At this year’s New York Film Festival, I saw twenty-five movies, or roughly one-third of the lineup. Depending on where you exist on the New York cinephile spectrum, that’s either quite a lot or nothing at all, but by my fourth three-movie day, it began to feel like too much. Not to knock the festival itself: across the various slates I saw experimental documentaries, autobiographical collages, restored classics, and plenty of form-breaking films blurring the line between reality and fiction. Some of these films were good; plenty were good enough. But when you take in so many images in such a short span, your standards begin to rise. Minor flaws become unforgivable; a bad score turns your stomach. And in the midst of so much talent, mediocrity becomes the deadliest of sins.
Take The Friend. Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s National Book Award–winning 2018 novel, it follows Iris (Naomi Watts), an esteemed but not terribly successful writer who mostly works as a creative-writing teacher. When her mentor, friend, and one-time romantic partner Walter (Bill Murray) commits suicide, she is left with Apollo, a black-and-white-spotted Great Dane. Apollo, “played” by a dog named Bing, is a giant animal of undeniable presence, and Iris is not actually allowed to keep him in her “shoebox” rent-controlled apartment.
Nunez’s book is slim and discursive, less a story than a series of cool meditations on such subjects as pet loyalty, suicide rates, and sexual politics. This does not necessarily lend itself to gripping drama, and so writer-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel make a number of changes to The Friend, all of them bad. The book’s unnamed narrator has a job teaching victims of human trafficking. In place of her we get Iris, who is bright and blonde and stuck moderating hacky conversations between sexist MFA students. She’s given a backstory—dead father, writer’s block—and a sidekick: Walter’s daughter Val (Sarah Pidgeon). In place of Iris’s thoughts and solitary grief, we get her frazzled reactions to Apollo and Val and Walter’s ex-wives, which wouldn’t be out of place in a sitcom. McGehee and Siegel have also moved Iris downtown from New York’s Union Square to the comparatively fancy Washington Square, a change that transforms the narrator from marginal artist to bougie socialite.
But this is nothing compared to the pair’s disastrous stylistic choices. McGehee and Siegel shoot their film with the strenuous indifference of prestige television, all roving pans across sleek, light-filled rooms, showing much, saying nothing. Worried, perhaps, that their script isn’t obvious enough, they drown every scene in a cloyingly schmaltzy score—for example, a bath of weepy strings to let you know that, yes, now might be a moment to cry. Then there is their butchering of Nunez’s prose. Presented via Watts’s narration, it comes across as a series of hopelessly sentimental meditations on dogs and their owners. It’s such a thorough misunderstanding that you have to wonder if they’ve actually read The Friend—or any other book written for adults. This is adaptation as vandalism; Nunez should sue for damages. Within the first fifteen minutes the word “atrocious” popped into my mind and never left. At least I got to look at a really big dog.
Much the same could be said for Maria. The latest tony Netflix production from Chilean biopic addict Pablo Larraín is set in September 1977, during the final week of opera singer Maria Callas’s life. After more than a decade away from the stage, Callas (Angelina Jolie) is degraded in both voice and mind, singing only for her valet and cook, and hallucinating figures from across her life. Larraín intercuts this more prosaic drama with montages of Callas in her prime, as well as scenes from throughout her life, including her childhood performing for the Nazi occupiers, her romance with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilgener), and a meeting with John F. Kennedy Jr. To borrow from the 2007 movie Walk Hard: Callas has to think about her whole life before she dies. Toward that end, Stephen Knight’s script imagines her giving a final hallucinated interview to a hallucinated journalist played by Kodi Smit-McPhee. The journalist is named Mandrax, after the sedative Callas nibbles on the sly. By building the film on her visions, Maria flirts with more interesting possibilities, initially probing the overlap between a Diva and her roles and evoking the long hangover of fame. But the film quickly surrenders. Smit-McPhee exists only to prompt Callas’s reflections, reducing her psychic disturbances to simple expositional devices.
Larraín’s preference is for the claustrophobic, locking in tight on faces that emphasize his characters’ isolated, put-upon state. This might have formed a nice counterpoint to the grand scale of opera, and you can imagine a version of this film that crams the heightened emotions that Callas once conveyed on the stage into the intimate spaces of her declining life. Unfortunately, this film doesn’t do that. Instead, Larraín stages several of Callas’s most famous numbers on the streets of Paris—performances in which she herself does not take part. As she repeatedly tells us, it’s her voice, and she will decide when to sing or not.
We do hear Callas sing, in both the film’s present and its past. Larraín doesn’t have the courage to deny us her music, or any real understanding of how to deploy it. He isn’t a musical filmmaker and has little feeling for rhythm or dynamics. Even Bradley Cooper’s overblown Maestro understood that the biopic of a musical figure ought to reflect the spirit of their art at least as much as the facts of their life. Watching Maria, I longed for drama, bombast, tension, scale—anything but this self-conscious recitation of biopic clichés.
Most people will watch Maria on Netflix, and I’m sure that when viewed between episodes of Marriage or Mortgage it may look like above-average content, just as The Friend might play okay on a phone. No one will make that mistake with RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, the best thing I saw at NYFF, and probably all year. Ross’s adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel is an expression of true empathy and radical form—a work of art in the most profound sense.
Whitehead’s novel tells the story of two young black boys, Elwood and Turner, both incarcerated at a segregated Florida reform school, the Nickel Academy, in 1962. Elwood, played in the film by Ethan Cole Sharp, is an idealistic, politically active young man, a supporter of Martin Luther King Jr. Convicted for accepting a ride in a stolen car, he ends up at Nickel alongside other juvenile delinquents, including Turner (Brandon Wilson), a Texas boy who has been in and out of reform academies for years.
Nickel is a place of exploitation and violence, where the “students” attack and sexually assault one another, and the administrators punish every transgression with violence. Turner has long since resigned himself to all this, and counsels Elwood to avert his eyes, to accept favors, and to avoid standing up for his fellow inmates. Elwood rejects this advice, and continues pushing back against bullies and keeping a record of the school’s many illegal activities.
It might sound schematic, and in Whitehead’s book it sometimes is. But Ross, who wrote the screenplay with his producer Joslyn Barnes, is less interested in adaptation than expansion. As a documentarian and photographer, he focuses on questions of presentation and contextualization: What is there to see, and how do we see it? Ross applies a series of striking formal conceits to his first narrative film, shooting all the 1960s scenes in first-person point-of-view, a choice which locks us into the characters’ perspectives, allowing us to see what they see as if we were inside their heads. As in the works of Ozu and Demme, this creates a sense of almost unbearable intimacy between viewer and character.
Ross places us first in Elwood’s perspective, then in Turner’s, with occasional jumps forward to the 1990s and 2000s, where we see Elwood, now played by Daveed Diggs, in middle age. Though “see” might not be the best word: in these future sequences, the camera is locked about a foot behind Diggs, showing only the back of his head as he begins to dig into his experience at Nickel. Ross connects these moments with a series of bravura montages, combining movie footage and images of the moon landing with grainy video from the African American Home Movie Archive.
There may be moments of opacity or overreach in Nickel Boys, but they don’t matter. It reminded me of Aftersun, another recent film that deploys conspicuous stylistic choices in the service of overwhelming emotion. Both films involve the viewer in the construction of their meaning, presenting a series of increasingly disparate images and asking you to put them back together. When, late in Nickel Boys, Ross drops the other shoe, the realization devastated me. And continued to: in the following days, I would think of Ross’s film, and choke up. By this time next year, I won’t remember most of what I saw at the sixty-second NYFF. But Nickel Boys will endure.
