2021 In Review: My Favorite Documentaries of the Year

 

This is the first in a series of posts looking back at the films and television shows of the past year.

I'm currently on track to see well over 100 of this year's films by the time I publish my "Not the Best Films of 2021" here in mid-January.  It's been a terrific year for movies, too - so much so that I'll have a very tough time limiting that upcoming list to just 12 films.  So this year, I've decided to honor my three favorite documentaries of 2021 in their own separate post. Here they are, in no particular order.:

Some Kind of Heaven (director Lance Oppenheim)

The Villages - Florida's sprawling, sun-drenched, candy-colored retirement community - look like a retiree's paradise at first glance.  Lots of trim, tanned seniors tool around in golf carts between water aerobics classes, dance parties and evening cocktails, and everyone looks healthy and happy. But  director Lance Oppenheim looks a little closer and finds the hell-on-earth experience beneath the shiny surface for a handful of its residents. A recently widowed woman, who can't quite get on board with the forced cheerfulness and relentless organized group activity, can't afford to move back to be with her family in New Jersey.  Another struggles with  her husband's addiction and mental health issues with little support or understanding from the the community around her.  A would-be lothario lives out of his van and sneaks onto the property daily to hang by the pool and search for a wealthy widow to take him in. 

Oppenheim's direction is extraordinarily subtle. He captures, with no apparent irony, the aspects of life in The Villages that are genuinely appealing, yet also accords tremendous sympathy and dignity to those who aren't well served by the community's perpetually sunny and upbeat vibe.  He doesn't push an agenda so much as gently, but persistently, excavate the details of his subjects' lives. The result is both fascinating and heartbreaking.

Some Kind of Heaven is available to stream on Hulu with a subscription, or to rent from Apple TV.

Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For it (director Mariem Perez Riera)

It's hard for me to write about this film without sounding like Rita Moreno's press agent. I can't help it.  I adore her, and I can't quite separate my fandom from this testament to Moreno's talent, passion and survival instincts. And why should I?  With seven decades of show business experience behind her - and a willingness to expose the skeletons in her closet (and everyone else's too) - Moreno's recounting of her own life story is a surefire hit. She's so brutally honest, passionate, opinionated, angry, funny and full of life that there's little for a director to do but point a camera at her and let 'er rip. (And, of course, insert a generous supply of film clips from her career along the way.)

As a young child, Moreno and her mother left Puerto Rico (and her father) for New York. She got her first film contract while still a teenager and spent years struggling with Hollywood's sexual predators and racist typecasting before breaking through to an Oscar-winning performance as Anita in West Side Story.  Even then, her career proceeded only in fits and starts, in tandem with a tempestuous, years-long on-off relationship with Marlon Brando. She followed it with therapy and a stable marriage to a man who was never entirely comfortable with her outsized show-business personality. Meanwhile, she worked steadily on television and the stage. Now 90, Moreno has both the feisty energy of a much younger woman and the filter-permanently-removed frankness of a seen-it-all nonagenarian, committed to both activism and art. The happy result is a documentary that's equal parts entertainment, education, and inspiration.

Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It is available to stream on Netflix.

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (Director Robert Weide)

I've already reviewed this in a previous post (you can read it here.)  Since seeing it, I've spent a fair amount of time reading both Vonnegut's own work and other people's assessments of him; as a result, I'm forced to admit that Weide's documentary is a tad more hagiographic than I initially realized. Some of the most difficult and contradictory aspects of Vonnegut's personality aren't acknowledged at all. (One example: Vonnegut, a survivor of the Dresden firebombing and passionate opponent of the Vietnam War, owned a sizable amount of stock in Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of napalm. Wouldn't you like to know why? I would.)

Even so, I remain extremely fond of this film, if only because it allows me to spend time with one of my most cherished authors.  It has saddened me to realize, as I've read up on Vonnegut in the last few weeks, that many reviewers still dismiss him based on his special appeal to sensitive young people.  Their position appears to be that his writing itself is adolescent, that it won't hold up for older, wiser readers. Frankly, this is bullshit. 

Just yesterday, I finished re-reading Mother Night, Vonnegut's mournful 1961 novel about the aftermath of World War II and the thin, malleable boundaries between collective guilt and personal culpability for its horrors. It's infused with the kind of world-weary heartache that only an experienced adult can understand; I was much more moved by it this time - emotionally shattered, in fact - than I was or even could have been at 16. And, for the record, I turn 62 next month, which makes me 23 years older than Vonnegut was when he wrote it. 

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time is available to rent from Amazon or Apple TV.

What I Watched This Weekend: House of Gucci and Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time

 

If you see House of Gucci primarily to admire Lady Gaga's much-touted, Method-inspired performance, you won't be disappointed.  

If, however, you are hoping to indulge in a glamourous story of love gone wrong, draped in high fashion and shot in exquisite Italian locations, you might want to rethink your multiplex selection. The tragic fall of the house of Gucci, it turns out, comes down mainly to fraud, tax evasion and family members who sell off their shares - plot twists that are painfully difficult to make interesting, let alone comprehensible. Even an estimable director like Ridley Scott can't quite pull it off. As for the fashion, the only runway show we see in any detail is Tom Ford's first show for Gucci, which comes very late in the film.

House of Gucci has some good moments, primarily in its first half when Gucci heir, Maurizio (Adam Driver) and his wife, Patrizia, are wildly in love and struggling with Maurizio's indifference to his inherited wealth. Patrizia, a secretary in her middle-class father's trucking company, is canny and calculating in ingratiating herself with Maurizio's elegant, moneyed family, but also very much in love with her husband. Gaga nails the complexity in her character without hitting a single false note.  A lesser actress might have made Patrizia into a hot-headed gold digger, but Gaga makes her a little harder to get a handle on. She's conniving, but she has better business instincts than anyone born to the Gucci name, and you can feel her genuine pain in not being taken seriously.

Gaga, undeniably the films' VIP, tears into her role with full-bodied relish. You can't take your eyes off her. That she is the clear standout in a cast which also includes Driver, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Jared Leto and Salma Hayek, marks her as an actress whose continuing career should be exciting to watch. (Whereas Leto is the least compelling member of the ensemble.  Playing the family buffoon, he overacts the hell out of his role, affecting an accent that sounds more like an Italian waiter in a Bugs Bunny cartoon than any real person.)

Unfortunately, as Patrizia and Maurizio's marriage comes apart - and Gaga has less to do - the film also loses its way.  By the time she hires hitmen to assassinate her estranged husband (which should have been the dramatic high point of the film), you barely care anymore. And that's mostly because, House of Gucci is just too damn long.  At two hours and 37 minutes - especially when preceded by 25 minutes of coming attractions - it makes for one butt-numbing night at the multiplex.

Like Robert Weide, the director of Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, I discovered Vonnegut's writing at the age of 16 through his novel Breakfast of Champions and read his books near-obsessively over the next few years.  He was funny and mournful at the same time, an iconoclast who said the true things no one else would say aloud.  And he was from Indiana, which blew my young mind because he was like no one in my Hoosier experience.

Weide, best known as the Emmy-winning director of Curb Your Enthusiasm, embarked on making a documentary about Vonnegut when he was just 23, after a friendly exchange of letters with the author. That documentary, only just completed after nearly 40 years, not only presents a robust and challenging assessment of Vonnegut but also chronicles his close friendship with Weide.

There are obvious dangers when a filmmaker grows too close to his subject, not least a lack of objectivity which can too easily devolve into hagiography. Then there's the potentially problematic nature of a filmmaker who injects himself into the subject's story.  

Thankfully, Weide manages to sidestep both these potential pitfalls. Vonnegut is portrayed as far less than saintly in extensive interviews with his children (his own three, plus the four nephews he took in when his beloved sister and her husband both died in the same week). As youngsters, they were witnesses to the writer's early, struggling days when he was prone to wild mood swings with unpredictable fits of rage and anguish.  Although their adult remembrances are tempered with some forgiveness and understanding, the picture they paint is uncomfortable at best.

As for Weide's recurring presence in the film, it's clear the two men did have a genuinely close friendship as evinced by the many warm, appreciative answering machine messages the writer left for Weide over the years, all played back here.  Weide manages to make himself an inoffensive stand-in for all of us who discovered and worshipped Vonnegut as young people.  If anything, I envied Weide's friendship with Vonnegut and wished I'd been brave enough to write him a fan letter myself.

I particularly enjoyed the footage of Vonnegut in his hometown of Indianapolis, where he enjoyed a privileged and mostly happy childhood as part of a socially prominent family. (His father was an architect, whose buildings I hope are still standing in downtown Indy. The family also owned a popular chain of hardware stores.) He's seen chatting with Shortridge High School classmates at his 60th reunion, swapping World War II reminisces with the fellow veterans in his class, and he comes off as a regular Hoosier guy.

Although he dismisses the notion in one of the film's interview segments, World War II forever scarred and shaped Vonnegut's world view. As a young soldier, he was captured by the Germans and placed in a prison camp near Dresden.  After the horrific firebombing of that city, he and fellow POWs were tasked with excavating, stacking and burying the hundreds of dead bodies trapped in the rubble.  It took him years to finally come to terms with this trauma in his masterpiece Slaughterhouse Five. The experience becomes a recurring touchpoint in this documentary; even the title of the film is a reference to the novel's most famous line: "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time."

Unstuck in Time is exhaustive in scope, yet some chapters in Vonnegut's life remain mysterious. Little is said about his second marriage to photographer Jill Krementz. It's implied there was trouble in the marriage; apparently, Vonnegut lived alone in his final years. Yet the two never divorced, and Krementz herself does not go on the record here.

I can't speak for viewers who are unfamiliar with Vonnegut, but to those of us who idolized him, this film is pure heaven. It's easily the most engrossing and entertaining documentary I've seen in years.  And it sent me straight back to Vonnegut's work. With the exception of Slaughterhouse Five, which I revisited about ten years ago, I hadn't touched one of his books since college. But this morning I downloaded Breakfast of Champions to my IPad and starting reading it again for the first time since 1976.  I was stunned at how prescient it was, right from its opening chapter - how in tune with our current day its initial sentiments were.  Here's a sample from that first chapter:

"The teachers told the children that (1492) was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

Here was another piece of evil nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human being everywhere else.  There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see...

Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continue to think of ordinary human beings as machines."

Wow!! I can assure you that no one said this kind of stuff out loud in 1973 - at least no one in Indiana anyway. Vonnegut was "woke" about 50 years before "woke" was anything other than the past tense of "wake."  

I think it's time for a Kurt Vonnegut revival. I can imagine young people once again embracing him, turning to his novels for a dose of sanity and humane good sense in a world where neither of those things is much in evidence.  And it's time for me to re-visit his books myself. I first read them as an unsophisticated, unworldly teen. I'd like to see how they'll hold up for me now that I'm older than Vonnegut was when he wrote most of them.

Quick Take on: Spencer

 

In Spencer, director Pablo Larrain clearly wants you to see Princess Diana as a woman trapped in an uncaring, archaic system, deprived of love and close to madness. Unfortunately the Diana of this bizarre fantasia actually comes off as a spoiled sourpuss who’s pissed off at having to spend another Christmas with the in-laws. 

Larrain doesn't do traditional biopics. His 2017 film Jackie focused in on Jacqueline Kennedy's life in the days just following her husband's assassination; it was a psychologically astute and keenly observed study of a woman in the grip of post-traumatic stress. But that film succeeded because it was rooted in actual events and had some connection to reality.

With Spencer, Larrain  and screenwriter Steven Knight have thrown objective reality out the window and turned a Christmas holiday with the royal family at Sandringham into a psychological horror film with Diana as a tormented woman losing her grip on sanity.  It's all tense, jarring string music on the soundtrack,  and castle rooms filmed to look ominous and imposing.  Even the ghost of Anne Boleyn shows up to convince Diana she is doomed. 

Anyone who's watched The Crown already knows that the Windsors are a pretty insular clan who follow an odd but firmly entrenched series of rituals with unquestioning fealty. As depicted, both in that series and in Spencer, those rituals seem fairly harmless. Is it really such a chore to eat at pre-arranged meal times, show up for an annual family photo, go to church with your mother-in-law? No one in the family comes off here as menacing or unconcerned about Diana, just a little stuffy. Even Prince Charles tries, not unkindly, to help Diana understand what she signed up for in the way of duty and sacrifice. (When he tells her she has to be able to do things she hates, that’s not being mean. That’s pretty much the definition of adulthood.)

The lesson doesn't take. Diana continues to obsess about Anne Boleyn's fate and to act out a series of petty rebellions and clueless disruptions: A refusal to show up on time for any meal. Complaining about having to exchange presents on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. Entreating the estate's chef to talk with her about how dreadful pheasant hunting is when that poor guy is just trying to make sure the Christmas dinner is served on time.

In real life, Diana was hurt by her reputation within the family as being unstable, and Larrain unwittingly gives credence to that characterization of the princess. In addition to the Anne Boleyn stuff, she deliberately injures herself with a wire cutter, wanders the grounds alone late at night, and deliberately leaves her curtains open while undressing  - even after she's been told that tabloid photographers with long-lensed cameras have been snapping pictures of her. 

About that pheasant hunting... Maybe it's me, but an opposition to pheasant hunting is not the hill I'd choose to die on in a quest to bring the monarchy to its knees. For one thing, it's not necessarily an aristocratic or wasteful endeavor. I grew up in an area of rural Indiana where hedgerows in the fields made for an excellent pheasant habitat. My father and uncles shot pheasants every year; I watched my mom pluck their feathers and clean their carcasses in our kitchen. My family and I ate those pheasants, too, which was helpful when the grocery budget was tight. Stag hunting, with its apparent objective of providing trophy heads to hang in castle rooms, seems far more offensive to me. But then, Peter Morgan has pretty much worked that "dying stag as metaphor for threatened monarch" to death in both The Queen and The Crown. Maybe that's why Larrain chose to focus on pheasants.

"But how is Kristen Stewart's performance as Diana?" you may be asking.  Stewart is too good an actress to be bad, but her utter lack of resemblance to the princess is jarring, especially with the memory of lookalike Emma Corrin's brilliant work on The Crown so fresh in our memories. They didn't even take the trouble to give Stewart contact lenses to transform her pale green eyes into Diana's famously big baby blues. She gets the mannerisms and voice right, however, and ultimately just about gets me on Diana's side. But not quite.

Everything we know about Diana that makes us sympathetic to her plight is missing from Larrain’s film. There is virtually no mention of the charity work to which she was so devoted and even less evidence of her famously empathetic and caring personality. Charles’ infidelity is obliquely referenced  while Diana’s extramarital affairs appear not not to have happened at all.   By limiting the action to three days at a sprawling estate and reducing the conflict to just Diana’s resistance to hoary rituals, Spencer reduces the real tragedy of its heroine’s life to an isolated episode of despair, to be solved with fast food and pop tunes in the final scene.

Report from the Chicago International Film Festival - 2021

When was the last time you were in a large, crowded movie theater, anxiously awaiting the beginning of a new film?  When both you and the audience around you laughed, cried and sighed together over the story and the characters? When the entire audience burst into sustained, enthusiastic applause as the end credits rolled? When you left the theater in such a happy afterglow that you just had to call or text friends to tell them they must see this?

This was my experience on Saturday night, at the Chicago International Film Festival, watching a screening of Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God.  As much as I loved the film itself, it was the experience of seeing it with a full audience, on a huge screen that enhanced its impeccable scenic design and sumptuous cinematography, that brought me close to tears. "I forgot what this was like!" I thought to myself, more than once in those two-or-so hours. During the COVID lockdown, I had stopped  imagining pleasures that I once took for granted, not allowing myself to even think about travelling outside the country, seeing live theatre, or being in crowded events of any kind.  When one of those old pleasures was unexpectedly restored for me, the tidal wave of emotion it unleashed took me by surprise. I'd actually planned to see another film that night, starting just 10 minutes after The Hand of God ended. But I couldn't bring myself to go.  I needed to sit with that feeling of joy and wonder.  And also to text a few cinephile friends who I knew would love the film as much as I did. 

(Note to the concerned: all in-person screenings at the CIFF require attendees to present either proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test result within 72 hours prior to the screening. Masks are required, when not actively eating or drinking.)

This was my first trip to the CIFF since 2018; last year's festival was almost entirely virtual, and in 2019, I was helping to care for my seriously ill parents. I hadn't even been in downtown Chicago for any reason in well over two years.  Despite all the headlines about muggings, car-jackings and other escalating types of crime, this trip felt no less safe or enjoyable than it had in previous years. It was a clear and gorgeous weekend in Chicago with tourists happily roaming the Magnificent Mile and cinephiles giddily queuing up at the River East AMC for an outstanding slate of cinematic treats.

My festival weekend was evenly divided between packed evening screenings of high profile, highly anticipated films and afternoons of disturbing documentaries. Back at home, I streamed one additional title. (Because we're still not out of the COVID woods, the festival is offering a sizable slate of virtual presentations again this year.)  What follows are my thoughts about the films I saw, in the order that I saw them:

The Other Side of the River 

This German documentary follows a 20-year-old Syrian woman named Hala who leaves her home and crosses the Euphrates to join an all-female Kurdish freedom fighting unit.  After ISIS is forced out of her hometown, she returns and joins the police force there, much to the dismay of her traditional Muslim family.

This film is uncomfortable on many levels, and not always to good effect. The filmmaker, Antonia Kilian, does little but follow Hala around and point her camera at whatever she can get away with filming; the results are raw and shocking, but too frequently provided without needed context. There is very little narration, and Kilian's camerawork can be disruptive and intrusive. The obvious discomfort of Hala's mother and sisters at being so relentlessly filmed is upsetting to witness.

Hala and her fellow fighters are militantly opposed to marriage and to men in general; their comments are startling, but not difficult to understand. There's overwhelming evidence here of the harrowing lives that Syrian women lead, with multiple stories of horrific abuse at the hands of their fathers, brothers and husbands. Hala's own father shows up briefly to tell us that "We can take care of Hala with one bullet." He goes on to claim that he loves all his children and wants the best for them, but seems fixated on the 'shame' that Hala's actions have brought on the family. Her mother, who has given birth to twelve children - some of them still toddlers - can't be much past 40. But she has the careworn face and slow, shuffling walk of a much older woman.

Hala isn't an easily embraceable heroine. We're told told that she throws a grenade into her family's home after learning that two of her younger sisters are being married off. Although we never learn the extent of the damage she causes or whether any of her family were injured, we do get to see her bitter unrepentance for her actions.

I felt very sad and a little sick after watching this, but I'm not sure if that's what Kilian wanted me to feel or even how she felt herself. While I usually appreciate a filmmaker who lets me draw my own conclusions, I believe The Other Side of the River would have benefitted from some judicious editing and a clear point of view.

The Hand of God

This film is a welcome change of pace from Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, whose films get nuttier and weirder every year. (And whose HBO Max series, The New Pope, I named the worst streaming series of 2020.)   

Here, Sorrentino mostly puts aside his tendencies towards meticulously art-directed profanity to tell the story of his own early life in Naples.  Young actor Filipo Scotti plays Fabietto, a stand-in for Sorrentino as a teen-ager in the 1980s. Sorrentino opens with raucous remembrances of his large, loud, exuberantly vulgar extended family, including a sexy but problematic aunt (Luisa Ranieri) who will bewitch and haunt Fabietto throughout his life. His parents are played by Teresa Saponangelo and Toni Servillo (the latter, a familiar fixture in Sorrentino's work) and they are superbly funny and mercurial.

(Slight spoiler ahead - skip the next two paragraphs if you want to go in this film with no expectations...)

Like all Neopolitans of that time, Fabietto is obsessed by Napoli's recently acquired soccer star Diego Maradona, and (in a plot twist from Sorrentino's own life), Maradona is instrumental in keeping him alive. When his parents go skiing, Fabietto decides to stay home and watch Maradona play. At their ski house, his mother and father are poisoned  and killed by a carbon monoxide leak. As Fabietto's uncle tells him at the funeral, he has been saved by "the hand of god." In more ways than one - "the hand of God" is also Maradona's explanation for scoring a World Cup semifinals-winning goal.

Much as I loved this film, I must admit that once Fabietto's parents are gone, it loses a bit of its focus and energy. Some of this may be by design, as it's reflective of Fabietto's own disorientation as he struggles to come to terms with his grief and pain.  But it's also fair to say that Scotti lacks the nuance and range to effectively cue us into his character's emotional state.  Even so, Sorrentino surrounds him with enough oddballs and strange experiences to keep us invested in the story as well as to explain his ultimate decision to become a film director.  

There are nods to Fellini throughout - some subtle, some obvious - including a scene where Fabietto accompanies his older brother to a cattle call audition for a Fellini film (another incident taken from Sorrentino's real life.) My initial gut reaction is to call this Sorrentino's Amarcord, but in truth, there's a soupcon of  8 1/2 in the mix as well, laced with the sensibilities of  a man who came of age in the 1980s.

And then, there is this wonderful image: Fabietto comes upon a late-night film set in the heart of Naples. A scene is being shot in which a man in an impeccably tailored suit is hung by his heels high above the street, surrounded by beautiful rococo buildings. We get no context for this scene while it's being filmed, nor do we get any additional information when Fabietto is later shown watching the scene in a cinema.  But it's a stunning, intriguing image all the same. And its so characteristic of Sorrentino's recent work, in which a lot of cool, visually interesting stuff is shot for no apparent reason other than it just looks interesting. Fortunately,  The Hand of God has much more going on beneath its beautiful surface.

The Hand of God comes to Netflix on December 15, but it's really worth seeing on the big screen. Try to seek it out in theaters after December 3, if you can.

Babi Yar: Context

Babi Yar is a ravine near Kiev, Ukraine in which over 100,000 Jews were massacred by the German army in 1941.  As per its title, this film is a chronological assembly of actual film footage shot before, during and after the time of the massacre, intended to put this horrific event into proper context. And it succeeds nobly, though it is a predictably tough watch.

The films opens with brief, grainy shots of Ukranian Jews being beaten and dragged through the streets of Kiev by their hair.  It closes with the actual execution of twelve German officers who were charged with war crimes, a gruesome episode  in which one officer appears to faint just before the gallows give way and the camera lingers on the twitching hands of another in the throes of death. Suffice it say that everything in between is sobering and properly shocking. (But be assured, there is no footage of the massacre itself.)

I chose to see this film because it was directed by Sergei Loznitsa, whose 2020 film State Funeral I greatly admired. State Funeral was a compilation of film footage shot during the national mourning period and funeral of Joseph Stalin, presented with some musical accompaniment but no narration or commentary.  It was mostly fascinating, save for one long section in which Chopin's Funeral March is played on a seemingly endless repeating loop while mourners file past Stalin's open coffin.  

Babi Yar; Context  takes a similar approach to its material, offering only a handful of title cards to supply information that can't be gleaned from the footage itself. It's an important and worthwhile film, but definitely not for the faint of heart.

 

The Power of the Dog

I'd like to give you a tidy introductory summation of Jane Campion's new film, but it defies easy description or standard genre labels.  It's shot on a ranch in Montana, but it's no Western. It has elements of a psychological thriller, but to call it such doesn't really get to the heart of its story either.

Whatever you call it, Benedict Cumberbatch is unnerving here as an inexplicably cruel and conniving rancher. He and his gentler, more refined brother (Jesse Plemons) run a family ranch together in uneasy partnership where Plemmons steadfastly deflects his brother's insults. When Plemmons meets and marries a sweet-tempered widow (Kirsten Dunst), Cumberbatch makes it his mission to undermine and unnerve her, and succeeds in driving her to drink.  Dunst's teenage son, sensitive and shy, also becomes the target of Cumberbatch's nastiness.

What I've given you is a bare outline of the story.  It's far more twisty and subtle than I can properly convey, and let's just say that at least two of these characters are not quite what they seem to be at first glance.  Cumberbatch is electrifying in every scene, always managing to suggest a vulnerability - or at least some unplumbed complexity - beneath every wincingly nasty wisecrack. The gorgeously photographed landscape that surrounds them all is beautiful and forbidding at the same time. The film kept me off balance and guessing at things right up to the final shot (and apparently did the same for the rest of audience, judging by the conversations I overheard on my way out of the theater.)

The Power of the Dog will be in theaters in November, followed by a Netflix debut on December 5.  

The Worst Person in the World

This Norwegian comedy-drama about a thirty-something woman's inability to settle on a career path or a partner is a pleasant, if not spectacular, way to spend a couple of hours.  It's been compared by at least one critic to Frances Ha  - an apt comparison, although this film is more distinctly European in its ambiguity. Its scenes wander in and around the characters emotions, without clearly defined comic beats or other cues to elicit desired audience reactions.

The film benefits from the fine lead performance of Renate Reinsve, a sweet-faced and subtle actress who comes off as likable and sympathetic even as her character makes selfish, ill-advised life choices. Her drift from job to job is played for laughs, while the scenes of her romantic break-ups are played with a realistic ambivalence and genuine pain. 

I've seen a few films by this director (Joachim Trier), but I think this may be my favorite of his work. It's certainly the sunniest and sweetest of his films that I've seen.

At Last! These are NOT the Best Films of 2020...

 

I took forever to get around to this post, because 2020 is the one year that I DO NOT want to spend time recollecting, and COVID wasn't the half of it. It was a year full of upheavals and loss, personal and professional. I started the year with one parent in nursing home hospice care and the other at home with round-the-clock caregivers, sinking further and further into dementia on an almost daily basis.  By mid-June, I had lost them both. Less than 36 hours after my father's funeral, I started a completely new position at the company where I worked - without having been able to attend the previous two weeks of training and orientation while I'd been keeping vigil at Dad's bedside.  At the end of the year, I retired - happily, but this came with a whole new level of adjusting and adapting.

I think this list reflects my fractured state of mind, and that's why I continue to call it "NOT the best films of the year." Because they may not be - they're just my favorites and you can draw your own conclusions.

I watched 240 movies last year; just over a third of them were 2020 releases.  At some point, fatigue set in and I lost my usual year-end fervor to catch up on major new releases.  I have yet to see any of the following generally acclaimed 2020 films (and feel no urgency to watch them anytime soon): Collective, Dick Johnson is Dead, Babyteeth, Time, Vitalina Verela, Soul, Da 5 Bloods, Corpus Christi, The Vast of Night or any of the Small Axe films.

Then there were the acclaimed films that I actually did see, but didn't particularly care for.  Unlike other 'best of 2020' lists you'll find all over the internet, mine does not contain Mank, Shirley, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Martin Eden or Bacarau. Maybe if I'd watched them in some other year, I might have appreciated them more.  But in 2020, I couldn't get my mind around why they were supposed to be so great.

So... this list is, as ever, highly personal and occasionally idiosyncratic.  I'd rather refer you to offbeat or overlooked films that I found interesting, than crank out a predictable list that passes muster with every other film blogger on the internet.  If you watch one or more of my selections and find you like them, then I have achieved my goal - and I have included "where to stream' information to make that easier for you.

A final caveat:  to be eligible for this list, the film must have been released in the Chicago area for the first time between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2020, inclusive.  This means that some 2019 films (most notably Portrait of a Lady on Fire) were considered for the 2020 list, while many 2020 films (among them Promising Young Woman, Minari, News of the World, Nomadland, Pieces of a Woman, Undine and Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time) will be considered for the 2021. And I know it's still only January, but I can just about guarantee that at least of couple of those will make next year's list.

Here, finally, are my 13 favorite films of 2020, in reverse order of preference:

12. (TIED) Peter Sellers: A State of Comic Ecstasy (dir. John O'Rourke)

                   The Ghost of Peter Sellers (dir. Peter Medak)

These are my most personal choices on this list.  My late father worshipped Peter Sellers to the point where it sometimes felt like Sellers was a member of our extended family.  Every new Sellers film was a celebrated event, with a trip to the movie theater immediately preceded by a family dinner out, usually an all-you-could-eat Friday night fish fry. It was a tradition we kept up fairly consistently from about the time of Casino Royale till his dreadful final film, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. 

One of my life's greatest regrets is that I showed my father the 2005 HBO biopic The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, in which Geoffrey Rush portrayed the late, great comic actor as a relentlessly mean, narcissistic son of a bitch. I still feel sad when I recall Dad's crestfallen expression at the film's end. It was worse than if I'd told a five-year-old that there was no Santa Claus. I'd effectively dethroned his most adored idol.

I kind of wish Dad had lived to see one or both of these documentaries. Neither shies away from Seller's dark and difficult sides, but, taken together, they're significantly more generous and nuanced in their assessment of him. 

A State of Comic Ecstasy is a distinctly British take on Sellers: a BBC documentary in which Dr. Strangelove is the only of Sellers' American films to be discussed in any meaningful way. (His entire body of work with director Blake Edwards is summed up by a three-second clip from The Pink Panther and a cursory voice-over comment; Being There is crammed into the last 30 seconds as an obvious afterthought.) But copious clips from Sellers' vast collection of home movies - plus interviews with his wives, children, co-stars and personal secretaries - yield a portrait of a gifted but painfully insecure man with a few addiction issues, a sometimes tenuous grip on reality, and an inability to cope with the demands (both external and self-generated) of his own genius.

The Ghost of Peter Sellers, by contrast, specifically focuses on Sellers' inadvertent sabotage of the never-released pirate comedy Ghost in the Noonday Sun. Driven by his intolerance of mediocrity (and often aided and abetted by his good friend and frequent collaborator, Spike Milligan), Sellers turned the shoot into a nightmare for director Peter Medak - who never fully recovered, professionally or emotionally. This film is Medak's attempt to come to grips with the experience. You feel his pain and frustration in every frame, but you'll also see that Medak was ill equipped to shape the nearly incoherent script into a decently funny film, let alone handle the fragile ego of his star. (The many clips shown from Ghost... are, without exception, god-awful.) Blessedly it all ends on a note of forgiveness and acceptance, with Medak unreservedly acknowledging Sellers' brilliance.

(Peter Sellers: A State of Comic Ecstasy is available to watch in its entirety on You Tube.  The Ghost of Peter Sellers is available to stream on Amazon Prime or the Criterion Channel with a subscription - or can be rented on ITunes or Vudu.)

11. Waiting for the Barbarians (dir. Ciro Guerra)

This harrowing adaptation of J. M. Coetzee's novel is not without its flaws, but Mark Rylance is so damn good in it that you overlook the occasional missteps. Rylance plays the magistrate in an unidentified colonial outpost of a similarly unnamed empire. He fancies himself a fair and kind magistrate, but his infatuation with a native woman and his attempts to help her heal after a brutal attack soon bring to light his own complicity in the sins of his countrymen.  Rylance is such a thoughtful and nuanced actor; the slightest flickers of emotion on his face are endlessly fascinating to watch. Johnny Depp makes a couple of brief appearances as a sadistic colonel who orders brutal tortures of locals on the flimsiest of charges (leading to several scenes that are very difficult to watch) and Robert Pattinson has a cameo role late in the film.  But it's Rylance's show all the way, and it's a provocative examination of his character's naivete and delusions about his own good intentions. The final scene is heart-stopping.

(Waiting for the Barbarians is available to stream on Amazon Prime or Hulu with a subscription, or to rent on ITunes or Vudu.)

10. Kajillionaire (dir. Miranda July)

The quirk factor in Miranda July's film work tends to be uncomfortably high; her celebrated 2005 feature debut, Me You and Everyone We Know, felt like it was written by high school sophomore with very little life experience but lots of eccentric imagination. There's a pretty high level of quirkiness here, too, but it's nicely balanced by Evan Rachel Wood's performance - one which I would not hesitate to call miraculous.  She plays the daughter of two small-time grifters (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger) who have dropped out of society and rejected the life of 'false fakey people' to eke out a meager living with low-paying scams and mail theft. Wood inadvertently gets a glimpse of what normal families and parental affection look like and comes to realize what her parents' choices have cost her. Her performance is strange and off-putting at first - she affects an unnaturally husky voice that sounds oddly like Mira Sorvino's in the Romy and Michelle movie.  But her performance has a touching feral quality, and her awkward but deliberate grasping towards normalcy is at once heartbreaking and exhilarating to watch.  Jenkins and Winger are no slouches, of course, but this is Wood's film to steal.

(Kajillionaire is available to rent on Amazon, ITunes, Google Play and Vudu.)

9. Belushi (dir. R. J. Cutler)

If, like me, you are old enough to have read National Lampoon in its heyday or watched the very first season of SNL, this documentary profile of John Belushi will be like a trip down memory lane with old friends. It's loaded with classic sketches from SNL and the Lampoon stage shows, Blues Brothers performances and film clips, plus remembrances from Belushi's friends and co-stars. And to re-experience those belly laughs again is a joy, indeed.

But of course, there's more to it than nostalgia. Director R. J. Cutler worked closely with Belushi's widow, Judith Belushi Pisano, to get at the demons and self-destructive excess that led to Belushi's tragic death from a drug overdose at 33. The clues to the actor's inner torment are found in his letters to Judith, a number of which are read here (by Bill Hader) as voice-overs to home movie footage or imaginatively animated sequences.  For all his apparent brash confidence as a comic performer, Belushi was fraught with insecurity and self-doubt, forever struggling to be good when all he wanted to do was party away his fears. None of this is particularly shocking - it's difficult to name any truly great comic actor who wasn't a bit mentally unbalanced (see the Peter Sellers references above, just for starters.) But this film is equally a great reminder of just how damn funny the man was in his prime.

(Belushi is currently available to stream only on Showtime platforms or Direct TV, with a subscription)

8. The Nest (dir. Sean Durkin)

Our first cue that Jude Law's character isn't getting enough challenge or satisfaction in his career is his ridiculously over-the-top gloating after beating his young son in a backyard soccer game. That comes early on and The Nest continues to deliver odd, gut-punch cues to his toxic ambition and the toll it takes on his wife and children.  Law takes a potentially high-earning position with a London brokerage firm and uproots his American family, moving them to a once-grand, now empty and creepy manor house he can ill afford. Things fall apart from there. The Nest has the unsettling vibe of a good horror film. Which, in a sense, it actually is - if you can consider rampant greed and materialism to be a kind of menacing monster. (Not a stretch for me, I'll admit). Carrie Coon is especially good as Law's down-to-earth wife, although with her blond locks and occasionally icy gaze, I more than once forgot I wasn't watching Cate Blanchett.  The resemblance is eerie.

(The Nest is available to rent on Amazon, Vudu or Google Play.)

7. The Invisible Man

Just the latest testament to the first-rate "bad ass-ery" of Elizabeth Moss. (I think I just invented a word!) The film opens, thrillingly, with her escape from her controlling, abusive tech billionaire husband.  Every time you think Moss has finally escaped his grasp, he shows up to sabotage her plans. Or rather, doesn't show up, as this tech genius has found a way to make himself invisible and uses that power to wreak all kinds of havoc. There are moments here which could easily have devolved into unintentional comedy, but Moss is so fully committed in every harrowing moment that they tend to work like gangbusters.  

(The Invisible Man is currently only available on HBO platforms, with a subscription)

6. Bad Education (dir. Cory Finley)

If you've forgotten how good an actor Hugh Jackman is, Bad Education is a highly entertaining reminder.  Like other films before (To Die For and The Laundromat spring to mind), it filters a true crime story through a darkly comedic lens.  Jackman and the always wonderful Allison Janney play administrators at an elite Long Island high school who may be funneling school funds into their own personal bank accounts. Jackman's performance evolves like a set of nesting dolls, with ever stranger levels of subterfuge and twisted good intentions revealing themselves, and he is mesmerizing in every minute of it. The direction and writing are first-rate, with a sharp cast that also includes Ray Romano and a fine young actress, Geraldine Viswanathan, as the student reporter who stumbles onto the evidence.

(Bad Education is available to stream on all HBO platforms, with a subscription - or to rent on Amazon, ITunes, Google Play or Vudu.)

5. Sound of Metal (dir. Darius Marder)

Riz Ahmed plays a rock drummer who realizes he is going deaf and who comes to terms with that loss in unexpected, unpredictable fits and starts. Ahmed's performance is unspectacular but all the more affecting for that. The sound design is particularly well-conceived, allowing the viewer to experience what Ahmed's character does as his hearing deteriorates - or is ineffectively improved with cochlear implants. I like that the film doesn't tell you what to feel or think about Ahmed's situation, but lets you take the emotional journey along with him. It's a small, unprepossessing film that winds up being immensely rewarding.

(Sound of Metal is currently available to stream only on Amazon Prime with a subscription.)

4. First Cow (dir. Kelly Reichardt)

Now and then, I like a film that takes its time to build a sense of atmosphere and place rather than just jumping into a narrative.  First Cow is a slow starter in the best tradition, immersing itself at the outset in an introduction to the natural landscape in which its story unfolds. It gives us ample time to acquaint ourselves with Otis "Cookie" Figowitz (John Magaro), the cook traveling with a fur trapping expedition, and his developing friendship with a Chinese immigrant (Orion Lu). The 'first cow' of the title refers to, literally, the first milk cow to be brought to the Oregon territory; that bovine character plays a critical role in the development of Cookie's burgeoning home-baked biscuit business. And that's all I'm giving you - it's best to go into this film fresh, open minded, and willing to go along with where it takes you.

(First Cow is available to stream on Showtime platforms or Direct TV with a subscription, or to rent on Amazon, ITunes or Google Play.)

3. Never Rarely Sometimes Always (dir. Eliza Hittman)

This is a drama about about a small-town teenage girl's grueling trip to New York City for an abortion. It is not polemical, it does not take sides.  It is observational and restrained, but even so, it demolishes the notion that young women become sexually active because abortions are convenient. 

Sidney Flanigan, who plays the pregnant teen, keeps her emotional cards close to her chest, only occasionally letting us see the cracks in her stoic façade. It's strongly suggested that she was bullied or coerced into sex by an abusive sometime boyfriend, but Flanigan guards even this information with care.  It's an amazingly skillful and nuanced performance from such a young actress - restrained but transparent at the same time.

Eliza Hittman directs the film like a detached procedural, but that only heightens the tension and urgency. The legal and bureaucratic hurdles depicted here are exhausting and unnerving to witness. Even at the end, you never really let out a breath of relief.  To embrace this film is not a matter of being pro-choice or pro-life - it's more specific than that. It asks us to consider one young woman's heartbreaking situation and allows us to draw our own conclusions.  

(Never Rarely Sometimes Always is  available to stream on HBO platforms with a subscription or to rent on Amazon, ITunes, Google Play or Vudu.)

2. The Assistant

No one ever says the name "Harvey Weinstein" in The Assistant, but he's an almost ghostly presence in the story, lingering around the edges, informing the drama.  We never see the film executive for whom Julia Garner plays the long-suffering assistant, but we see her cleaning up after one of his trysts, returning lost earrings to the women he trifles with, lying to his wife about his whereabouts.  Turns out what we don't actually see is creepier and more disturbing than if we'd witnessed it all.

The Assistant relies heavily on mood and atmosphere and requires an attention to tossed-off details. It seems to mainly take place in shadows and half-darkness. Garner's work day begins before dawn as she arrives at the office well ahead of everyone else to stock up the water bottles in the fridge, start the coffee and distribute the faxes. By the time she leaves, it's hours past sunset.  The tension and compromises of her work are everywhere apparent in her tense posture and tightly concealed reactions, and the multitude of small humiliations she suffers in a single day lend an ever-increasing weight to the story as it moves along.

Every detail of Garner's day is revelatory - from the abbreviated, half-finished meals she occasionally gets to gulp down in the breakroom to the apology emails she is forced to send her boss with wording dictated to her in detail by male co-workers.  Along with the name Harvey Weinstein, the other never-heard words in this drama are "MeToo," "sexual harassment" and "discrimination" - not even in an electrifying scene between Garner and Matthew McFayden as the firm's way-too-smooth HR director.

But by the film's end, however, we know the toll these unaddressed grievances are taking on the overworked, underpaid assistant. Garner, who may be best known to audiences from the Netflix series Ozark, is brilliant in a difficult role. Whenever we finally get around to having the Oscars, I'll be outraged if she isn't on the list of Best Actress nominees.

(The Assistant is available to stream on Hulu or Kanopy with a subscription, or to rent on Amazon, Google Play and Vudu.)

1. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (dir. Celine Sciamma)

This movie is many things - a love story, a feminist fable, a story about painters and their subjects and the fraught relationship between them.  It has the grand sweep of an epic period piece, yet feels entirely contemporary. If it's the most ambitious film of the year, it's also the film that most perfectly achieves its lofty ambitions.

As a meditation on the process of artistic creation, it is, itself, gorgeous to look  at; every shot is composed in a painterly fashion with meticulous attention to lighting and composition.

From a feminist point of view, it depicts a rare, blessed window of time when no men are present in the household of a 19th century aristocratic French family and shows women bonding and taking care of one another in ways that men cannot. You can sense the relaxation in all the female characters during this chapter.

And as a love story between two women, it is undeniably romantic, in spite of the fact that the relationship must ultimately give way to the demands of practicality and propriety.

Marianne (Noemi Merlant) is a painter who is summoned to an estate on an island in Brittany to paint a portrait of an about-to-be-married young noblewoman, Heloise (Adele Haenel). The catch: she is not to let Heloise know she is painting her.  The two women take long walks together near the shore, while Marianne works on a portrait in secret in the night. They gradually develop a friendship that ultimately becomes more.  I won't give away what happens from that point, but can assure you that the film's final scene ties the story up in a realistic but still emotionally satisfying way.

(Portrait of a Lady on Fire is available to stream on Hulu with a subscription or to rent on ITunes, Google Play or Vudu.)

The Binge (and Sort-of-Binged) Watches of 2020 - Ranked

 I watched a ridiculous amount of television this year.  And you probably did too.  With all of us spending a significant part of our year hunkered down in hiding from the coronavirus, what else would we do with our plentiful spare time? (If you're one of the eager beavers  who worked out everyday with the Peloton app or read the complete works of Shakespeare, please don't answer that question.)

The shows I write about here represent only a small percentage of what I watched in 2020. In a year where every week brought us new, unpredictable horrors, I found it comforting to re-watch my favorite television series of the past where I already knew how everything would turn out. So I binged the entire runs of Mad Men, Seinfeld, Veep, Sex and the City, Frasier and the Andy Griffith Show. (Yes, one of those things is not like the others. What can I tell you?  Some days, the most challenging things I could wrap my brain around were the up and downs of Barney and Thelma Lou's romance. Or maybe just seeing what Aunt Bee cooked when the preacher came for Sunday dinner.)

I also watched about 240 movies this year - almost a fourth of those were repeat viewings of old favorites. I'll get to those in a future post.  The takeaway here is: I've become an extra starchy couch potato this year, and I'm going to tell you all about it!

Normally this post is titled "Binge Watches of (insert year here) Ranked."  But most of the limited series or seasons of a series that I watched dropped in weekly installments of 1-3 episodes so it wasn't practical to binge them. 

As usual, this list skews heavily towards streaming platforms and premium cable rather than network television, and - of course - it only includes the shows I actually watched.  Many popular series of the past year don't appear here because they either didn't pique my interest or I started watching but quickly bailed on them. (The latter of those categories includes The Good Lord Bird, Normal People, The Great and Ratched. Also The Queen's Gambit, but I plan to give that one another shot, based on recommendations from many people whose opinions I respect.)  

It is also a particularly cranky and contrarian ranking. I was unimpressed with many of this year's high profile/prestigious offerings and more drawn to some of the less-celebrated or even the sneered-at series (Tiger King is on the list, and probably ranked higher than you would expect.  Judge me all you want, I stand by my ranking.) Feel free to take my rankings with a large grain of salt. But if you see something here that appeals to you, watch it and like it, then my work here is done.

 Anyway, here are the series I actually did complete, in reverse order of preference:

13. The New Pope (HBO)            

I'm not sure whether writer-director Paolo Sorrentino has some actual point to make about the modern Catholic Church  or just likes throwing together a bunch of visually sumptuous but batshit-crazy scenes to give the illusion that he's saying something.  Some critics have found this series to be relevant and profound, but I thought it was just an exhausting mess. It's all outrageousness and sacrilege and weird juxtapositions of sex or pop culture with religious iconography. You may admire Sorrentino's inventiveness, but you'll long for some emotional or intellectual hook to really engage you in the narrative. It never comes.

In this series' 2017 prequel, The Young Pope, Jude Law played Pius XIII, a Pope who worked out a lot, drank Cherry Coke Zero for breakfast and collapsed from a sudden heart attack in the finale. (And also let a kangaroo loose in the Vatican Gardens - see my reference above to batshit craziness.) As The New Pope opens, we find Pius XIII in a coma and preparing for a heart transplant. He later appears in an opening credit sequence, striding along a beach full of bikini-clad women in a teeny, tiny Speedo and winking insouciantly at the camera. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.

In this series, we've also got John Malkovich on hand as Pius XIII's successor. Malkovich, a reliable purveyor of eccentricity and off-kilter line readings, dives right into Sorrentino's nuttiness with deadpan conviction but even he never quite makes sense of the gratingly weird character he's given to play.

I'm as susceptible as anyone to the fun of watching nuns dance to Europop disco tunes in the glare of a giant neon cross or a pope who summons Sharon Stone to the Vatican for a flirty private audience. (The actress plays herself and makes a gift of her Christian Louboutin high heels to Malkovich's grateful pontiff.) But honestly... political machinations and sexual hijinks at the Vatican aren't exactly fresh or original plot points, and throwing in a catchy pop song or (most offensively) a dwarf or a developmentally disabled character as set dressing now and then doesn't make it any more interesting. The New Pope is fun for a little while, but its relentless and pointless sacrilege wears mighty thin long before the ninth episode finale.

12. Hollywood (Netflix)

In Ryan Murphy's fantasy/alternate history of 1940s Hollywood, a woman gets to run a major studio, an actress of color gets the Oscar-winning lead role in a blockbuster drama  and Rock Hudson goes to the Oscars with his boyfriend.  All of which is not only very nice, but underlines just how limited and backwards the thinking of that day actually was. Unfortunately. Murphy's ham-fisted melodramatic tendencies are exhausting; he'll take any opportunity to titillate or shock, but nuance and subtlety are forever lost on him. What's more, his incorporation of real people into this fictional story is frequently problematic. I'm fine with his re-creation of George Cukor's Sunday night dinner parties winding up with naked men in the pool and Vivien Leigh hooking up with a hot guy in Cukor’s guest room. But  I will never forgive him for depicting Hudson as a good-looking but dim-witted lunk with no acting ability whatsoever. 

11. The Undoing (HBO)

Despite its A-list cast and veneer of artistic respectability, The Undoing amounted to a good opening episode, a good final episode and four hours of utter nonsense sandwiched in between.  Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant play a wealthy and well-respected Manhattan couple (she a psychotherapist, he a pediatric oncologist). The mother of their son's classmate is brutally murdered while Grant is mysteriously out of town without his cell phone. Then we learn the dead woman had ties to both of them. Did Grant kill her ? Did Kidman?  Or their 12-year-old son? Or was it Kidman's ultra rich, creepy dad, played with icy relish by Donald Sutherland? 

Throwing in a few red herrings to keep us off balance is one thing, but The Undoing is a near steady stream of irrelevant distractions, stray story threads that never get resolved, and stuff that just plain doesn't make sense. Just one example: Kidman briefly becomes a person of interest when a video surfaces showing her walking near the murder scene in Harlem around the time of the crime. She says she was just talking a walk to clear her head. But she lives on the Upper East Side, so that means she walked about 50 blocks from home and I assume her head was thoroughly cleared by that point. Most of the show's audience won't know Manhattan well enough to realize how insane this is (although there is a whole Reddit thread about it.) But the people who wrote it should - and so should the police characters in the show. Why don't they dig deeper into Kidman's story?

Most problematic for me is Grant's performance. His character's alibi is tweaked and amended so many times you'll get whiplash trying to keep up with it, but there's no consistent subtext or discernible personality behind his ramblings.  He performance doesn't so much suggest a man who's desperate to be found innocent as it does an actor who was seemingly never told whether his character was the actual murderer till the final day of shooting.  (For the record, Grant is normally one of my favorite actors; if you want to see him at his best, I recommend streaming the British mini-series A Very English Scandal on Amazon Prime.)

The final episode is so unaccountably good - unnerving, tense and impeccably acted - that it almost makes you forget how frustrating everything was that preceded it. Almost. But, like me, you may find it to be too little, much too late.

10. Mrs. America (FX/Hulu)

I'm just old enough to remember when the Equal Rights Amendment slowly made its way through the state-by-state ratification process, including the well-orchestrated campaign of right-wing darling Phyllis Schlafly to stop it.  I can even remember picking up a STOP ERA flyer in a local drugstore when I was about 13, and briefly jumping on Schlafly's bandwagon until I became the early '70s version of a "woke feminist" a year later at 14. 

So I came to Mrs. America - which the battles between the conservative the Christian homemakers of STOP ERA and the feminist icons of NOW and Ms. magazine - with heightened expectations that weren't entirely met.

There's some good stuff in Mrs. America - including terrific performances, not only by Cate Blanchett as Schlafly but notably by Uzo Aduba (playing Shirley Chisholm, the first woman of color to run for president) and Margo Martindale (perfectly cast as Bella Abzug). But too often, the series feels like it was made by people who aren't actually old enough to remember the '70s but watched a lot of documentaries and talked to some people. (And my suspicions appear to be at least partly correct; the series creator, Dhavi Waller, is a Canadian writer whose age isn't listed anywhere on the internet, but whose television writing career began in 2003.) I suppose it comes down to me feeling about this series the way British royalists feel about The Crown: it should come with a disclaimer reminding us that it's not a history lesson. It's speculative and clearly fictionalized.

I'm completely on board, however, with the portrayal of Schlafly as a woman forced to sublimate her own considerable political ambitions into being the self-appointed figurehead of an ERA opposition group. Blanchett plays Schlafly as smarter than any of the men in the room, but too ladylike to press the point. She's icy, intimidating and quietly conniving, yet Blanchett manages to give her just a soupçon of vulnerability, as much a prisoner of the patriarchy as the women she so vocally opposes.

Less impressive are capsule episodes devoted to Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne) and Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman) and the fictional character played by Sarah Paulson - a Schlafly acolyte whose ambivalence towards the STOP ERA movement feels more underwritten than authentic.  Paulson gives it her usual full commitment, but even she can't make the character compelling.

9. The Vow (HBO)

Here's my idea for The Vow drinking game: pour yourself a drink every time someone pulls out a kitchen knife and a couple of avocados. Because when former NXIVM cult members gather to process their post-traumatic stress, it almost always takes place at a kitchen counter while one of them makes guacamole. I'm not even kidding about that.

I'd like to believe that if I'd ever met Keith Raniere, the dweeby leader of the NXIVM cult, I wouldn't have fallen for his bullshit. And watching The Vow initially reinforced that confidence, as I watched some ostensibly smart but incredibly gullible people fall hook, line and sinker for Raniere's airheaded, self-serving psychobabble. NXIVM, by the way, is pronounced "Nexium" - like the heartburn pill. Also, its members didn't refer to Raniere by his name, they were required to address him as "Vanguard." Seriously. Are you starting to understand my skepticism?

Every time I was ready to bail on this docuseries - every time the NXIUM escapees launched into another guacamole-fueled round of Raniere-bashing laced with survivors’ guilt  - there'd be some new revelation that pulled me right back in, if only because it was so lurid or bizarre that I thought it couldn't possibly be real. The Vow unwinds in a sort of narrative spiral, cycling from talking head testimonies to footage from the cult's meetings, seminars and nighttime volleyball games to jaw-dropping revelations. But it leaves its most horrifying details for the final episode, when the full, frightening picture of Raniere's manipulative power and misogynistic rage comes into view.

I’m being deliberately evasive about what NXIUM preached and what happened to its members because The Vow is more powerful if you go in cold. But you don’t have to. The New York Times has covered the whole sordid saga in extensive detail over the last two years, including the criminal trials of Raniere and others who were ultimately convicted on charges ranging form wire fraud and racketeering to sex trafficking and possession of child pornography. Raniere himself was sentenced to 120 years in prison not long after this series aired. In the final episode, we hear him speak by phone from prison where he insists there is another story to be told. Yes, The Vow: Part 2 is coming in 2021. Clear your calendar, and get your avocados ready.

8. The Trouble with Maggie Cole (PBS)

This genial, slightly goofy British mini-series succeeds largely due to the welcome presence of Dawn French in the title role. (You may remember her as The Vicar of Dibley or perhaps as the '80s comedy partner of Absolutely Fabulous star Jennifer Saunders.) Maggie Cole is the town historian in the kind of quaint, sleepy English village where everyone knows everyone. After being plied with gin and tonics by a devious radio interviewer, Maggie spills all the gossip whispered around town regarding certain residents. As she sets about attempting to repair her relationships with those she drunkenly slandered, we learn that the truth about these people is actually far more interesting than the gossip about them. French is the friendly, funny heart of the show, but really all the characters are easy to take to heart, and it all goes down as comfortingly as a warm mug of tea

7. Tiger King (Netflix)

What makes a show binge-able if not the delivery of a tantalizing hook at the end of each installment that keeps you wanting to know more? Eccentric, outrageous characters don't hurt either, nor does a lurid true-crime story that you probably haven't heard before and can just barely believe.  Tiger King, the ratings hit of the early COVID lockdown days, is tailor-made to be your compulsively watchable guilty pleasure.  Watching the first episode is like tearing into a party-size bag of Lay's Potato chips; betcha can't watch just one.

Your interest may be dependent on how much time you want to spend with the flamboyant, platinum-blond-mulleted Joe Exotic (real name Joe Molanado), a Florida roadside zoo owner and collector of exotic animals.  But he's only one character here of many, and the whole world of exotic animal ownership (and exploitation and abuse) proves to be a pretty tangled web.  The series is laid out in a tightly structured series of revelations, nested like Russian dolls, and unwinds like a good, pulpy detective novel.

For those who have avoided the show due to the concerns about animal abuse, let me me assure you that while the abuse is frequently referenced in later episodes, it goes virtually unseen in the actual footage.

6. Emily in Paris (Netflix)

There's no accounting for how addictive and enjoyable this supremely silly little confection turned out to be, but I devoured it like it was a box of Ladurée macarons. Lily Collins plays a Chicago PR flack sent to manage a Paris-based luxury brand marketing firm.  In the real world, she'd probably at least have learned to speak French before taking this job, but this is Fantasy Paris, so instead she's the gauche American that the snotty French people eventually learn to tolerate and even admire. Emily fills her Instagram feed with pictures of croissants and sidewalk cafés and falls into all kinds of romantic entanglements with handsome Frenchmen.  Not one moment of the show is remotely believable, but if ever there was a year when we needed an escape from harsh reality, 2020 was it. So I went right along with the fantasy. Besides, Collins is charming enough to carry the day. A second season is on the way in 2021; it will be interesting to see if it remains popular.

Favorite moment: Emily meets another young American woman who asks her (with no irony whatsoever)  "Are you from Indianapolis? Because you seem really friendly."  As a native Hoosier, may I just say how nice it is to hear someone identify a positive character trait with my home state, even in a piece of fictional fluff like this.

5. The Flight Attendant (HBO)

As HBO Max murder mystery series go, this one far surpassed The Undoing for me, if only because the characters had plausible human reactions to the occasionally very shocking events and the plot was actually tied up in a way that made logical sense. Those aren't particularly high bars for a murder mystery to clear, but here we are.

Kaley Cuoco (best known as Penny on The Big Bang Theory) takes the title role of Cassie, a flight attendant who, after a night of partying in Bangkok with a handsome passenger, wakes up next to him to find him murdered - and has no memory of what happened.  Cuoco, with her enormous eyes and tousled blond locks gives off a strong "Goldie Hawn in the '80s vibe" here - and honestly, this is  exactly the kind of role in which Hawn would have been cast then.  She certainly has her work cut out for her: the story covers a lot of ground including an intermittently grim look at her character's raging alcoholism and suppressed childhood trauma. At the other extreme, there are a fair number of comedy bits that Cuoco delivers with the practiced charm of a sitcom veteran..

And if that's not enough, there's also a contrived but mostly successful plot device in which Cuoco has extended 'conversations' with the dead man as she struggles to piece together the events of that horrible night in Bangkok. Plus we've got subplots involving Cassie's best friend and laywer (Zosia Mamet) and a wholly unnecessary espionage side story involving a fellow flight attendant (Rosie Perez).  

Clearly there are moments when the storytellers bite off more than they can chew, but mostly The Flight Attendant is good, unfussy entertainment delivered with a zippy visual style (lots of split-screen action, àla early Brian DePalma), a jazzy musical score that effectively heightens the suspense, and just enough glamorous 'travel porn' shots of Bangkok and Rome to keep a unhappily grounded traveler like myself happy.

4. I May Destroy You (HBO)

A stunning achievement by writer/director/star Michaela Coel who distills her own experience of  a sexual assault into a prismatic 12-part drama that examines her post-traumatic emotional landscape  from a multitude of perspectives.  In that respect, it perfectly mirrors her mental state and uneasy, 'one step forward, two steps back' progress towards healing.  The heavy use of British slang can be a little difficult for an American to get a handle on in the early episodes, and the extreme casualness of the all the characters' drug use and hooking up was a bit hard for this quaint old fart to get her mind around. But there's an almost dreamlike quality to the series that captures you and pulls you in. You can feel Coel's sense of confusion, disorientation, rage and, ultimately, forgiveness and release.  

3. The Crown, Season 4 (Netflix)

Art imitates life in a startling and unexpected way this season. On The Crown, as in real life, Princess Diana steals the show.

Newcomer Emma Corrin takes on the most intimidating assignment of Season 4: playing the much beloved "People's Princess" whose good looks, charisma and natural emotional intelligence both invigorated and shamed the British monarchy. And she nails it! Corrin replicates the late Princess' speech patterns and mannerisms with eerie authenticity; from some angles, she even bears an uncanny physical resemblance to the princess. But the performance is no mere impersonation; there's a solid core of emotional truth at its heart, a fully and impeccably developed character behind the side swept bangs and shy upward glances.

All of which is not to take away from the predictably excellent performances of Olivia Coleman (the Queen), Tobias Menzies (Prince Phillip), Josh O'Connor (Prince Charles), Erin Doherty (Princess Anne), Helena Bonham-Carter (Princess Margaret) and Emerald Fennell (Camilla Parker-Bowles). There's some shockingly great acting going on this season, especially in two-character confrontation scenes like Philip and Charles squaring off over their duties at Lord Mountbatten's funeral. Or the exquisite cat-and-mouse game between Diana and Camilla at lunch. Or Princess Anne's futile attempts to explain the cold rules of adultery to a petulant, Camilla-besotted Charles. And also every time the pissed-off Queen tells Charles to stop whining and commit to his marriage.  Charles is presented as so unrelentingly villainous towards his young wife, that these angry smackdowns from his mother are particularly satisfying. 

I must not forget Gillian Anderson who plays Margaret Thatcher.  While I love Anderson, I found her performance overly mannered and a bit grating.  Or maybe that was just really good acting.  Because I was no fan of Thatcher's either.

2. After Life (Netflix)

This is the series that redeemed Ricky Gervais for me.

Once upon a time, Gervais was a chubby, self-deprecating, genuinely funny man. Then he lost weight, got famous and became an insufferably arrogant prick.  But After Life finds him with some weight back on and dealing with grief and loss in a painful and recognizably accurate way.

Gervais plays a bereft and deeply depressed widower who can't get past his wife's death from cancer. Some days, only the need to feed the dog gets him out of bed and moving. Through the first season (which originally aired in 2019), he makes halting, painful progress towards healing, transforming from a shut-down curmudgeon to a decent guy who puts his head up to see that other people around him are struggling, too.  In this year's second season, he must contend with a parent's Alzheimer's and the dread of dating again.  It'd all be unbearably sad if it weren't for Gervais' talent for inserting a sarcastic remark at just the moment it's needed. Yet he doesn't back off the honest emotions required. It's his best performance since David Brent on The Office - and maybe his best ever.

This series was timely, relevant and cathartic for me; I lost both parents in the first half of 2020, and I've also been through the sudden death of a long-term romantic partner a few years back. I cried buckets during this show, but I found it genuinely moving and helpful to me in processing my own grief.

And the good news is, there will be a third season.  Since Season 2 ended on a hopeful note, involving another character played by Gervais' frequent co-star, Ashley Jensen, I'm looking forward to sunnier episodes ahead.

1. Unorthodox (Netflix)

Unorthodox is loosely based on Deborah Feldman's memoir Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, the subject of which is pretty much obvious from its title. What is particularly impressive about this adaptation is the efficiency and lack of fussy exposition in the storytelling. The writers (Anna Winger and Alexa Karolinski) trust us to figure the roles, rituals and narrowly proscribed roles for women in the Hasidic sect by jumping right into the story at its point of highest tension. We open on a young woman named Esty (Shira Hass playing a fictionalized version of Feldman) who's  about to leave her husband and her Brooklyn-based Hasidic community - on the Sabbath of all days - and is clearly violating major tenets of her religion to do so. 

Esty makes it to Berlin (an ironic place for a Jewish woman to seek freedom, but one that makes sense as more backstory is revealed) and tentatively starts a new life. But no one - especially a woman - is allowed to leave a Hasidic community without being hunted down and dragged back. So the tension about whether Esty will finally be able to build a new life is sustained throughout all four episodes as her husband, Yanky (Amith Rahav) and a friend follow her to Berlin on a mission to bring her home.

Unorthodox skillfully blends the tropes of an espionage thriller with those of a woman's journey of self-discovery, and seamlessly weaves in copious flashbacks to Esty's early life and her courtship and and troubled marriage to Yanky.  Winger and Karolinski are particularly brilliant at distilling the dynamics of Esty's unhappy relationship with her husband into the smallest telling details.  Their very first conversation, just after Esty is selected for him by the sect's matchmaker, opens like this:

Yanky: My father took us to Europe last year. We saw the graves of all the great rabbis.

Esty: You went to Europe and all you saw were graves? Nothing else?

Yanky:  I wanted to, but my father would not allow it.

That simple exchange actually lays all the groundwork for the trouble to follow. Just the fact that Esty makes a smart-ass comment about seeing nothing but graves on a trip to Europe - rather than professing wide-eyed admiration - tells you she's got a mind of her own and won't be the kind of passive, docile wife her community requires her to be. And Yanky, firmly under the thumb of his domineering parents, won't begin to make her happy.

Hass, an  Israeli actress who learned to speak both English and Yiddish for this role, has a quietly commandeering presence. Through her expressive eyes, you can clearly see her every fleeting emotion, ever when she's required to otherwise suppress them.  I wanted to spend more time with her character and see where else she goes, but the series ends abruptly after four episodes. And maybe that's enough. Sometimes we need to be left with our own imaginations to decide where the story goes next (a lesson I wish the makers of The Handmaid's Tale had taken to heart).There are worse things than an ambiguous conclusion to a great television series.