Film review

  • Wet Season

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Anthony Chen (2019)

    The rain it raineth almost throughout writer-director Anthony Chen’s second feature, set in Singapore during monsoon season.  A lack of sunny intervals reflects the prevailing mood of the film – and its protagonist Ling (Yeo Yann Yann) – but screen weather serves a purpose beyond pathetic fallacy here.  Successive downpours influence the storyline too.  If it wasn’t pouring down, Ling, a Mandarin language teacher in a boys’ secondary school, wouldn’t need to give lifts in her car to one of the students, sixteen-year-old Wei Lun (Koh Jia Ler).  The climate, for much of the story, isn’t altogether symbolic – the rainfall isn’t enabling new life to grow.  Ling, a Malysian, is continuing to undergo IVF treatment, having failed to conceive throughout her eight-year marriage to Singaporean businessman Andrew (Christopher Lee), which is under increasing strain.  The couple share their home with, and care for, Andrew’s elderly and severely disabled father (Yang Shi Bin), partially paralysed by a stroke.  The only nappies that Ling changes are her father-in-law’s.

    The action man-boy Wei Lun changes Ling’s world of numb, barren stasis.  He’s no Mandarin scholar – he attends remedial classes with Ling outside normal school hours – but he’s a brilliant exponent of wushu, a Chinese martial art.  Not at the start of Wet Season, though, when Wei Lun is on crutches following a training accident – another reason for giving him a lift home to the apartment block where he lives with his parents.  Their absence from the film reflects how little interest they take in their son.  On one occasion, Wei Lun comes back with Ling to her home, and the father-in-law immediately takes a shine to him.  When the boy wins his wushu class at the national school championships, it’s Ling and the old man, not his parents, who are watching, along with Wei Lun’s schoolmates.

    It’s not unusual, when an infirm character in a film suddenly gets a new lease of life, for it to be a short-term lease.  A few screen minutes after encouraging Ling, as best he can, to smile, her father-in-law dies.  Nor is it unexpected when the relationship between teacher and pupil gets more serious and sexual.  The culminating non-surprise of Wet Season is Ling’s discovery that Wei Lun has succeeded where both her husband, who by now is with another woman, and IVF failed.  A plot synopsis of this small-scale drama makes it sound tritely predictable, and the film takes time to gather momentum.  Once it does, though, it’s absorbing – and offers a perspective on male sexual entitlement that, thanks to the two main characters’ relative status and ages, is unusual.

    Wei Lun makes a difference to Ling’s life but not, until the later stages of the film, a dramatic difference.  When they eat durian together, its creamy pulp may predict forbidden fruit to follow; and Ling is aware that she enjoys Wei Lun’s company.  He may also, of course, be the child she’s never had.  You don’t get the impression, though, that she’s analysing these things too closely and there’s no suggestion she might be ready to transgress the bounds of reasonable social interaction with a student.  Wei Lun has a more definite and proactive crush on Ling:  he takes photos of her on his phone when her back is turned in the classroom.  (It seems the other kids must be looking away too – no one else seems to notice what he’s doing at this stage.)  The crucial shift in the relationship occurs one evening when, as she drives him home, he has a nosebleed.  She helps him into his apartment; not only are his parents absent but there’s next to nothing in the fridge when Ling goes to it to make an ice pack.  In his bedroom, the walls covered in posters of his hero Jackie Chan, Wei Lun removes his shirt as Ling applies the ice.  She sits on the bed beside him.  Once his nosebleed has stopped, Wei Lun takes hold of Ling and kisses her.  She struggles but he’s too strong for her.  He takes off the rest of his clothes and forces her to have intercourse.

    This scene and its aftermath are remarkable in several ways.  We see from Ling’s reaction that Wei Lun’s passion isn’t unrequited.  (This serves as a reminder too that her husband no longer wants to have sex with her.)  Even so, there’s no doubt that Wei Lun rapes her.  After he’s done so, he registers her distress and is concerned, but for his own self-esteem rather than for Ling.  He asks her not if he’s done wrong but ‘Did I do it wrong?’  Performance is what matters.  She understandably doesn’t answer his question – not least because she knows, whatever position she now takes, she will be seen by others to have done wrong.  This is well and allusively captured during a subsequent car journey.  Ling’s attempts to behave as if nothing has happened exasperate Wei Lun; he tries to get out of the car while it’s moving.   In preventing that, Ling swerves and collides with a cab.  No one is physically hurt but the angry cabbie berates her for terrible driving – even worse, he says, when your son is in the car with you.

    Later, as they’re about to part for the last time, Wei Lun peremptorily informs Ling this is his first relationship so she might at least have the decency to make its ending memorable.  (This leads to the prolonged embrace which provides the image for the film’s theatrical release poster.)  Anthony Chen doesn’t censure Wei Lun; he suggests, rather, that a confusion of virgin’s anxiety and lack of affection from his own mother may be driving the teenager’s behaviour and attitude.  Even so, he’s not easily likeable and it’s hard to forget that Jiale, the boy protagonist of Chen’s debut feature Ilo Ilo (2013), wasn’t easily likeable either.  Wei Lun never learns about Ling’s pregnancy.  Her marriage ends, she gives up her job and returns to her mother’s home in rural Malaysia to have the baby.   Now the weather has gone full-blown metaphorical.  The rains are over.  In the final scene of the film, Ling looks up into a sky of white clouds, through which the sun is starting to peep.  She smiles, as her father-in-law recommended.

    I stayed for part of the Q&A with Chen that followed the screening of Wet Season at the London Film Festival.  He talked interestingly about the casting.  Yann Yann Yeo and Koh Lia Jer both appeared in Ilo Ilo and Chen didn’t want either of them in the leads this time.  They were mother and son in the earlier film; the idea of their playing characters sexually involved with each other carried, Chen thought, ‘too much incestuous baggage’. Only when he failed, after a lengthy search, to find his Ling and Wei Lun elsewhere, did Chen think again.  Doing so was a good decision.  Yeo Yann Yann, the strongest adult performer in Ilo Ilo, has a larger role in Wet Season and her characterisation is an object lesson in realistically expressive acting.  The viewer can read her feelings but they’re not obvious to other people on the screen, except when Ling means to be transparent to those people.  (This isn’t simply a matter of an inscrutable oriental face:  Awkwafina in The Farewell is, compared with Yeo, unrealistically expressive.)   As Wei Lun, Koh Jia Ler, ten years old when he played Jiale in Ilo Ilo, now convincingly combines physical heft and emotional callowness.  Yang Shi Bin is subtly eloquent as Ling’s father-in-law.

    Chen’s sensitive direction is better than his writing.   There are elements of the screenplay, both minor and major, that seem careless or awkward.   One of Ling’s fellow teachers lives in the same block as Wei Lun’s family; when she bumps into Ling there with the boy, this teacher/nosey neighbour is, from the start, suspicious but it’s not followed through.  Wei Lun’s obsession with Ling comes to light when some of the other boys see him looking at images of her and seize his phone.  This results in a fight and the phone being handed in to the school principal, who summons Wei Lun and Ling to his office.  Chen seems to forget Wei Lun’s recent wushu triumph:  that would not only give him kudos among his peers; it would also mean the principal would know who he was, instead of saying, ‘Now, let’s see – you’re in 4B, aren’t you?’  The principal is a cartoon careerist, about to move on to his next job – he doesn’t want to know any more from Ling about her relationship with Wei Lun, in case it makes inconvenient waves.  Yet if he’s selfishly ambitious, the principal would likely be alert to anything likely to embellish his CV, including his students’ sporting success.

    The sequence of events late on is baffling.   After signing off papers for the divorce her husband has instigated, Ling prepares to move her things out of the apartment they shared.  She happens to find an unused pregnancy testing kit in the bathroom cabinet and, for the hell of it, takes the test.  We hear her reaction – a bitterly astonished moan – but don’t see it.   When she arrives back in Malaysia, she shows no outward signs of pregnancy.  It must be possible to get a divorce very quickly in Singapore …  These considerations seem finally unimportant, though.  What matters most in the film, and makes it distinctive, is the central relationship.  Anthony Chen’s handling of that relationship – in both its touching and its troubling aspects – makes Wet Season memorable.

    9 October 2019

  • The Peanut Butter Falcon

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz (2019)

    The Peanut Butter Falcon, showing at the London Film Festival immediately before its UK-wide release, has two distinctive features.  The first is an appealing, intriguing title.  The second, more important, is that the main character is a young man with Down’s syndrome, played by an actor who has the same condition.  In most other respects, this is a formulaic drama-comedy – sentimental and predictable, though well acted and likeable too.  Twenty-two-year-old Zak (Zack Gottsagen), who has special needs but no family, is in care in North Carolina – in, of all places, a retirement home.  He keeps trying to escape; his sensitive but exasperated carer Eleanor (Dakota Johnson) labels him a ‘flight risk’.  One night, with the help of his wily geriatric roommate Carl (Bruce Dern), Zak takes off, into the great outdoors.

    Although he’s taken a shine to Zak, one thing about him Carl won’t miss.  The old man is obliged to spend a fair amount of every day watching an antique VHS tape that Zak insists on playing repeatedly.  It promotes the exploits of a pro wrestler known as the Salt Water Redneck and his wrestling school in the North Carolina town of Ayden.  Zak has his heart set on becoming a wrestler too.  When he escapes from the retirement home, his destination is the school in Ayden but he hasn’t any idea how to get there.  Wearing just his underpants and soon bewildered, he takes refuge on a fishing boat moored beside a lake.  He’s startled to find the boat suddenly in motion.  It’s been stolen by Tyler (Shia LaBeouf), a local man who also needs to make a getaway.

    Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz have introduced Tyler in parallel to Zak but the two are destined to be partners on the journey, geographical and emotional, that The Peanut Butter Falcon describes.  We first meet Tyler in an altercation at a crab shack with two other locals, Duncan (John Hawkes) and Ratboy (Yelawolf).  They won’t let Tyler sell his crabs because he hasn’t a licence for catching them.  In retaliation, he sets fire to $12,000 worth of equipment on the docks and flees on the boat Zak’s hiding on.   In his first, brief conversation with Zak, Tyler learns little more than that the young man can’t swim.  Tyler has decided to quit North Carolina and head for Florida.  Once they reach the other side of the lake, he attempts to leave Zak behind but soon thinks again.  He retraces his steps to see Zak on a high platform and in peril.  A teenage boy, yelling ‘retard’ repeatedly, forces him to jump down into the lake.

    Although he rescues Zak, Tyler spends a while after that grumbling at him – standard practice for a film character on the move, but with an unexpected, alien companion who’s liable to hinder progress.  Yet the older man, without saying so, soon feels not just a responsibility to protect Zak but also kinship with another runaway.  Eleanor, meanwhile, has been dispatched by her unpleasant boss, Glen (Lee Spencer), to track the fugitive down.  She bumps into Tyler in a convenience store, where he’s buying provisions for himself and Zak.  Tyler tries and fails to chat her up.  When Eleanor produces a photograph of Zak, Tyler denies having seen him.  As they continue on their journey to Florida via Ayden, Tyler is struck by Zak’s fierce, if clueless, determination to get to where he wants to be – and by the youngster’s unusual bodily strength.  He teaches Zak how to swim (shades of Moonlight) and fire a gun, and improvises a physical training programme for him.

    When he tells Tyler about his wrestling hero and ambitions, Zak admits that he can’t himself become a hero because of his Down’s syndrome.   It’s a resonant moment:  you can’t help wondering if Zack Gottsagen is also speaking for himself and the limited opportunities available to him as an actor.  I didn’t know this beforehand but the film was developed, according to Wikipedia, after ‘Nilson and Schwartz first met Zack Gottsagen at a camp for disabled actors around 2011 in Venice, California, and he expressed interest in them making a film with him’.  The writer-directors took Gottsagen’s ‘own desire to be an actor and change[d] it into a quest to become a wrestler’.  In the light of ‘shooting a $20,000 proof-of-concept video, the duo received funding for a feature starring Gottsagen’.

    There’s no getting away from this dimension of The Peanut Butter Falcon – or from how unlikely it is that Zack Gottsagen’s appearance in what is now a critically and commercially successful film will be the breakthrough it might have been for a non-disabled actor.  Gottsagen is actually thirty-four (older than either Shia LaBeouf or Dakota Johnson).  His IMDb credits include a short made in 2012 and a feature (Ready to Ride: A Musical Homecoming), starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard and which is now in post-production.  Even so, Gottsagen’s screen opportunities will inevitably be few.   As you watch The Peanut Butter Falcon, you do get a more real understanding of why there are growing calls for disabled characters always to be played by appropriately disabled actors – who will certainly never get to play people without their disability.

    Zack Gottsagen may, to a large extent, be expressing himself rather than creating a character but he can time and point a line, and he produces some comically singular sounds when Zak is exerting himself physically and emotionally.  Gottsagen may also have helped Shia LaBeouf give a dynamic and generous performance – the best I’ve seen from him.   Tyler has a criminal record and caused the death of his elder brother in a car crash (drunk driving, Tyler fell asleep at the wheel).  LaBeouf shows very well how Tyler’s empathy with Zak – someone who, like himself, is up against it – grows into altruism.  When Eleanor discovers the pair’s camp, she makes unavailing attempts to get Zak to return with her immediately to the retirement home.  Tyler persuades her to accompany them to Ayden instead.  She agrees, provided they return to the home once Zak has visited Salt Water Redneck’s wrestling school.  Soon after making that condition, she goes native.  It’s a mechanical transition; to Dakota Johnson’s credit, it doesn’t feel like a false one.  Nuanced from the start, Johnson always suggests a potential in Eleanor to change her mind and ways.  Another prescribed element of the script is that, in due course, she and Tyler fall in love.  Johnson and LaBeouf make that work too.

    The episodic narrative has echoes of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.   Crossing a river, Tyler and Zak narrowly escape being struck by a passenger boat.  They stumble across an eccentric old blind man (Wayne Dehart) – a zealous Christian who baptises them both and gives them what they need to build a raft.   Throughout their journey around the Outer Banks of North Carolina, they’re pursued by Duncan and Ratbag, hellbent on getting revenge for Tyler’s arson.   In these cases too, Nilson and Schwartz are well served by their actors – especially John Hawkes.  Although Duncan and Ratbag are baddies in the simple moral scheme of the piece, Hawkes conveys, as well as wiry aggression, a raw neediness in Duncan.

    Tyler eventually tracks down Salt Water Redneck (Thomas Haden Church), although he’s long retired and the school has closed down.  This is one of the best parts of the film – thanks not least to Thomas Haden Church’s strong and funny presence.  (Bruce Dern has similar qualities in the opening scenes.)  It’s beyond Zak’s comprehension that what he saw on the video isn’t happening here and now.  Salt Water, real name Clint, is moved by what Tyler tells him to set up a wrestling bout for Zak – the climax to the story and to the pursuit of Tyler by Duncan and Ratbag.  The Peanut Butter Falcon finally reduces to a simplistic happy ending as Eleanor, Zak and Tyler drive into Florida together.  Still, the misfits’ friendship has occasionally brought to mind Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy – so it’s a relief to see both Zak and Tyler reach Florida alive.  Eleanor has finally parted company with the retirement home, the outrageous Glen having proposed that, rather than bring Zak back there, she place him in a care facility for drug addicts and prostitutes.  I’m assuming the film isn’t inventing how shockingly random and thoughtless placements in the American care system can be.

    As will be clear, Nilson’s and Schwartz’s screenplay is on the primitive side but they tell an entertaining story and, with the help of their DP Nigel Bluck, make good use of the landscape, conjuring up a sense of both its liberating and threatening aspects.   The script’s sketchiness is a plus in one sense:  it avoids an overworking of either Tyler’s or Eleanor’s backstory.  There are just a couple of flashbacks to Tyler and his brother (Jon Bernthal) to illustrate their closeness and make clear how the latter died.  There’s no explanation at all of how Eleanor became such a young widow.  A little bluegrass music goes a long way with me and the soundtrack contains more than a little, but that’s hardly a criticism.   It turns out the film is named for Zak’s wrestling persona, inspired by his regular diet during the journey.   When he went shopping in the convenience store, a jar of peanut butter was all that Tyler could afford.

    11 October 2019

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