I Couldn’t Stop Thinking About This Beautiful Slice of Life, One of the Best Movies of the Year

In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2023, Bilge Ebiri, Esther Zuckerman, and Mark Harris—about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here.

My fellow holdovers,

Dana, I will respond to your prompt about smaller, indie films on my list. However, I must first return to Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and le cinema de John Francis Daley et Jonathan Goldstein.

Esther reminds us all (correctly) how great Game Night was. But I must also make a case for their much-maligned Ed Helms–starring Vacation remake/sequel/legacyquel/IP-exhumation from 2015, in part because it offers, I think, a telling anecdote about criticism. I was unable to attend the press screening of Vacation at the time, but I did have to review it, so I wound up seeing it on Friday as a paying customer in one of New York’s many multiplexes. By this point, the film had been duly savaged by just about every critic I knew, so I felt like a dead man walking as I lumbered into that auditorium.

There was a small smattering of people there, maybe 10 total.  I will not speculate about the life circumstances that led the other souls in that room to come to the Vacation remake early one Friday afternoon. But we all somehow implicitly bonded as we scream-laughed our way through what is still one of the funniest comedies I’ve ever seen. To be fair, the film makes zero sense, and it plays things so haphazardly with plot and character and dialogue that one could easily deem it a Bad Movie. And maybe, as critics, we do have to be on the lookout more than most viewers for such failings. But are they failings? Maybe these “flaws” are what one needs to create the mood of anything-goes abandon within which such absurd comedy can operate. Because dear god, is it forget-where-you-are, fall-out-of-your-chair, crap-your-pants funny. The ridiculousness of the set pieces and the gags make it even funnier. At one point a character stuck in the middle of the desert violently kicks a thorn bush in frustration, and there turns out to be a fire hydrant inside the thorn bush. That is … idiotic. It’s also hilarious.
As Roger Ebert memorably put it, “Two things that cannot be convincingly faked are laughter and orgasms. If a movie made you laugh, as a critic you have to be honest and report that. Maybe not so much with orgasms.”

Most of my critic friends still think I’m crazy for liking the Vacation remake, but the success of the directors’ subsequent films gives me hope that it will one day be reevaluated for the deranged masterpiece of surrealism that it is. (Our dear friend Mike Ryan is already leading the way.) Let’s be clear, Dungeons and Dragons is a more accomplished and polished film than Vacation is. The story, as looney as it is, makes sense, and the characters are drawn with care and consistency. But in the end what also makes the new movie work is that Daley and Goldstein will do anything—anything—for a laugh. And they aren’t above painstakingly setting up a whole elaborate gag just to end it with Chris Pine flying out a window on Jarnathan. God bless them.

This does make me think, however, about the value and intent of criticism. Especially when it comes to comedy. Sometimes, you have to admit that you laughed at Adam Sandler’s stupid accent in That’s My Boy! or the tiny sentient Nazi sausages in Yoga Hosers or that scene in The Brothers Grimsby where Mark Strong and Sacha Baron Cohen [redacted] in a [redacted]’s [redacted] and then another [redacted] [redacted]s the [redacted] and then there’s a [redacted], and no amount of soul-searching will make those facts untrue.

As a reader, you’re never going to agree with all the critics, or even the individual critics you tend to read and like. And as a critic, you are of course sometimes (and maybe often) going to find yourself swimming against the tide of other critics and/or audiences. A lot of critics see themselves as consumer advocates or filters, holding the line against bad movies and steering people away from spending their hard-earned cash on rotten product. I’ve always been uncomfortable with that idea. Ideally, when I write, beyond offering my opinion, I also try to give enough of a sense of the film in question that someone might be prompted to watch it because it sounds like something they’d like, even if I didn’t. Just because I hated Leave the World Behind or Wish (and, let me be clear: I really hated them) doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t watch those movies. You might love them!

Now, where were we? Oh, right, smaller films. Actually, Dana, Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up is also an interesting case for how malleable our response as critics can be. I certainly liked it a lot when I first saw it; the portrayal of this particular Portland subculture felt lived-in, authentic, loving, but never rose-tinted. And Reichardt’s clear connection to the material comes through: Like her protagonist, Lizzy (Michelle Williams), Reichardt makes unshowy, small-scale work that doesn’t always pay the bills, and even in her small world (smaller, even, than the world of indie film) some of the people around her—like her friend and landlord Jo (Hong Chau)—are clearly achieving greater success.

In her excellent review of the film, our colleague and friend Alison Willmore wonders if Lizzy’s relationship to Jo bears echoes of Reichardt’s relationship to her A24 labelmates Ari Aster and the Daniels. In a panel I participated in at the Film Society of Lincoln Center recently, Amy Taubin suggested that Jo might be closer to Todd Haynes, who’s been one of Reichardt’s closest friends and supporters for decades, and who helped introduce her to the whole Portland scene and to Michelle Williams. But the beautiful thing about Showing Up is that it’s not really about professional resentment or imbalance. There is the reality of Jo’s being Lizzy’s landlord, yes, but really, what Lizzy wrestles with are the mundane things out of which life emerges: a day off from work, the hot water in her apartment, a small sculpture that got damaged on one side in a kiln, an injured bird she (and Jo, sort of) are nursing. But through Michelle Williams’s subtle, transcendent performance, the movie becomes so much more than the sum of these parts. She takes every emotional detail and underplays it—which in turns opens up whole new worlds of possibilities. This is why the movie has such a mysterious hold on some of us, I think. You can’t reduce it to a genre, or a story, or a relationship, or some sort of easily diagrammable conflict. Or, god forbid, a meme. You sort of have to just experience it.

And yet, at the time I first saw Showing Up, I probably wouldn’t have predicted that it would make my Top 20. It felt a bit too slight, a bit too ambling, with little of the narrative cohesion or emotional urgency of, say, First Cow or Wendy and Lucy. But it turned out to be a grower. I found myself thinking about it constantly, and thinking about the characters in the film as if they were real people. It made me want to visit Portland. The movie introduces us to a relatable world and, yes, a relatable emotional dynamic. We compare ourselves to our colleagues and then feel bad that we’re comparing ourselves to our colleagues without realizing that our colleagues are also comparing themselves to us, and in the end none of it is really all that important and we all just keep doing our thing, because that sort of is all we can do.

Showing Up is certainly not perfect. Dana, I’m not even sure I remember the ending well enough to tell you whether I liked it more than you did. But here, sort of like with the Vacation Situation, was another case where the reality of my moviegoing experience—in this case, that these characters and this world never left me—had to be acknowledged in some way.

Speaking of Ari Aster, by the way, I did not put Beau Is Afraid on my Top 20, but I have also not stopped thinking about it since it came out. I still have my issues with it—compounded perhaps by the fact that the first hour is so damn good that the ensuing two hours, as crazy and creative and endlessly fascinating as they are, kind of feel like a letdown. But I have profound respect for Aster’s willingness to burn a small mountain of A24’s cash in pursuit of such a completely deranged and personal vision. I couldn’t help but think of how Federico Fellini, after the successes of La Dolce Vita and 8 ½, proceeded over the next decade and a half to make a series of deliciously surreal, indulgent, elaborate, psychosexual fantasias from which world cinema still hasn’t recovered.

Esther, you put Beau Is Afraid in your Top 10, and I remember we saw it together at an early screening. I think we were the only two people in the room, and we both guffawed in disbelief repeatedly as the crazy thing unfolded. (Again the Vacation Situation makes an appearance.) I saw it at a second time at a late-night Alamo Drafthouse screening, and I heard the same What the fucks and Holy shits and What the hell is going ons as the long night went on, often pursued by nervous laughter and squeals of outraged delight. At the end of the movie, there was even quite a bit of applause, though I don’t know how much of it was genuine and appreciative and how much of it ironic and embittered. Does it even matter? If you can get that kind of response out of your audience, well, I’ll follow you anywhere.

That wasn’t a dream. That was a MEMORY!

Bilge

Read the next entry in the Movie Club: Which Director Should Make the Movie of Your Life?