Monthly Archives: February 2021

  • The Rider

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Chloé Zhao (2017)

    The standard this-is-a-work-of-fiction disclaimer at the end of The Rider comes as a surprise and controverts text ‘About the Production’ on the film’s website[1].  Chloé Zhao’s cast comprises non-professional actors almost all of whom play someone whose name is the same as their own.  The only significant exceptions, or partial exceptions, are the three family members playing the family at the centre of the story.  The father has a completely different name from his character; his two children share a forename with theirs.  The protagonist is Brady Blackburn, a young man in his early twenties, whose career as a rising rodeo star has been cut short.  A rodeo accident, which put him in a coma for several days, has left Brady with a metal plate in his head and long-term neurological damage.  He’s played by twenty-two-year-old Brady Jandreau.  According to The Rider‘s website:

    ‘On April 1st, 2016, Brady entered the PRCE rodeo in Fargo, North Dakota.  He was to compete in the ‘Saddle Bronc’ section and felt confident after a string of successful rides during the season.  But that night Brady was thrown off.  The bucking horse stomped on his head and nearly fatally crashed his skull.  Brady’s brain bled internally.  He had a seizure and fell into a three day coma.  … Brady now has a metal plate in his head and suffers from other health issues associated with a severe traumatic brain injury.  The doctors advised him to never ride again. …’

    Yet the closing titles assert that any resemblance to actual persons etc etc is entirely coincidental and unintentional.  Although the contradiction is baffling, I raise it not as come-off-it criticism of the film-makers but to stress how inescapable are the real-life elements of Chloé Zhao’s ‘contemporary western drama film’ (Wikipedia) for a viewer who comes to The Rider with some idea of its development history.  That’s equally the case when you watch the same writer-director’s Nomadland.  If, like me, you see the two films chronologically the wrong way round, the experience of Zhao’s latest succès d’estime will also tend to shape your response to The Rider.

    At first, this places the earlier film at a disadvantage.  You observe Fern, the itinerant heroine of Nomadland, go about her mostly unexciting business and marvel at Frances McDormand’s skill:  she makes Fern as real as any of the actual nomadists on the screen while creating curiosity about the character in ways only a gifted actor can.  In The Rider Zhao’s introduction to Brady’s situation and family life is engaging but a scene such as a nighttime countryside outing with his friends seems in no man’s land between documentary and drama.  Brady, Cat (Cat Clifford), James (James Calhoon) and Tanner (Tanner Langdeau) sit chatting and smoking weed.  Their interactions don’t amount to much and I felt I was making twofold allowances for this.  I told myself that, since the young men were playing themselves, they were presenting unvarnished reality which should be sufficiently interesting per se.  At the same time, I realised I was excusing the occasionally awkward delivery of lines on the grounds that these were inexperienced actors.

    You wouldn’t always guess it from their appearance but Brady Jandreau and other cast members are cowboys and Indians (Lakota Sioux).  Zhao got to know them while shooting her first feature, Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.  Brady Jandreau lives off the land, hunting on horseback and fishing.  Despite his increasing rodeo success, his regular work was breaking in and training wild horses.  Zhao was fascinated to watch this and communicates that fascination in The Rider.  It was during a sequence in which Brady pacifies and gains the trust of an unbroken horse that I started to see the film differently.  The episode is absorbing in purely documentary terms but it’s also more than that.  Zhao and her editor Alex O’Flinn have worked what in reality must have been a much longer session into something apparently continuous, thereby intensifying Brady’s magic touch with horses.  And because by now we’ve built up a strong awareness of his frustration at being unable to resume rodeo, we get an even stronger – a dramatic – sense of the importance of this complementary equestrian expertise as the means of maintaining his self-identity.  Riding horses is not just what Brady does but who he is.

    His rodeo accident caused an immediate seizure; its legacy includes what a doctor describes as ‘complex partial seizures’ whereby Brady can’t use his hands.  The medical advice is never to get on a horse again, either in the rodeo ring or as a breaker-in.  Brady finds temporary work in a supermarket but seems denatured there.  It doesn’t help that he’s a local celebrity.  At the checkout, a man urges him not to give up on his dreams.   A young boy wants a photo of himself with Brady, his hero.  There’s another good moment when Brady, stacking shelves and pricing items, seems to be wielding his portable barcode scanner like a gun.  Brady Jandreau is always expressive but more interestingly so as the film goes on.  When, in an early scene, Brady visits his mother’s hillside grave, Zhao’s camera seems simply to observe his melancholy.  By the time the young fan asks for the photo with Brady, Jandreau seems to be using his face, and drawing the camera, to tell us more of his character’s feelings.

    Chloé Zhao was intending to make a film based on Brady Jandreau’s way of life before the accident that radically changed it:  his predicament offered a newly urgent focus that Zhao could hardly overlook.  Since The Rider isn’t a documentary, however, the indivisibility of two other characters and the people playing them seems more problematic, even exploitative.  Lilly Blackburn has Asperger’s Syndrome because Lilly Jandreau has Asperger’s Syndrome.  Brady’s friend Lane Scott, whom he several times visits in a long-term care facility, was a star bull-rider until he suffered an accident even more damaging than Brady’s.  Wheelchair bound and unable to speak, Lane still has an active brain.  He can make himself understood by finger movements.  He can also watch videos of himself in his cocksure, bull-riding prime – videos, that is, of the real Lane Scott, before the 2017 car accident that left him paralysed, mute and now playing a character called Lane Scott whose resemblance to his actual self is supposedly coincidental and unintentional.  The only difference between them is that the ‘fictional’ Lane’s injuries resulted, like Brady’s, from a fall from a bucking animal rather than a car crash.  Lilly’s imaginative language and lack of inhibition are extraordinary to hear and see.  Both she and Lane would have been capable of consenting to take part in the film.  Yet I still felt uneasy watching these involuntarily compelling camera subjects.

    After a climactic argument with his father Wayne, Brady drives off to take part in a rodeo competition.  Wayne says he won’t be coming to watch his son kill himself and walks away from the car.  Brady’s parting shot, addressed to his father’s receding back, is, ‘I don’t want to end up like you’.  In the film’s penultimate scene, at the rodeo, Brady is about to enter the ring when he catches sight of Wayne and Lilly looking on, and thinks again.  He walks over to them.  The three embrace before leaving the rodeo.  This may well signal, as the Wikipedia plot synopsis says, that Brady Blackburn ‘finally decides to walk away from the competition and life as a rodeo rider’ – as Brady Jandreau has done (though it seems he hasn’t given up breaking in wild horses).  Zhao does well nevertheless to follow this with another sequence in Lane’s hospital room, with Brady once more encouraging his friend’s wheelchair riding.   We hear in Brady’s voice that he, as much as Lane, still longs to be on horseback.

    This last impression left by The Rider exemplifies Zhao’s success in taking her material beyond the quasi-documentary.  She’s done this more continuously in developing the relationship between Brady and his father.  The latter may be the most invented of the substantial characters, and not only because his name is different from that of the man playing him.  Tim Jandreau is the lead actor’s father and, according to the film’s website, ‘an old school cowboy who taught Brady all he knows’.  Wayne Blackburn too is an old-school cowboy but there’s no reason to think that the hints of Wayne’s casual womanising or his addiction to gambling machines, which has aggravated his family’s lack of funds, are inspired by Tim Jandreau.  They could be, of course, but Wayne’s key traits aren’t obviously dictated, as they are in other cases, by the traits of the person in the role.  And the mixture of feelings between Wayne and Brady is persuasive.  They infuriate each other – Brady is exasperated by his father’s wastrel side, Wayne by his son’s foolhardy stubbornness – but they evidently care about each other too.

    In the end, I liked The Rider a lot – more than I like Nomadland.  That movie, for all its virtues, is sweeping up awards partly because it has a worthy subject and viewers can feel they’ve done a good deed by watching it.  That isn’t the case with The Rider.  Assets shared by the two films include Chloé Zhao’s lack of condescension towards people who might be thought deprived; an effective use of music (The Rider’s original score is by Nathan Halpern); and Joshua James Richards’ impressive landscape cinematography.  The widescreen grandeur of Richards’ images of the South Dakota Badlands is on a larger scale than other aspects of the film.  It’s thematically less ambitious than Nomadland yet the story of The Rider is tighter and tenser and, for this viewer, proved emotionally more involving.

    22 February 2021

    [1] The Rider || A Sony Pictures Classics Release (sonyclassics.com)

  • Dick Johnson Is Dead

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kirsten Johnson (2020)

    Kirsten Johnson’s voiceover introduces her father as ‘just the kind of dad you want – open, accepting …’  It’s soon clear too that C Richard (Dick) Johnson has charm and humour to burn.  Dick Johnson Is Dead is a truly extraordinary documentary in several ways but its chief asset is the man at its centre – very bright, transparently decent, immensely likeable and endlessly co-operative.  His daughter admits at the start of the film she can’t bear the idea of losing him but knows the idea is now becoming reality.  Octogenarian Dick, a retired clinical psychiatrist, has been diagnosed with dementia and is ‘starting to disappear’.  Kirsten’s mother, who died several years ago, also suffered from Alzheimer’s.   A couple of photos capture her vividly young and middle-aged; a fragment of video footage shows the distracted, depleted older woman.  It’s distressing to Kirsten this is the only moving-picture record she has of her mother.  She’s not letting the same thing happen with her father.

    Dick Johnson Is Dead moves from Seattle, where Dick has lived and worked for years, to New York City, his daughter’s home.  When his dementia worsens he moves into her Manhattan apartment.   (Kirsten, unusually, co-parents her twin children with the film-maker Ira Sachs and his husband, who live in an adjacent apartment.)  One sequence shows Kirsten with Marta, an experienced carer of terminally ill patients who has been engaged to help care for Dick.  The two women briefly discuss Kirsten’s qualms about the film she’s making.  Marta tells Kirsten that Dick’s love for her means ‘he’d let you do anything’.  Marta means the remark to reassure but it doesn’t.  Although Kirsten knows she mustn’t go beyond what it’s decent to record of her father’s decline, she confesses to being unsure where the boundary is.

    A viewer naturally shares Kirsten’s misgivings – this viewer did anyway.  I’m predisposed to dislike real-life descriptions of terminal mental decline and sceptical about the value of television documentaries which, in showing people with advanced neuro-degenerative disease, purport to help others who are having or will have to cope with it, either as sufferers or carers.  Despite the enthusiastic reception for Dick Johnson Is Dead (a Sundance prizewinner in early 2020 and currently 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes from 88 reviews), I didn’t expect to think well of it but I did, with some reservations.  One’s never in doubt from what she says and how she says it that Kirsten Johnson loves her father deeply but that alone wouldn’t be enough to dispel worries that she’s exploiting him.  (The families involved in the kind of TV just mentioned no doubt mean well.)  It’s Dick who makes the difference.  He has consented to Kirsten’s project while still of sound mind; his faculties are clearly in decline but he remains aware of what’s happening to him – and is often witty about it.  Kirsten asks whether, when his condition deteriorates, he’d rather not be alive at all.  Dick says he loves life too much to be able to imagine preferring non-existence but, he adds good-humouredly, ‘You can euthanise me if you want’.  When Kirsten asks if he really means that, he confirms as much ‘but run it past me before you do’.

    He seems a man with few regrets beyond the loss of his wife and the badly deformed toes he was born with and has always been ashamed of.   He feels the sadness of his fate but accepts it cheerfully.  He has, it seems throughout his life, been a practising Seventh Day Adventist and clearly sees the fellowship of churchgoing as salutary, though it’s less clear how much of the Adventist dogma he believes.  A visit to the doctor to check on his cognitive condition is a wonderfully eloquent illustration of how well he understands his condition, even as he demonstrates it.  The doctor gives him five words to remember – church, daisy, face, red and velvet.  (I’m trying to lock them into my brain as I did the words in the corresponding test in Still Alice:  stethoscope, hedgehog, millennium, cathode, pomegranate, trellis – if memory serves, which it may not.)  The words, as a group, have disappeared in no time although Dick can still retrieve them with prompts that one’s a colour, one’s a material, and so on.   He shows a professional medic’s interest in the test and seems to enjoy taking it.

    Now to the reservations.  Its leading man confers a persistent saving grace on Dick Johnson Is Dead yet the most original aspect, implicit in the film’s title, is stubbornly problematic.  Kirsten Johnson keeps staging her father’s death, in different ways but usually as the result of a startling accident:  an air conditioner falls from an upstairs window and hits Dick as he walks along the street below; a careless building worker swings a plank into his face.  These (and other) incidents make use of stunt doubles and fake blood.  The rationale for them seems clear enough.  Kirsten instinctively refuses to accept Dick’s actual impending demise.  By making him die, she creates repeated opportunities to resurrect him – in two ways.  First, the pretend endings of his life are sometimes followed by kitsch visualisations of heaven, where Dick is received and looks ecstatic, especially catching sight of his miraculously transformed toes.  Second, he isn’t really dead yet.

    The staged deaths are troubling partly because Dick is occasionally a troubled participant in them:  he knows what’s going on – his daughter ‘keeps killing me and I keep coming back to life’ – but that doesn’t prevent his being confused and upset by the fake blood, for example.  This brings clearly into view the decency boundary that Kirsten is concerned about overlooking.   So does a later Halloween episode when Dick, costumed for the occasion, appears to be left alone in the spookily lit apartment while Kirsten and her children are out.  When his daughter returns Dick repeatedly expresses relief that she came back and didn’t leave him alone in the dark.  She takes the opportunity to describe, in voiceover, the Seventh Day Adventist belief that the faithful, when they die, will remain unconscious until raised to new life at Christ’s second coming; she suggests that fear of being ‘left behind’ is thus fundamental to the Adventist creed.  Even if he wasn’t actually left alone on Halloween night (he presumably had a camera operator for company in the apartment), Dick evinces real anxiety at the prospect of being abandoned.

    There’s another reason why the mock deaths are uncomfortable to watch.   At one point, Dick asks Kirsten why she makes documentaries rather than fictional films ‘where the big bucks are’.  Her answer is that she tends to find reality more fascinating than invention.  It’s possible to see this documentary as a play on how much screen fiction trades in mayhem that is lethal but also, through its frequent mechanical use, emotionally weightless.  As such, it can be used here as a means of de-realising mortality, of ‘distract[ing] from distraction by distraction’.  It’s also, however, a means of both extending and gussying up the narrative.  Dick Johnson Is Dead runs just short of ninety minutes, which pass quickly.   It would be thoroughly absorbing but barely feature-length without the morbid make-believe – and that element, whatever Kirsten Johnson intended, is largely responsible for the degree of admiring attention the film is receiving.

    The climax, though, is both a successful coup de théâtre and a moving vindication of the whole piece.  Dick Johnson suffered a heart attack when in his mid-fifties.  He remembers that, the previous day, he’d eaten three pieces of chocolate cake – a perennial favourite.  We watch his grandchildren help Kirsten make a cake for Dick’s eighty-sixth birthday.  He pronounces it the best chocolate cake he’s ever eaten ‘and I’ve eaten a lot of them’.   Cut to a screen indicating 23rd June 2019 with a soundtrack of concerned voices and an ambulance siren.  Dick has evidently had another heart attack.  We don’t see or hear him but we gather he has stopped breathing and that paramedics are failing to resuscitate him.  This is followed by a funeral service in the Seattle church where Dick worshipped.  A microphone is passed around members of the huge congregation who want to say something in remembrance of Dick.  A woman describes how he comforted her when her own husband died but, the next time they spoke, asked after her husband’s health.  Dick’s best friend, seen earlier in the film, comes to the front of the church to deliver a eulogy.  He repeatedly breaks down.  Dick, with Kirsten at his side, is shown watching this, transfixed by and upset for his friend – ‘He thinks it’s for real’.

    This culminating trompe l’oeil sequence is also confirmation of its themes – inventively futile human denial of death vs its inevitability, celebration of a life worth celebrating vs mourning of its end.  Dick’s funeral was staged in Seattle before his move to Kirsten’s home in New York City.  At the end of the service, he walks down the church aisle, beaming at his many friends in the pews either side.  The whole thing is a put-on but not a put-on.  The woman describing her first experience of Dick’s loss of memory is recalling what she knew was the beginning of the end.  The best friend’s grief is no pretence:  he knows the person he has loved is doomed to go away, to New York and, in time, to oblivion.  In the very last scene, Kirsten Johnson repeats ‘Dick Johnson is dead, Dick Johnson is dead’ – acknowledging that these words are, for her, an inescapable mantra.  Yet she’s still impelled, she says, to assert ‘Long live, Dick Johnson!’   The closing dedication on the screen is to ‘Dick Johnson, 1932-‘.  I don’t know if he technically still is in the land of living.  In a sense, that’s irrelevant to his daughter’s priorities in making this remarkable film.

    16 February 2021

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