"Nope" Wants To Challenge You. "The Gray Man" Doesn't
#186: "Nope," "The Gray Man"
Edition 186:
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: Jordan Peele’s highly anticipated third film came out this week, and proved to be incredibly divisive. Ditto for the Netflix blockbuster “The Gray Man,” out this week and perched atop the Top 10 rankings. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” it’s a full-length trailer for the upcoming, x-rated Marilyn Monroe biopic starring Ana de Armas.
Nope
Theaters
If the movie landscape could be viewed as concentric circles, with “art” on one side and “mass entertainment” on the other, then one might properly appreciate just how few filmmakers exist within the ever-shrinking sliver of intersection.
In terms of wholly original stories (not based on any previous IP) that consistently penetrate the mainstream consciousness, the complete list of directors are Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, and now Jordan Peele. That’s it (Scorsese and Spielberg’s last movies were both adaptations, and besides, one went to see them; Wes Anderson is too niche).
Peele earned his status almost immediately. His 2017 debut Get Out was a triumph, the best movie of that decade and a rare entry into the all-time film canon within months of release. The utter joy of that movie was its discovery — no one expected the funny guy from the “Key and Peele” comedy sketches to be capable of telling a story with such depth. The movie, and its discourse, peeled back layers like an onion, packing a powerful message about cultural appropriation and social inequity in this country that one could feel reverberate throughout the moviegoing public. It made $255 million and it won Peele an Oscar. It was a unicorn.
The expectation for his 2019 follow-up Us was then so high as to have been a little bit unfair. I and many others couldn’t help but be disappointed when some kind of profound social messaging was not readily apparent. It wasn’t until I revisited the movie and saw it was just an awesome horror thriller, expertly crafted and scary as hell, meant to be enjoyed rather than analyzed. The market bore this out by equaling the previous $255 million haul but failing to provide any Oscar nominations.
Peele’s backstory is crucial to retrace when approaching his new movie, Nope. Because we want to believe, badly, that his movies contain the deep and important meaning we saw in Get Out. If only we look closely enough, we might fight something transcendent.
The feeling gets amplified by the undeniable fact that Peele crafted every single frame of this movie exactly how he wanted it. The quality of the filmmaking on display here is insanely high, and the combination of that obvious talent and attention to detail convinces audiences to give Peele the benefit of the doubt when it comes to metaphor and symbolism.
In Nope — which I’ll set up spoiler-free as a movie about a family of horse trainers who encounter a UFO on their ranch — that faith is put to the test.
It’s a movie packed with ambiguity. I’d go so far as to say it’s outright challenging. There are powerful images that cry out for metaphor, and entire scenes that don’t make sense without interpretation.
As a result, from every corner and crevice of the internet you can find “explainers” and analysis straining to uncover what the movie and its provocations “mean.” I’ve read some of them. They’re hardly convincing.
The movie has therefore become a kind of Rorschach test, where each viewer looks at it and comes up with something different. Is it about climate change? Our obsession with spectacle? Social media clout? Family legacy? A convincing argument can (and has) been made for each, and others.
In many ways, producing this kind of effect is pretty beautiful. That’s what a real piece of art does, like standing in front of an abstract painting. The fact that something so subversive is being served up in the form of a mass entertainment blockbuster — reaching $58 million worth of people and counting — is a modern miracle (and not without consequence, as many moviegoers who refused to engage or wrestle with the material insist that it’s a bad movie…i.e. Logan Paul).
I just can’t help but wonder if maybe we’re thinking about it all wrong. Three movies into his career we’re unsure of who Peele wants to be as a filmmaker, and this quote from a recent podcast interview took me by surprise:
“I just don’t think that people actually want a director who’s trying to scream a message at them. I think people want to have a good time…I’ve been evolving as an artist in a bit that I think people like movies, more than messages.”
Of course, the baseline for purely surface level enjoyment in a Peele movie is very high. There are scary moments that give you goosebumps, comedic moments that produce audible laughs, and a final 30 minutes that will have you on the edge of your seat. Daniel Kaluuya plays entirely against type as a suppressed cowboy, and Keke Palmer steals the show as his charismatic sister, both excellent performances. So yes, the movie could be enjoyed without analysis, but I’d argue it cannot be watched without leaving one grasping at explanation.
The question is really, whether Peele bears any responsibility for making his movies accessible, or whether is he dangling ambiguity as a way to simulate importance (something I once accused Stanley Kubrick of doing in The Shining). I always go back to the “blue curtains” example. Sometimes they’re blue for no reason at all.
It’s possible, and entirely forgivable, that Peele might not be able to come up with another all-time great movie premise (who could!), or be able to recreate the several years he spent honing and refining Get Out and connecting every dot to something tangible.
Or maybe he just doesn’t want to fit into a box. As he said in the same interview as above, “I love to do what I’m not supposed to do, first and foremost.” Just when we think he’s a social justice warrior, he pivots to straight horror, and then to western action/adventure (there is no horror in the final 30 minutes of this movie). Who knows what’s coming next.
More importantly, will audiences follow him there? Will he continue to be able to bridge the colossal and ever-growing divide between “art” and “mass entertainment” at the box office?
I don’t know, but as for me, I plan on going to see this movie again, in IMAX, and am willing to publish an update or correction if the movie’s walls are more easily scaled the second time around. I have my doubts. Still, wherever Peele goes, I will be following!
The Gray Man
Netflix
I spent more time than I care to admit this week thinking about the Russo Brothers, the filmmaking duo behind most of the biggest Marvel movies (Avengers: Endgame, etc.) and now this $200 million Netflix blockbuster, The Gray Man, which is getting crushed by critics as often as it’s being praised by the fans keeping it at No. 1 on the Netflix Top 10.
Specifically, it took a while to put my finger on exactly why I dislike the Russos’ filmmaking style so much. Sure, there are the obvious things — 1) absolutely no regard for consequences or story logic; 2) action sequences that cut between shots every .02 seconds until you’re super disoriented and have no idea what’s going on; 3) extremely obvious music played loud to hold the audience’s hand and tell it exactly how it should feel at all times; 4) over-the-top product placement; 5) soooo much CGI, and often it looks very fake; 6) the “meta” jokes (“shoot that Ken doll” in reference to Gosling, who is cast as Ken in an upcoming Barbie movie); I could go on.
But these are merely stylistic preferences, and I know I (and other people who watch a lot of actual good movies) are in the minority in disliking them. Netflix was desperate for a giant blockbuster franchise so they got the guys responsible for two of the top five highest grossing movies of all time. That’s good business, and fans of the Marvel movies will likely find a comfortable rhythm in the action-quip-action-quip-action pacing of this globe-trotting thriller about a rogue super spy being hunted by his former CIA handlers.
The thing I realized I couldn’t stand was just how artificial the worlds of the Russo Brothers’ films feel. Not only do you never feel like this movie takes place in the real world — which was the appeal of other spy thrillers like the Tom Clancy adaptations or the Bourne series — but it never convincingly creates its own made-up movie world either. Never for a second does an audience lose the sense that they’re watching a movie, that every single element is being constructed for them like a theatrical stage show (even then, stage shows are more immersive).
So the best way to think of the Russo Brothers’ movies is being Vaudevillian. If you want your movies to be song-and-dance productions you can enjoy without the vulnerability of full immersion, in complete contrast to something like Nope, you probably love the Russos’ style.
In that way, Chris Evans is kind of their perfect avatar. Here he sheds his Captain America suit for a different kind of costume: ridiculous flamboyant clothes, ridiculous haircut, even more ridiculous mustache. He’s hamming it up so much it would make even the most absurd Bond villain blush, and it fits the movie perfectly as the “bad guy” spy who is looking for our hero.
That hero is played by Ryan Gosling, one of my very favorite actors on the planet, who introduces too much real life personality and humanity into a role that should be essentially be a superhero. He’s playing comedic shades of his character in The Nice Guys, which I love but doesn’t much fit as a “gray man” faceless CIA assassin.
Ana de Armas is here, as is Billy Bob Thornton, and Netflix heartthrob Regé-Jean Page, the result of a bloated budget that’s wasting legitimate talent on a story that cares very little about character. These people are one-note stereotypes, at best, in service of a non-stop plot machine that burns three movies worth of story within a 128-minute runtime.
The primary reason to watch this movie is simply how expensive it looks. The sets and locations are incredible, the actors are really doing their best to sell some unbelievably dumb dialogue, and some of the action sequences fulfill the kinds of CGI dreams that Bond and Bourne would only dream of, and Mission: Impossible wouldn’t dare try because Tom Cruise couldn’t possibly recreate it in real life.
As with most blockbusters, my takeaway is the same: the movie doesn’t need you to watch it, but if you want to you could still have a lot of fun checking out The Gray Man, and its inevitable sequels.
Trailer Watch: Blonde
The teaser a few weeks ago sparked a conversation about this Marilyn Monroe biopic that is sure to ignite into a full-on fire after this full-length trailer was released this week.
A novel by Joyce Carol-Oates, adapted by Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Killing Them Softly), starring Ana de Armas, about possibly the most famous sex symbol in history, and slapped with an NC-17 rating? That’s quite a potent cocktail.
If nothing else, the movie looks stylish as hell and as mysterious as it needs to be. I’m worried it’ll be poisoned by what I’ll call from now on “Spencer-itis,” but if it avoids advocacy I think it’ll be one of the buzziest movies on the entire calendar. I’m sure we’ll have much to say about it during awards season.