Tag Archives: Chloe Zhao

Eternals

Cast: Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Don Lee, Harish Patel, Kit Harrington, Salma Hayek, Angelina Jolie

Director: Chloé Zhao

Writers: Chloé Zhao, Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Kirpo, Kaz Firpo

The idea behind Eternals was that it was supposed to be different. Since around 2015-ish, Marvel Studios has settled into a factory-like production routine of micro-managing every single stage of their filmmaking process, utilising CGI sets, costumes, and other imagery wherever possible, and imposing a strict, narrow set of parameters on the style, craft, and content permitted in their films. This has allowed them to attain a level of quality control founded on uniformity and caution; which means their movies now all look the same and they scarcely take any risks. Some filmmakers, such as Gunn, Coogler, and Waititi, have been able to produce some good works in this system, and others, such as Joss Whedon and Edgar Wright, found it ultimately unmanageable. This has led to another trend with Marvel of enlisting smaller-time directors with less experience of working on blockbusters, the kind of filmmakers who come in with fewer demands and are more willing to defer to the studio and surrender control over certain elements. So, with Chloé Zhao, the Oscar-winning director of Nomadland, charged with taking on their next picture, Marvel Studios as promoted Eternals as proof that they can make ‘real’ movies after all. This is a film shot in real, naturalistic settings with soulful characters in a contemplative story about human nature that demonstrates a level of ambition, and innovation like few other blockbusters of recent memory. Or, that is what it’s desperately trying to be anyway.

The story unfolds over the span of millennia about a team of immortal superheroes sent to Earth to oversee and shape humanity’s development while fending off the Deviants, a race of destructive alien monsters. Leading the superpowered Eternals is maternal healer Ajak (Salma Hayek), charged by their celestial creator Arishem with this mission. Standing impassively beside her on that one featureless beach in all of the promotional shots are Sersi (Gemma Chan), with the ability to manipulate matter, Ikaris (Richard Madden), who can fly and shoot lasers from his eyes, Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani), who blasts projectiles with his hands, Sprite (Lia McHugh), an illusionist, Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), a technological innovator, Makkari (Lauren Ridloff), who can move with superhuman speed, Druig (Barry Keoghan), a manipulator of minds, Gilgamesh (Don Lee), of superhuman strength, and Thena (Angelina Jolie), an elite warrior. Over the course of 7,000 years, they see empires rise and fall in Mesopotamia and Babylon, embark on 5,000 year romantic relationships, and then finally split up in 1521 CE after apparently killing the last of the Deviants. Only it appears that their work is not done yet. In the Year of Our Lord 2021, Deviants turn up in London, where Sersi works in the Natural History Museum and is dating the very normal and mortal Dane Whitman (Kit Harrington). This attacks prompts Sersi to go get the team back together and combat this resurgent threat.

With a cast this talented and expansive, it shouldn’t be that difficult for Marvel to employ their collective charisma and deliver a worthwhile ensemble piece, but they’ve been cast in a movie that doesn’t know how to utilise their individual, distinctive qualities and bring them to the forefront. This is a movie that has Nanjiani, a very funny actor, quipping lines that aren’t funny, where Henry, a heavyweight and versatile performer, is handed paper-thin material, and where Jolie, one of the movie stars of her generation, is barely afforded a presence. Each cast member is treated as a cog in the Marvel machine; their function is not to bring a character to life but to contort themselves into archetypes that all talk and act the same way, and to that end the movie treats its actors interchangeably. Character has typically been one of these movies’ strengths; one thing The Avengers did really well was bring its ensemble together, identify how their differing personalities would manifest in the dynamics between them, and then play them out. Eternals is so bloated with such barely-defined characters that it’s almost fascinating to behold. Everyone is this film has been directed to deliver the same usual brand of quippy banter that is part-and-parcel for the Marvel movies, and through this the studio demonstrates how little they understand the true allure of having stars in their movies even as they can afford every one under the sun.

In her last film Zhao did work with Frances McDormand and directed her to an Oscar win, but she is the exception; Zhao has more experience working with non-professionals than she does with movie stars. Her focus has always been more with capturing moments of natural splendour and while she does demonstrate that she appreciates the visual beauty of the stars as her disposal, her ability to make use of them does not extend far beyond the aesthetic, and even there she has her limitations. The action scenes lack the punch and kinetic energy needed to make their bodies sing; the whole world feels too static and the characters feel too weightless. Whatever little flourishes the movie thinks to add, like how the Jolie character spins and moves in combat with the grace of a ballerina, there is no moment of awe or wonder that a cosmic story such as this should be able to evoke. Early on, Chan and Madden are called upon to perform the MCU’s first ever sex scene, a 10-second clip where their upper bodies are photographed in a gentle missionary, and it falls flat because nothing in their shared performances convey anything remotely sexual or romantic in the way of chemistry. Instead, it is as sexless and staid as any other MCU romance (Raquel S. Benedict said it best, not just for this movie, but all of them: everyone is beautiful and no one is horny).

However picturesque Zhao is able to make the golden-hour sunsets, naturally-lit jungles, and pristine seas look despite the studio’s efforts, it amounts to very little in a movie that has so little else going on. There is an appearance of a thoughtful story that Eternals tries to tell about humanity’s worth and the heroes’ differing opinions on their capacity for evil and good. There is the grain of an arc with Phastos, whose effort to uplift civilisation lead to grave results but who then has his faith restored by his husband and child. It’s not a lot save for what Henry brings, but it’s there. For the rest of the characters, there is no feeling or desire motivating them save a general inclination to do what they believe is right and good. There’s a potentially intriguing twist that takes place when Druig resolve to end an Amazonian people’s warring ways by controlling all of their minds for centuries, but the film never even attempts to unpack and grapple with the morality and true meaning of his choice; the ethics of Druig’s action are just never addressed, never mind questioned. It is emblematic of a studio that has grown to value content over all else, over art, storytelling, or thought. It doesn’t matter what happens or why it happens, all that matters is that the audience has something to occupy their eyes for a couple of hours. So long as it exists, it is sufficient.

It’s the reason why, for all the promotion around this film has celebrated its promotion of diversity, that representation is ultimately meaningless. Yes, the Eternals membership may reflect a greater variety of gender and race than any Marvel movie before it, but how can it be called representation when there is no character beneath those superficial qualities? What does it matter that half the characters are women if there is so little happening with them that they can barely be distinguished from one another? What worth is there in the depiction of a gay kiss when the characters don’t look or feel like they actually mean it? Yes, it’s nice that there’s a deaf character who is treated as an equal and gets to help out once in a while, but is the bar really so low that the audience should be grateful for these paltry ticks on a checklist that do nothing to add depth and feeling to the identities they purport to represent? I’m not sure Eternals is the worst movie Marvel has ever made, not when The Incredible Hulk and Black Widow exist, but it might be the most cynical. It is a movie so transparent in its pandering, so stifling of its potential, so devoid of substance that its aesthetic beauty and occasional moments of levity (I did link the Bollywood dance scene) cannot even begin to fill the overwhelming emptiness that permeates throughout.

★★

Nomadland

Cast: Frances McDormand, David Strathairn

Director: Chloé Zhao

Writer: Chloé Zhao

Nomadland, an American film about a sub-culture of people living (if not in then at least adjacent to) poverty in the modern day, struck me as an intriguing companion piece to the same year’s Minari. Both are films that at once feel like they could take place anywhere in the world at any time and yet feel so specific and intrinsic to their contemporary American settings. Both are films that explore resonant, omnipresent ideas about the sorrows and difficulties of making your way through the world without money, of the restlessness and indignations that drive people to try and carve out their own destinies, and the kinds of bonds that are forged and broken as varying experiences and ideals intersect and diverge, but they do so within the specific contexts of their respective politico-economic climates as founded on and defined by the greater injustices and broken promises of the American mythos. Nomadland is a quintessentially American film, even and especially as it dispels the images and ideals of the so-called American Dream, revealing a country of economic inequality and governmental indifference that is leaving more and more people behind to rot. Yet it isn’t a grim film; even as it explores the unglamorous lives of those who live on the margins of society, it shows how there is still abundant kindness, goodness, and hope still to be found in the people encountered.

The film opens with text informing the viewer how the United States Gypsum Corporation, after 88 years of operation, permanently closed its doors in 2011 due to the decreasing demand for sheetrock. The residents of Empire, Nevada, where the factory was based, were made to leave their company-owned homes to seek work elsewhere, leaving behind a ghost town with a discontinued zip code. One of those residents was the widowed Fern (Frances McDormand), who has since taken up residence in her van and tours the country seeking work. She finds however that, for a woman of her age and skillset, there are no permanent jobs to be found and the best she can do is get by on short-term employment boxing goods, cleaning bathrooms, cooking fast food, and whatever other seasonal work is on offer. Having started repurposing her camper-van to function as a living space, Fern is invited by a co-worker to attend a rendezvous of nomads, led by real-life advocate of vehicular living Bob Mills. There she learns practical skills for life on the road such as how to stay warm and protected, where best to park for the night, and how to dispose of the waste in your bucket-toilet. Here Fern learns of how there is a whole community of van-dwellers who have taken up the lifestyle for different reasons and who are all there to lend a hand, trade what they don’t need, and share their stories and experiences.

The film is based on the book of the same name by Jessica Bruder, subtitled Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, and even features a couple of its subjects playing semi-fictionalised versions of themselves. One of them is Swankie, a seventy-five-year-old nomad who took to the road upon learning of her cancer diagnosis and deciding that she wouldn’t spend her few remaining months lying in a hospital bed. She, like most who appear in this film, is not a professional actor; Zhao in her previous two films has shown a penchant casting non-actors in her films and in Swankie we see just one shining example of the breathtaking naturalism that kind of choice can inspire. Characters appear as their true, authentic selves to share their stories, making for a film that threads the line between being a work of narrative fiction and a documentary. There is perhaps an argument to be made that the film should have been a pure documentary, and the case may well be that Nomadland would have been a more fascinating and fulfilling experience for it, but there’s a reason Zhao chose to make the film the way that she did. One reason is quite simply the reality of working in the film industry; more people are going to watch a fictional Best Picture contender than they are a prestige documentary. Another is that a documentary would deprive the viewer of McDormand’s performance and also Zhao’s visual poetry.

And while the stories of Swankie and others like her do add such heart and depth to the story being told, it is Fern’s story; she is the vessel Zhao has chosen to personalise the labours, victories, and struggles of those who were left without homes or livelihoods by the 2008 recession. McDormand is simply sublime playing a character who is working laboriously to keep her head above water and her outlook positive even as she lives her life on the edge of destitution. She is a woman who has lost much and holds a great grief in her heart and to some extent she still buys into the old American myth that hard work and individualism is all one needs to get by. The nomad lifestyle is a new way of living for her, not only for its unconventional practices but for its unexpected communality. Those whom Fern encounters across state-lines and on highways living in their RVs and tents are no longer passing strangers to her, they are her neighbours. For someone as reserved and cut off as she, asking for help and relying on others doesn’t come naturally and it is something she has to wrestle over as she adapts to being a nomad. All she has left in the world are her memories and mementos, including a set of her father’s Chekhov’s plates that will inevitably end up in pieces. Fern is a character stuck in the past and her struggle comes from trying to find a way of moving forward.

And that’s essentially what the nomad lifestyle is shown to be about: moving forward in a country that has left them behind. While some entered this life willingly, most were forced to out of necessity. One woman talks about working her whole life and finding out when she reached retirement age that her social security is only good for $500 a month. The effects of the recession loom large and Bob Wells denounces “the tyranny of the dollar” and how the only way to live under it now is to be “a workhorse willing to work itself to death and then be put out to pasture”. In that way, the nomad life is presented as a way of escaping economic and class oppression, though not so far as to romanticise the idea. Most of the nomads we meet live the way they do because they have no choice, because they live in an inequitable country that attributes poverty to individual failure rather than institutional inadequacies. While that political understanding is present however, it is not the film’s focus. Nomadland isn’t about illustrating how and why capitalism has failed the economically downtrodden, but instead of showcasing who they really are and what they are doing about it. By telling us Fern’s story, Zhao is inviting the viewer not to sympathise with the woes and struggles of a collective, monolithic group, but to empathise with them in their infinite complexity on a fundamentally human level.

Zhao edited this film as well as writing and directing it and what she has constructed is a collage of moments stitched together to capture a digressive sense of authenticity, a kind of story made up not of scenes but of fleeting instances. Fern moves between towns and cities, meets and remeets various figures along the way, including a fellow nomad called Dave (David Strathairn) who has a bit of a thing for her, and communes with nature, and the film drifts from one moment to the next as if they were transient dreams or memories. The elemental nature of these moments, their palpability, is captured ever so exquisitely by Joshua James Richards’ photography. Far-ranging landscapes, serene shots of plants, sunsets that leave behind a sky of deep purple; this is a beautiful film to look at in all of its natural splendour, even if the score can be annoyingly distracting at times (I’m not a fan of Einaudi in general). The reverence with which Zhao and her crew capture the world allows for a jarring disconnect between the simultaneous harshness and sublimity of the world. It captures, in the way that only film truly can, an image of the world that is at once tender and tragic, marked both by the devastation and ruin wrought by modern civilisation and by the human capacity to find joy, beauty, and kinship even in the most difficult of times.

★★★★