Autofilmographic

Within every work of art lays a personal flourish emanating from its creator, details buried in the work related to the artist’s life, an expression of their inner workings, a scene or swath of canvas symbolizing past recollections, granting audiences a glimpse into the interior world of whoever’s helming the thing they’re experiencing – be it painting, play, or song. Everything from bubblegum pop hits to rudimentary cash-grab studio flicks contain personal touches, something akin to an inside joke, within their running time – be it a routine slasher or the tenth installation of a vapid comic book adaptation. Personal strokes are often whipped into movies surreptitiously, undetectable to the unaffiliated, leaving those not in the know none the wiser to meaningful details from, say, its author’s childhood.  A jutting head during the high-school prom scene can be an invented dance move attributed to a particular character, or a reproduced quirk the director’s varsity team buddy used to bust out back in the day.  Extrapolating aspects of the past into works of art is commonplace. Artists draw inspiration from their own lives as well as those around them. Great movies manage conflating personal subjects with fictional inventions, foregoing personal verities for the sake of the story’s flow. When movies refuse to deviate from mundane factuality, the path to pretention is steep. 

 

Within every filmmaker lays a passion project, a film they’re dying to make, a blank check beckoning to be cashed, the one nudging them to direct movies below their standards in order to accrue the clout necessary to fund it. Entering the field without a passion project to fuel the path indicates a hacky trajectory. Parallel to the passion project is the personal film (the two have been known to coincide at times), a segment of the filmmaker’s life recaptured for cinematic purposes. In many cases these semi-biographical films are the director’s debut: Truffaut with The 400 Blows, transmuting his personality and adolescence into Antoine Doinel, Barry Levinson reminiscing about his youth in Diner, or Scorsese drifting back to a Little Italy upbringing in his first proper film, Mean Streets. Other obvious candidates like last year’s Roma and Cassavetes’ Shadows are fine examples on how to make an individual’s intimate experiences interesting to a wider audience. No matter the genre’s guise, sooner or later every worthwhile filmmaker makes a work of personal importance, spraying props, nuances, and scenes with shades of subjectivity. 

 

Within every person lays the desire to share their life story, a need to express what we’ve been through, the turmoil, elations, joys, sorrows we’ve experienced. It is one of the most human traits, narrating our life in front of untapped ears in the hopes we will be better understood, our intentions and behaviors granted lucidity, our actions vindicated. Therapists and counselors make a living off listening to people’s life stories, tweaking their patients’ behaviors in the hopes of enabling them to lead a happier life. Authors publish their life saga in memoirs, songwriters express their personal side through lyrics, and this year filmmakers like Lulu Wang, Joanna Hogg, Pedro Almodovar, and Shia LaBeouf exorcised their individual demons with The Farewell, The Souvenir, Pain and Glory, and Honey Boy, respectively. All four are heavily biographical, ripping chapters from their makers’ lives and projecting them on the big screen for audiences to grasp what these folk went through at one point in their lives. 

LaBeouf had a hard go of it as a child actor under the guardianship of an abusive father, Joanna Hogg had a hard go of it as an aspiring director while in a toxic relationship with a heroin addict, Almodovar had a hard go of it coping with physical and mental ailments as repercussions of the artist’s creative lifestyle, and Lulu Wang had a hard go of it bidding her terminally ill grandmother farewell while she and her entire family kept the diagnosis a secret from its host. All four movies are conspicuously personal, therapeutically cleansing confessionals. 

 

Spending a million or so dollars punctiliously recreating one’s memories is a risky business move. None of the aforementioned 2019 releases made a killing, but none lost money. The Farewell grossed a commendable $17 million domestically, Pain and Glory did an impressive $35 million worldwide, The Souvenir an honorable $1.5 mil considering its no name packaging, and Honey Boy is slightly over the $2 million mark. These movies don’t boast huge box-office stars; between the four the only recognizable names are Antonio Banderas and LaBeouf. Moviegoers did not come out in droves, but all four titles found an audience, albeit a niche one. 

 

As the old storytelling motto goes, all movies are about someone or something, a particular character/group of people or an event. Movies that are based on or inspired by true events get adapted by professional writers, someone with a remove from the actual experience, who generally take dramatic licenses with the material, ramping up the drama and conflict to draw in a wider audience. Rarely does the subject onscreen originate from true events in the life of its writer-director, yet 2019 feels like a banner year for this type of film, especially if you throw in Noah Baumbach’s semi-biographical Marriage Story.

 

There is no grander format to tell your life story in than film, where music, writing, performance, and visuals are all melded for maximum impact; it is the ultimate medium of expression, incorporating the dynamics of every available art form into a single powerhouse. 

 

All four of the movies mentioned above were universally praised by critics, rated 90% or higher on RottenTomatoes.com, and will most likely be up for awards come award time. I enjoyed these movies, even double dipping into Pain and Glory and The Souvenir in the hopes of further appreciating the merits many major reviewers attributed to them, just not nearly as much as most critics enjoyed them, many of whom have at least three of these titles on their end of year Top 10 lists.  

 

Three of the four movies deal with the life of an artist, to varying degrees, pontificating the hardships involved in such work, particularly when strenuous circumstances interfere in the background, adding unnecessary complications to doing the work. These movies are not flashy or gaudily calling for attention (impressive for Almodovar), rather they’re pretty quiet melodramas dipped in somber tones. Quality-wise, they are well above mediocrity, with Pain and Glory being the personal favorite as the kitchen sink movie that best says all there is to say on the subject of filmmakers conveying personal experiences, I just wondered at times if the stories, despite being modestly budgeted, were interesting enough to warrant feature length venues. 

 

The Farewell offers a great premise, one of the more intriguing ones in recent memory, and doesn’t utilize it to much interest, the majority of length dedicated to a one-note back and forth debate of whether or not the family should tell the dying grandma of her fate. It’s a sweet movie with enough stirring moments to convince me of taking in a second viewing, rapper turned actor Awkwafina delivering strongly as the main character torn between telling the truth and maintaining her cultural tradition, and while the boulder sized adulation surrounding its release may have set me up to presuppose surefire greatness, I felt like the opportunity to dig further into the ramifications of its presented predicament was missed. The movie stagnates in waves of uncertainty, with little in the way of a convincing argument for either options (whether to tell or continue withholding from the grandma her diagnosis), that by the time the Awkwafina character comprehends the reasoning behind her family’s decision to maintain secrecy in the midst of a dying relative, the epiphany’s impact feels featherweight. 

 

Lulu Wang is a talented filmmaker; sometimes being so close to a subject hinders perspective, particularly when revolving around a beloved family member, or maybe the whole thing was lost on me. Wang was clearly affected by what she experienced with her grandmother, yet The Farewell feels restrained, not daring enough to penetrate its own dynamics. The movie is hands down one of the year’s best reviewed, both by critics and audiences alike, and probably the highest rated of the four. Again, it’s not a bad movie, simply one that didn’t capitalize on a promising scenario. The Souvenir, on the other hand, maximizes its minimalistic plot, yet is so static the final 20 minutes lumber corpse-like to the finale. 

 

In Joanna Hogg’s first theatrically released feature (in the US, at least), the peak of the movie’s interest lays in Julie, the lead character played beautifully by a subdued Honor Swinton Byrne, striving to make the type of movie that The Souvenir ultimately turns in to. “We don’t want to see life played out as is, we want to see life as it is experienced within this soft machine”, says Anthony, her soon to be lover, during a discussion about what filmgoers look for most when watching one. What follows is Hogg enacting this theory through Julie, her fictional stand in, focusing on the unhealthy relationship she develops with Anthony, who, as it turns out, is a mooching, thieving drug addict despite respectable employment in the Foreign Office. 

 

The Souvenir’s concept of capturing art as experienced by the individual, (the basic motif running through all four movies) sounds promising, unfortunately Hogg’s interpretation of her own experience turns lackluster the longer it’s drawn out. As a subtle examination of a detrimental relationship, The Souvenir works well for the most part, but at a certain point the repetitive cycles of being in a relationship with a junkie wears thin, and forced me to check out at around the same mark when watching it on Amazon Prime last week as when I saw it in theaters last June. 

Following multiple arrests for public intoxication and disorderly conduct, not to mention the more felonious Hollywood crime of issuing unflattering comments towards directors who cast the up and comer (at the time) in their blockbuster movies (Spielberg, who put him in the last Indiana Jones, and Michael Bay, who put him in a trio of Transformer movies), Shia LaBeouf found himself shunned from big budget productions, taking on roles that don’t adhere to mainstream traditions in movies like Nymphomaniac, American Honey, and The Peanut Butter Falcon. Those movies were really good, and LaBeouf was really good in them, pivoting away from the public eye’s shine. He wrote the screenplay for Honey Boy, based on his tumultuous childhood, while in rehab, attempting to purge himself of past traumas. The screenplay reads like a redemptive manifesto, an explanation of the bad boy demeanor that landed him in hot water. 

 

Handing over directorial duties to Alma Ha’rel, the documentary veteran doing a bang up job handling the film’s delicate tonal balance, dipping into fantasy sequences with imaginative gusto, LaBeouf also plays the role of his real life father, an embittered dry drunk whose shameful parenting would shock the most hardened of child welfare agents. In the movie, as assumedly in real life, LaBeouf’s implacable father is all frayed nerves and zero patience, chaperoning his child-actor son to television and movie sets on his hog, incessantly terrorizing him verbally and, in one of the more upsetting moments, physically. The father son relationship in Honey Boy is clearly the heart of the movie; its dysfunctional momentum an attempted pardon for is author’s alcohol-fueled behavior as an adult. 

 

The chemistry between Noah Jupe  (who plays LaBeouf at 12) and LaBeouf is refreshingly natural, standing as the film’s strongpoint, and LaBeouf is very good channeling a mess of a father. 

 

Lucas Hedges plays the adult version of LaBeouf, flashing back to his childhood during a stint in court-mandated rehab. The present day scenes are too briefly glossed over for audiences to fully appreciate the emotional toll taken by living with this type of father. Honey Boy could have benefitted from additional scenes with the adult LaBeouf, further closing the circle of cause and effect of a psychologically abused child. Emotional as the father-son relationship is, the movie ultimately didn’t stick, the grating whine of self-indulgence rising as the movie gets closer to concluding, with a resolution that amounts to little more than shrug. 

 

With over 20 features under his belt, Almodovar reached a stage of reflection in his latest movie, Pain and Glory, looking back on life as an artist, his impoverished adolescence, relationships both broken and mended. Almodovar’s latest is about a renowned director in Spain who has stopped working due to debilitating physical ailments, leaving him unable to do the job that gives his life meaning. Like most Almodovar movies, it is about much more: reconciling with the past, blocked creativity, salvation through artistic expression, making amends with a multitude of relationships. And like most Almodovar movies, it is all over the place, an organized chaotic unfurling of happenstance, progression, coincidence and fate, all of which the director has proven great skill in weaving together throughout his long career. 

 

Banderas essentially plays Almodovar. Not only does the actor sport the director’s real life attire, his character’s house is designed similarly and decorated with Almodovar’s personal possessions – paintings, tabletops, books, etc. Pain and Glory stews in the Banderas character’s pain more than his glory, the scenes involving his newfound usage of heroin dragging out longer than necessary. Thankfully there are departures from the morbid present day happenings to the character’s memories of being a precocious child, raised by his mother (played by Penelope Cruz) in a poor village in Spain. There are also brief departures into the activities of supporting characters that are some of the film’s best moments, especially when boomeranged back into the life of the Banderas character. 

Almodovar has made great movies, and while Pain and Glory doesn’t reach that mark for me, wrapping up in an all too simple manner, it’s a strong entry in a well-armed filmography. The ending feels like Almodovar gave the audience the cold shoulder, which is opposite of how I normally feel at the end of his movies.   

 

Criticisms aside, I did, for the most part, like all four of these movies, despite their indulgences. Salient observations about how we live life were made in each one of these works. Audience connection with a movie, particularly deeply personal movies, relies heavily on how we as individuals perceive life, the experiences that shaped us. In The Souvenir, Julie is told by one of her film professors that it’s “important to make a connection between your experience and the experience you’re trying to film”, an apt description of how audience view film. 

 

Personal connection to what we watch is not mandatory, as any empathic viewer can attest, we are able to relate to situations foreign from our own, and even with a personal connection to the plot (as I felt with The Farewell), the result does not always equal adoration. So many elements factor in how an audience feels about a film. For me, the execution is key. With movies as personal to their writer-directors as The Farewell, The Souvenir, Honey Boy, and Pride and Glory, where it is basically their life reproduced onscreen, the pleasure of being privy to such intimacies makes the watch worth the while.