Another alarming season for the cinema: those oft-praised “movies for adults” are bombing hard. After the Hunt, The Smashing Machine, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, Anemone went down one after another; Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest is also unlikely to turn a profit. I’m not an investor in Warner Brothers (anymore), money is just a means of sussing out how many people are going to the movies, which ones, and why. The main thing going against these movies is the film industry’s failure to successfully market to a new generation of teenagers and people in early-middle age; without cable television, there’s no way to direct the audience’s attention. You may hear an ad on the radio, but all that’s clear are the words “ONLY IN THEATERS.” Forget social media—there’s no direction in the cloud.
Besides that, these movies are stale. They’re using a cinematic language that hasn’t been meaningfully updated since the late-1960s/early-1970s. It’s amazing that Some Like It Hot came out eight years before Easy Rider. Robert Altman was the last major American director to innovate and expand the cinematic vocabulary, and all “classical” Hollywood filmmaking since the mid-1970s has been downstream of Steven Spielberg. Not a bad situation: the movies were great when I was growing up, and with major domos like George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Spielberg successfully fighting colorization and preserving thousands of films, there was a sense of a never-ending continuum, a way to re-experience ourselves on a weekly basis in a parallel reality where the same people lived different lives; as we grew older, they went away, and new people came to play out dramas and remind us all that it’s just a movie.
All of these movies were made to be released during awards season. The audience knows this. After the Hunt is a dramatic comeback at cancel culture, taglined “NOT EVERYTHING IS SUPPOSED TO MAKE YOU COMFORTABLE.” A very important movie about our times, and, in Julia Roberts, the performance of a career. Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine is similar, with an “unrecognizable” Dwayne Johnson. Not an inaccurate description, but that’s exactly what you do to win awards, along with playing a troubled character fighting addiction, struggling against all odds to keep his life from interfering with his work, and vice versa. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey came and went, but it was a genuine oddity, as if written by aliens (with assistance from the Burger King Corporation). However strange, Kogo Nada’s film hit familiar sentimental beats and operated in a register that’s remained static for a half century.
Anemone is the best example by far: Daniel Day-Lewis “comes out of retirement” to star in a film by his son Ronan. I didn’t see it, I’m not sure it came to Baltimore—but maybe The Charles passed. They didn’t play The Smashing Machine, even after having posters and playing the trailer for months. Smart move—the trailer begs for Oscar in the most obvious, exhausted way that it’s amazing anyone bothered to see it at all. It’s not a bad movie, but the way that it’s told and structured is nothing new, and the distinct voice of the Safdie Brothers work in the 2010s was mostly missing from this one. I’ve seen many refer to it as the kind of fake movie you’d see playing in the background of a comedy, or at the front of something like Tropic Thunder.
Ben Stiller’s 2008 comedy, with an Academy Award-nominated performance by Robert Downey Jr. in blackface, came out 10 years too early. The pandemic devastated theater attendance and froze the continuum for the first time, no stream nearly as wide; despite multimillion dollar experiments like Here by Robert Zemeckis, there isn’t an awareness that they exist. Without regular theater attendance by an additional 35 percent of the population, no one knows what’s coming out. Cable was already in bad shape in 2019, but people were still going to the movies because they were still going to the movies.
And there’s no new language for young people. Millennials were left with the novelty of COMIC BOOK MOVIES, and now that that era is finally over, those “movies for adults” haven’t been updated at all, and there’s no need to see them in theaters, or ever, when you can just watch The Wrestler or Basic Instinct. Young people still go to theaters, but now it’s more often to revivals, old movies made at a certain time—before 2015 or so—that signify a certain level of quality. That trust is gone now with the new, and you have to get blowjob review after blowjob review like One Battle After Another to eke out a not-embarrassing money-losing movie. Anderson’s film flails just as much as our contemporary film culture; as one of today’s major domos, he’s doing a fine job preserving photochemical film production and projection, even if he isn’t making good movies. Well, movie—it’s really so much worse than everything else he’s ever done, I can’t get over it.
Does it matter if only a certain number of people even know this movie exists? The appeal of the movies is that it brings everyone together, from earliest memories through every stage of life, with a mainstream and a counter culture that inadvertently feeds it. There is no counter culture right now in the United States, at least in the arts. People have been taught to hate themselves and everyone around them. They’ve been taught to mistrust their intuition and their feelings, and the effect is an overall depression of expression, self-censorship making its way into every corner it can find. People crave intimacy, and movies, now more than ever, can save our souls… if we… and they… want it.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith