Band of Outsiders
My thoughts on American Fiction, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget and Godard Cinema
In American Fiction, the directorial debut of Cord Jefferson, Jeffrey Wright plays Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, a Black writer whose low sales leave him unable to find a publisher for his latest work and force him to take a demeaning teaching position in order to pay the bills, one that he ends up losing in the opening scene when he quarrels with an overly woke white student who refuses to read a certain Flannery O’Connor short story on the syllabus. To make matters worse, he attends a writers conference and encounters the hot new Black author, Sinatra Golden (Issa Rae) and her celebrated creation, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, the kind of Push-style poverty porn that is usually described in reviews as being “searing.” Eventually, these personal and professional resentments lead Monk to sit down and, under a pen name, write a sneering spoof of what he believes is the only kind of narrative that contemporary audiences want from Black authors, the title of which is My Pafology. As a joke, he passes this manuscript along to his agent (John Ortiz) and the two are soon shocked to discover that not only are publishers taking it seriously instead of as satire, they are champing at the bit to print what they are convinced is going to be a sure-fire best seller. Naturally, Monk is initially appalled by this but with an Alzheimer’s-ridden mother (Leslie Uggams) in need of immediate and expensive care, he decides to go along with the charade and things quickly begin to escalate from there as the book does indeed become the best-selling literary sensation of the season.
In adapting Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure to the screen, Jefferson has three things going for him—an intriguing initial premise, a strong satirical perspective and a strong central performance from Wright as Monk—that help to keep the film moving along for a while. In the second half, however, the only one of those that is still working is the undeniably effective performance by Wright. As for the film itself, the satire grows softer as the absurdities begin to pile up and the sharpness devolves into the kind of bland self-satisfaction that lets viewers off the hook instead of forcing them to examine their own attitudes to the issues and ideas raised in the way that Spike Lee’s thematically similar but infinitely more scabrous Bamboozled did two decades earlier. The film also ends up straying from its central premise for a number of well-acted but ultimately unnecessary scenes involving Monk rebuilding his relationship with his estranged and newly-out brother (Sterling K. Brown) and embarking on a tentative romance with a new neighbor (Erika Alexander). American Fiction has undeniable ambitions and some very funny moments, at least in the beginning, but at a certain point, it just becomes an increasingly repetitive exercise in shooting ducks in a barrel and somehow still missing a number of the targets along the way.
You will remember, I presume, Chicken Run, the hugely popular and immensely delightful 2000 stop-motion animation favorite from Aardman that utilized the basic template of The Great Escape to chart an insurrection of plucky chickens determined to flee the industrial farm where they are kept before they are turned into pies. (If you don’t, please put this down and watch it right this instant.) As the belated sequel Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget opens, those chickens are living peacefully on an island and the ringleaders of that operation, Ginger (Thandiwe Newton) and Rocky (Zachary Levi), are raising their own daughter, Molly (Bella Ramsey), who is beginning to chafe at their overprotective nature. With some friends, Molly goes off in search of adventure and lands in a free range spread that is so charming and bucolic that nothing could possibly be wrong with it. Alas, the place turns out to be the handiwork of Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson), the owner of the first film’s farm who has a diabolical new plan for the chickens in her possession (one cunningly hidden in the title) and Ginger, Rocky and a number of the old timers, including Babs (Jane Horrocks) and Fowler (David Bradley) now have to conceive an execute a plan to break into the farm and rescue Molly and the others before they have their imminent dates with a variety of dipping sauces.
Those who are familiar with the previous film will suspect that things are a bit off right from the start once they discover that the original voices of Ginger and Rocky, Julia Sawahla and Mel Gibson, have been replaced—perhaps understandably in the case of the latter, though the exclusion of Sawahla is simply baffling. However, the problems with the film extend far beyond the new additions to the voice cast and mostly revolve around the largely ungainly and uninspired screenplay, which tries to do for heist films what the original did for WWII sagas but never manages to approximate either the sly wit or genuine tension of its predecessor. This is the rare Aardman production that feels as if it was made solely to exploit a valuable property than to tell an interesting story and although it certainly works from a visual perspective and has a few funny moments here and there, the bland characterizations, lackluster narrative and lack of any real quirk or charm never make a real case for its existence. Because it is bright and colorful and reasonably energetic, little kids might get a kick out of it (especially those who have not seen the original) but anyone who saw and loved the original Chicken Run is likely to come away from this one feeling little more than a vague sense of disappointment.
Considering that he had a career than spanned over six decades, included over 140 titles and saw him continuing to challenge virtually every aspect of the language of cinema right up until his passing last year at the age of 91, it would seem to be an impossible task for any single film to fully encapsulate the life and work of the legendary Jean-Luc Godard. To its credit, Cyril Leuthy’s Godard Cinema (which premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival about a week before Godard’s passing) does not even attempt such a potentially foolhardy task. Instead, it takes a broader look at his career, charting his evolution from the maverick whose initial burst of filmmaking spanning from 1959-67 remains arguably the greatest and most prolific stretch of work in the history of cinema to his radical shift to wholly polemical projects for most of the Seventies to his third wave in which he made a semi-return to narrative projects, albeit on his highly unique terms and often in ways that found him deconstructing the filmmaking apparatus along the way. This is accomplished via the use of new interviews with past colleagues and collaborators, nifty archival materials (including stirring footage of him helping to lead the artistic protests against the government that led to the shutdown of the 1968 Cannes Film Festival) and, most importantly, choice selections from one of the most stacked filmographies of all time that will have most viewers scurrying for the Criterion Channel as soon as it is over.
As someone who considers Godard to be one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, watching Godard Cinema made for an undeniably entertaining experience. The interviews (especially the one done by Julie Delpy, who got her start in film in his Detective) do a good job of conveying the clearly head-spinning aspects of trying to co-exist with him on either a personal or professional level and the glimpses of Godard in the studio that he established for himself in Switzerland in order to carry out his various formal experiments in relative solitude were also fascinating. Of course, the film also offered up the chance to once again bask in some of the most memorable moments to ever pass through the light of a projector——Jean Seberg hawking newspapers in Breathless, Anna Karina weeping at the screen in Vivre Sa Vie, the alternately hilarious and arousing opening of Contempt. And yet, even though there was no way to fit all of his life and work into a running time even a minute shorter than the one he used for his landmark Histoire(s) du Cinema series, there are a number of frustrating blanks spaces on hand, particularly the omission of virtually everything he did after his controversial 1986 work Hail Mary, a period that included such impressive works as In Praise of Love (2000), Film Socialisme (2010) and Goodbye to Language, a 2014 effort featuring a jerry-rigged form of 3D that provided some of the most astonishing sights ever seen in that format. That said, Godard Cinema is still a good film that will entertain his followers, serve as a decent primer for newcomers to his legacy and hopefully inspire someone to do a more in-depth look at his life and work down the line.
Preceding screenings of Godard Cinema is Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars, a 20-minute-long short that appears to be Godard’s final cinematic output. It is evidently an off-shoot of an attempt by Godard to make a film adaptation of Charles Plisnier’s 1937 book False Passports, a story comprised of five linked short narratives charting underground communist activities in France, China, Germany, Italy and Spain in the wake of World War One. What is shown is a collage of photos, storyboards, abstract drawings clips from Godard’s own Notre Musique and brief voiceover comments about Plisnier and his work from Godard himself, all of which is presented in a manner arcane enough to send even those familiar with a working knowledge of Godard’s deliberately obscure later projects scurrying for the aisles in utter bafflement. (The soundtrack takes so long to finally kick in that I found myself checking to make sure that my screener wasn’t faulty.) Having watched it, I cannot say I have any specific ideas as to what Godard might have been hoping to achieve with the prospective project and there is some suggestion that perhaps he didn’t have a fully formed idea at this point either. However, what we do get is an opportunity to see a filmmaker in his nineties still cheerfully confounding all expectations and leaving even those who profess to know of his work baffled—honestly, I cannot think of a more fitting way to end the most idiosyncratic of filmographies than that.