Which Director Should Make the Movie of Your Life?

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.

Hello friends and fans of Vacation (2015),

A friend of mine who works in this godforsaken industry on the publicity side recently posed a question somewhat late into a drunken night: What director do you think should direct the movie of your life? It’s a terribly unfair question. Do you answer, I don’t know, Steven Spielberg, because you want a master to take elevate your lowly, minor saga? That seems absurd. Still, I actually took the question seriously, and not just because I’d had three glasses of wine already.

Thinking back on the movies of this year, I first responded with “Kelly Reichardt,” probably because I found such a kindred spirit in Michelle Williams’ grumpy, stressed-out sculptor Lizzy in Showing Up. I think Showing Up is extraordinary in many ways, but I also rarely have identified more with a character: Someone dedicated to her craft who isn’t as celebrated as some of her peers. Lizzy just wants to be left alone to finish the pieces for her solo show—delicate depictions of women actually made by the artist Cynthia Lahti—but that’s hard when her landlord (Hong Chau) won’t fix her hot water. I can’t tell you how many times my plans to get a piece done have been derailed by an issue totally out of my control. It’s almost painful to watch because of how relatable it is.

But then when I really thought about it, I realized Reichardt isn’t a good fit for my life on a purely aesthetic level. I’m a city kid through and through, and she mostly makes movies about people in the Oregon wilderness. In fact, Showing Up might be her most urban story yet, and it still takes place at an art school so pastoral that André 3000 wanders the grounds playing the flute.

So that brought me to another film I loved this year, also released by A24: Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings. I adored this movie for all the same reasons previously mentioned, and I acknowledge that my own day-to-day is filled with, as Mark put it, “small, wholly believable bourgeois mortification.” I revisited a lot of Holofcener’s output when I was preparing to interview her for Vanity Fair, and kept thinking about how perfectly she captures the kind of guilt and stress that pervades the minds of New Yorkers and Angelenos. (Did I mention I grew up in Los Angeles but my family is based in New York? Did I mention I feel a lot of guilt and stress?!)

Though, yes, her characters are often wealthy, she’s maybe one of our best chroniclers of class anxiety. It’s less explicit in You Hurt My Feelings than in, say, Please Give—in which Catherine Keener plays a do-gooder who’s also desperate to take over her elderly neighbor’s apartment as soon as she dies—but it’s definitely there. Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Beth is comfortable with her gorgeous home and loving husband and son, but she’s also constantly grappling with the idea that success isn’t what she thought it would be. Sure, she has one book out, a memoir, and yet she needs to keep producing more to feel like she’s still a writer people care about. (Does anyone really care about writers? It’s a question I ask myself constantly.) Then she hears that her husband doesn’t like her novel, and spirals, as any of us would. It’s an absolute nightmare—a horror film for the creative class.

Speaking of horror: I most certainly would not like Ari Aster making a movie about me, but not because I think it would be too weird (even though it most certainly would be weird). Honestly, I’m afraid that what Aster could come up with could ring too true. Look, I am nothing like Beau, the ostensible protagonist of Beau Is Afraid, portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix. However, that opening section, in which Beau navigates the surreal and frightening modern fictional city in which he lives, is one of the best depictions of what anxiety feels like I’ve seen to date. I keep revisiting the moment in which Beau takes his new medication, which requires water, only to discover there is not a drop to drink in his apartment. He must run across the street to the bodega, all while a group of vagrants circles the open door to his building. I don’t have that much terror about city life, and yet Aster captures what your brain feels like when you’re always thinking about the worst possible outcomes.

Bilge, I remember that screening that only the two of us attended very well. After sitting dumbstruck through the credits, I was anticipating what you were going to say. At that point I wasn’t even sure what I thought yet. The more I pondered, the more I was convinced this was a great movie, even though I knew it was going to piss people off. (And piss people off it certainly did!) Maybe it is because I had a long conversation with Aster for GQ shortly before the release, but I firmly believe there’s a method to his madness. Yes, A24 gave him their equivalent of a blank check—which is still pretty modest in the grand scheme of Hollywood budgets—but it is not indulgent for the sake of indulgence. At times it’s indulgent for the sake of dumb jokes, which I appreciate greatly. Just look at the graffiti and posters outside Beau’s apartment building, some of which Aster hand-wrote himself. But beyond prurient gags (the giant penis monster, engorged testicles) there’s something surprisingly spiritual in Aster’s odyssey of guilt and mommy issues. It’s an exuberantly creative dive into the psyche of someone living within others’ expectations, and in that way it has a lot in common with Showing Up and You Hurt My Feelings.

When I spoke to Holofcener, she explained how hard it was to get You Hurt My Feelings financed, and—while we might talk about why it sucks that Aster gets $35 million and she gets far less than that in another dispatch—I’m glad all three of these distinctive artists get the chance to make their movies about just how hard and weird it is to exist.

I don’t want to only give A24 the credit here, because there are plenty of other production companies and national film funds funding art about modern malaise. In fact, one of my top picks comes from Finnish master Aki Kaurismäki, whose Fallen Leaves is essentially a rom-com about an alcoholic and a woman who is constantly losing her job. It’s dark, it’s sweet, and it features an awesome musical number from a girl group whose Finnish name translates to “Spice Girls.” Mark, how did you find the movies spoke to how you were feeling emotionally this year? (And: Who would direct the movie of your life?)

Yours in giant penis monsters,

Esther

Speaking of giant penis monsters, read the next Movie Club entry: This Threesome Drama Was the Hot Mess I Craved in 2023