In 'Smile' And 'Blonde,' Trauma Always Wins
#196: "Smile," "Blonde," "Bros," "Dr. No," "Chocolat"
Edition 196:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
In this week’s newsletter: It’s a great week in the misery business, and not just because Paramore agreed to play their famous song again on tour. Smile and Blonde are major bummers. Thankfully, Bros is not, and neither are this week’s streaming suggestions. Plus, this week’s “Trailer Watch” about a violent Santa Claus cracked me up.
Smile / Blonde
A podcast host I admire made an off-hand comment recently that I’d like to investigate as we talk about last week’s two biggest movies, the jump-scare horror flick Smile and the three-hour Marilyn Monroe epic Blonde.
The joke was something like, “therapy has kind of ruined screenwriting.”
Obviously, on its face, it’s a ridiculous comment. More screenwriters are likely in therapy than ever before, true, but I’ve never subscribed to the theory that only broken people can make great art. Nor was that what this person was suggesting.
The insinuation was rather that everything these days has to be about trauma. All of us, including screenwriters, are so much more aware of the ways that moments from our past have shaped and scarred us, and because screenwriters always “write what they know,” the themes end up in their work.
That doesn’t seem like such a bad thing at first, until you realize you can hardly find a movie anymore that doesn’t include daddy/mommy issues or a flashback to some horrific tragedy. Heroes in our less self-aware generations might’ve had more interesting or creative reasons for their flaws, or maybe no reason whatsoever, but in either case, the trauma was not held up as the most important thing in their life.
Smile and Blonde are the logical endpoints of this trend. These are movies that really only exist as vehicles for trauma.
In the case of Smile, therapy forms the literal backbone of the entire movie. Our protagonist works an ER therapist — who, of course, has both mommy issues and a traumatic moment in her past that defines her entire life — so when the evil forces show up, they are waved off as mental illness. Audiences are left wondering whether the increasingly crazy things that happen are real or taking place only in her head.
The movie is quite scary, though as is often the case, most of the scariest moments were spoiled in the excellent trailer (the price of doing business in 2022, as that trailer brought out audiences to the tune of an impressive, box office-leading $22 million opening).
The frights are kind of cheap, though, because almost all are highly manufactured jump scares, following the classic set up→silence→loud noise→disturbing imagery formula. The angle of mental illness is used to develop our protagonist as an unreliable narrator, and allows for entire scenes that don’t “actually happen” except in her head. This gives the filmmakers license interrupt the story just to create a jump scare and then quickly zip back to the story without any consequences.
So in effect, the scares have no reason to exist other than to be scary. Even the actual smiling, which gives the movie not only its name but its identity, is never explained or substantiated beyond the fact that it looks really creepy. Those qualities make this most similar to schlocky B-movie horror flicks of past decades, before the genre took on an air of prestige and started being used to Trojan Horse in real ideas.
The biggest problem I had with the movie is the ending, which I won’t spoil here, other than to say it proves the movie to be brain-dead and perpetuates the idea of trauma as an inescapable, all-consuming vacuum.
Coincidentally, “an inescapable, all-consuming vacuum of trauma” is the best possible way to describe Blonde, which will go down as unquestionably the worst movie I watch this year.
This life story of Marilyn Monroe is spooled out as a three-hour haunted house ride, traveling from one disturbing scene to the next without any forward plot or through line other than pain. There is no joy and no fun to be found. Every smile is hollow or forced, fighting back tears.
Monroe in real life might’ve been a tragic figure, but she was also the most popular actress on the planet and learned how to wield her rare power as a woman in mid-century Hollywood. She did have some joy in her life, and yet it’s not shown here and she’s given no agency over her life in this movie. Instead, she’s a pinball falling down and bouncing from one abuser to the next.
Put simply, this movie sucks. Not necessarily in execution, as some of the cinematography is breathtaking and the lead performance of Ana de Armas is transformational and fascinating, but the story being told is both boring and a bummer. It’s exhausting. I’ll be honest, I didn’t even make it to the end. And I never EVER quit movies early. Three hours felt like nine.
It’s entirely inexplicable why this movie exists unless the filmmaker, and the studio who signed off on it (Netflix, king of the half-baked, no notes green light), found the idea of trauma endlessly interesting. Let me tell you something, it is not. And it’s even more inexcusable when I found out after the fact that some of the more horrific parts of the movie were entirely fabricated. Total fiction! Why would you add in additional trauma? Unless you’re a psychopath?
My own theory is not that therapy has ruined screenwriters. It’s that most screenwriters are just narcissists. Honestly, it’s a trait that helps a writer stare down a blank page and actually believe that the world they’re being paid a lot of money to create is something that a lot of people will want to see. But it also gets writers confused — it gets them thinking their problems are the most interesting thing not just to them but to us as well. Maybe even more interesting than the life of one of America’s most iconic celebrities. And in that regard, they are just flat wrong.
Something New
Bros (Theaters): I hesitate to call this “late period Judd Apatow” considering he’s only 54 years old, a spring chicken by Hollywood super-producer standards, but after now 20 years of exposure to his comedic sensibilities (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Funny People) I have to admit they are beginning to feel a bit stale. He did not direct Bros — that would be Nicholas Stoller, who previously directed Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Neighbors under the producer supervision of Apatow, but the latter now seems laser-focused on building low concept comedies around specific comedians, the way past generations might do with a sitcom. Nowadays there’s no “Seinfeld” or “Roseanne,” but Apatow has made movies starring thinly fictionalized versions of Amy Schumer (Trainwreck), Pete Davidson (The King of Staten Island) and now Billy Eichner.
Eichner isn’t really a movie star, but he is really funny and proves as capable of delivering dramatic monologues as he is spouting one-liners. Unfortunately he’s paired up with the Hallmark star Luke Macfarlane, and as I often say a rom-com lives or dies on the chemistry of its two leads, which doesn’t crackle here.
Wearing proudly the mantle of “the first mainstream gay studio rom-com,” the movie tries admirably to accurately reflect gay culture, rather than making a heterosexual romance movie that just stars two male leads (a concept the movie explicitly mocks). It’s failure at the box office says as much about the state of studio comedies (a flaming dumpster fire) as it does any homophobia, though the marketing of this as a message movie instead of just a classic rom-com with some funny jokes may have crippled it before it had much of a chance to succeed.
All told, the movie is too sweet to be offensively bad. It’s just sorta ho-hum, playing the usual notes in a rom-com song that we’ve all heard many times before, even if this time the voices are a little huskier.
Something Old
Dr. No (1962, Amazon Prime): This week marks the 60th anniversary of James Bond, which debuted with the dashing Sean Connery in 1962 and forever changed action movies. Fans of the Daniel Craig movies forget that Bond started as a fun and corny B-movie franchise, on full display here with character names like “Honey Ryder” and the villain dying by falling in a vat of boiling acid. But the longevity of this franchise is utterly unique in movie history.
I also bring this topic up because the Broccoli family said this week they haven’t started casting the next Bond. But they did eliminate three A-list candidates — Idris Elba, Tom Hardy and Tom Hiddleston — and stated that the role would go to someone who is in their 30s.
Dev Patel is 32 years old. I’ve said it a million times. He should be the next Bond. MAKE IT HAPPEN!!
Something to Stream
Chocolat (Netflix): In light of the dreariness of this week’s big releases, I felt it only appropriate to cue up what is one of the quintessential feel-good movies. How could it not be — this movie is quite literally about a chocolate shop in France, where young Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp fall in love. Yet despite it’s glossy, syrupy storytelling, somehow the scales never tip into Hallmark-style cutesy-ness. The powerful screen presences of Alfred Molina and Judi Dench stop the “villains” from being too cartoonish, despite the fact that they’re basically the grinches from Footloose if you substitute chocolate for dancing.
Heck, this movie was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture! Please, for the love of cinema, pick Chocolat the next time you need a pick me up, instead of the dozens of cookie-cutter Netflix rom-coms that seemingly multiply every week on the service. It’s infinitely better.
Trailer Watch: Violent Night
If you all have been subscribing long enough, you’re probably well aware that my favorite movie trailer of all time is the one for Fatman, starring Mel Gibson as an angry, vengeful Santa Claus. Needless to say, between that and Bad Santa, I’ve got a lot of time for the burgeoning “Santa behaving badly” subgenre.
This time around, a drunk Santa (played by David Harbour!) slides down a chimney and happens to interrupt a house robbery of $300 million from a family safe by a heavily armed squad of burglars. The utter ridiculousness of the whole thing crescendos into some of my hardest laughs ever at a trailer. “Time for some season’s beatings.” I mean come on. I love it.