with especially androphilic trans-masculine people who describe their experiences, positive and negative, with cis male partners or in cis male communities. Outside these moments of exposition, which on their own place the film firmly within the tradition of documentary as advocacy (see The Life and Times of Harvey Milk [Epstein, 1984] for a much more successful [albeit also more straightforward] example of this style of documentary filmmaking also within the queer community), the fictional narrative scaffolding Desire Lines employs to introduce and incorporate the interview fragments feels hollow, most likely because there isn’t really much to it. If excerpt, the entirety of the fictional runtime wouldn’t be more than twenty humdrum minutes of uneasy office exchanges between new colleagues who *may* have something to share. Sure, the final exchange takes place as depicted above, during a permissive bathhouse scene bordering on orgy; but honestly, readers, if you’re watching this film just for the tension of potentially explicit human sexuality then I’m sure you already know much better places to find it.
Temperature check
Cold
A Real Pain (2024)
Sundance • Comedy • The Odd Couple – in Poland!
Synopsis
Cousins carry their family’s charged history onto a heritage trip in Poland.
My take
Fresh off his Emmy win for Lead Actor in a Drama Series, Kieran Culkin catalyzes all the drama in Jesse Eisenberg’s new film about antagonistic cousins whose issues follow them all the way to Eastern Europe. Functionally the heat in every scene, Culkin’s Benji alternately enrages and soothes both the people around him and the people in his audience with his uncensored antics. While the film contemplates how people with similarly magnetizing dispositions are simultaneously valued and vilified by the rest of society, the on-screen chemistry between Benji and Eisenberg’s subdued but anxious David hardly gets past the emotional cat-and-mouse antics it leverages to introduce the pair to us in the audience. The two egg each other on, pressing specific buttons that only close family members know just how truly deeply their owners ache for having pressed, while everyone in the vicinity suffers the intermittently comic crossfire. Yes, there’s charm in it; the light side of Culkin’s Benji ensures that much. Yet, charm isn’t quite enough to compensate for the low-stakes grievances it’s meant to balance; while the two cousins do emotionally connect, their final reconciliation feels almost forced, set atop a handful of small victories won over their least admirable tendencies.
I guess, I just wish Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed the film, had gone farther — i.e., pushed his characters harder to cross-examine their vices and virtues as vestiges they’ve allowed themselves to retain over years of refusing to reëvaluate whether coping strategies they’d learned as youths still served them beneficially as adults. Even if we take Eisenberg’s word that he preferred the film focus on the perceptual relativism of pain instead of the learned machinery that causes pain, we’re hard pressed to tell while we watch A Real Pain where that intention isn’t ultimately at odds with the core interpersonal tension depicted on screen.
Temperature check
Cold
Love Me (2024)
Sundance • Romance • Songbirds & Snakes
Synopsis
A SMART buoy seeks happiness with a satellite circling post-apocalyptic Earth.
My take
The most original and interesting premise of the festival brings us two perspectives on a curious love story: one literally telegraphic, a conjecture born from the most lenient visions of future artificial intelligence, and the other only thinly human, contracted from the least lenient opinions on present influence — particularly, influence via social media. Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun play both pairs of lovers, whose shared identity allows both actors to play in the space between the given extremes: true automata on one hand and passing simulacra of humanity on the other. This play considers most centrally what it takes for anyone — or anything, as the clerics guarding sentience out there may insist — to be happy. Both Yeun and Stewart are up to the task, but it is really Stewart who allows her performance to go beyond the scenes on the page and into explorations of selfhood the audience can feel in her whole body. The relatability of this performance, a very good but perhaps still not great piece of screen acting, is perhaps what will surprise you most.
Temperature check
Hot (for its novelty)
Seeking Mavis Beacon (2024)
Sundance • Documentary • Retracing Key Steps
Synopsis
Two young filmmakers attempt to track down the real woman behind the popular pedagogical figure Mavis Beacon, from 1980s and 1990s’ educational software.
My take
Dynamic editing fuels this self-exploration of identity-based iconography in mainstream media — and, yes, Mavis Beacon was and is an icon for those many thousands, if not millions, of students who improved their typing skills under her virtual tutelage (myself included). What I suppose I never considered prior to this film, however, was just how significant her appearance truly was to especially the Black female students who took her lessons. Invoking their own histories and the histories of Black female representation in mainstream media as context, filmmakers Jazmin Renée Jones and Olivia McKayla Ross present an entertaining and almost uniformly praiseworthy investigation of a cultural phenomenon as part detective story, part advocacy, and part recovery effort.
The greatest stumble the film takes, in my opinion, is in its closing: Foregrounding acceptance of limitations instead of growth around them, the film’s conclusion suggests that the filmmakers, who by that point in the runtime have clearly become our surrogate protagonists, really lacked the personal growth and emotional closure necessary to steady and resolve their passionately dedicated perspectives on an open case. Without that closure, the audience, like the filmmakers, is left in narrative limbo, near to but disconnected from any clear integration of the film’s years of work and discovery into an understanding anyone would feel at least comfortable with, if not outright pleased with, acknowledging as the truth beauty of the world.
Were it not for this last-mile stumble, this film would have been undoubtedly warmer than:
Temperature check
Tepid
Indeed, writer-director Josh Margolin includes an explicit (and sweet) homage to the film’s namesake, his own grandmother Thelma, in a recapitulation of one of the film’s ending scenes, whose lines are faithful transcriptions of her real words.