Get Out (2017)
Surely you’ve heard of Get Out by now. The movie about an African American dating a white girl, and going to visit her parents in their creepy gated community? Where black people have been disappearing, and later reappearing as meek community members without any memory of their old identities?
If you didn’t know,
it’s good.
I was unfair to Get
Out at the cinema. I made the mistake of reading writer/director Jordan Peele’s
artist’s statements about how this movie would subvert tropes like why
protagonists never leave the house. Artist’s statements are dangerous, and the
movie doesn’t give compelling reasons for its hero to not get the hell out of
there.
But there’s no reason
to get hung up on details like that unless you’re holding a grudge against a
film’s creators, and Jordan Peele did a hell of a job on this movie. Even in
the theater, with my petty biases, I was utterly won over by the end of the
movie, which has one of the most satisfying series of reveals and knockdowns in
Horror history. It keeps unfolding all its mysteries and gives people some
necessary receipts.
Get Out lives and dies
on Daniel Kaluuya’s subdued performance, as he’s constantly trying not to
object to an utterly objectionable world. Early on it’s meeting his girlfriend’s
“benignly racist” parents and being pulled over by the cops for nothing. By the
end of the movie, it’s for utterly ridiculous SciFi nonsense that destroys most
of the social commentary, but is cathartic and warped and fun.
It doesn’t deserve to
be junked just because it doesn’t remain faithful to being “about” real racism
for its full runtime. Stepford Wives can be socially cutting despite going to
some ludicrous places, so why not this?
Get Out turns things
into something that can be more explicitly fought in the grounds of Horror, and
it does it damned well, and it does it near enough to reality that its ending
manages to bounce back into one of the tensest, most painfully authentic
moments in Horror cinema all year.
Gerald’s Game (2017)
I can’t stress enough how much I disliked the opening and
was riveted by the close. By the end, I was literally chanting at the screen
rooting for this woman to pull off her plan. But the movie opens on twenty-five
minutes of a cringing, whining main character. The first part is as bad as the last
part is good.
That’s the call you have to make because this is a premise a
lot of people won’t want to watch. Jessie and Gerald’s marriage is failing, so
they head off to their cabin in the woods to spice things up. Jessie is
introverted, and behaves like someone who’s been browbeaten into submission her
whole life. She isn’t comfortable when Gerald handcuffs her to the bed, but
plays along until he starts roleplaying raping her. In the middle of an
argument, Gerald dies of a heart attack. Jessie is left cuffed, with no one for
miles around. There’s no way out.
The first twenty-five minutes are pure Second Hand
Discomfort Porn, as Jessie is condescended to about feeding the wrong meat to a
hungry dog, and tries to shy away from being groped, and pressured into a roleplay
she clearly hates, and cries as she’s stuck to the bed with her husband dead on
the floor.
There is nothing I hate more in film than prolonged crying. The
sound tenses my muscles and annoys me. But there’s nothing I can do about it,
and it’s so common that I just freaking wait for the plot to move on. Gerald’s
Game takes a while to move on.
It doesn’t help that Carla Gugino plays Jessie as so tense
that she feels like she’s going to shatter at the next unkind word. The part
read as contrived to me, but her performance is necessary setup for where her
character goes next. Gugino clearly knows what she’s doing.
Jessie has a breakdown and starts fantasizing about her
husband talking to her. Then other versions of Jessie show up to voice dissent.
She argues with these figments of her imagination, diving deeply into what is
wrong with her life that she’d wind up here, and all the things she’s denied.
There is a scene where Jessie’s “other self” coaches her
into reaching a glass of water that’s just out of range that is worth the
entire trek. The power of her talking herself through something so simple and
so hard could only work in film wit he “double self.”
The book thrives upon prose’s natural relationship with
internal voices. It can all just happen in narration, and dialogue paragraphs
bouncing back and forth. Staging this sort of thing for film must have been a
challenge. It’s to the film’s credit that, after a couple minutes of acclimating
to the delusions intruding on our reality, the film makes them seem perfectly
natural.
The emotional journey she goes on, stewing with her own
doubts, regrets, and repressed memories, is excruciating and brilliant. She
forces herself out of that cultural prescribed fragile head space and towards methods
of escape. They’re brutal, but she might be able to pull them off. Her big plan
is the culmination of special knowledge very few people could put together –
and only she can, because of all the crap she’s gone through in her life. No character
in film this year earns their escape as much as Jessie.
But I’m not going to tell you if she makes it, or what
she has planned. You have to see that for yourself, if it’s something you can
watch.Up next: The Transfiguration and A Dark Song
I've heard great things about Get Out. Missed it in the theater but intend to watch it soon.
ReplyDeleteYou will be neither shocked nor suprised to learn I hadn't heard of either.
ReplyDeleteI loved Get Out. Monster and I watched in a packed theater that was cheering the whole way through. It was so much fun!
ReplyDeleteI hadn't heard of Gerald's Game. The ending sounds entriguing, but I couldn't make it through the beginning. Maybe if I fast-forwarded that part...