Why Are Critics Dismissing the Movie Masterpiece of 2023?

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.

Dear Holdovers,

What a pleasure to be stranded with all of you this holiday season! Bilge and Esther, I share your love for Alexander Payne’s movie, and I wonder if what people find “cozy” about The Holdovers is that it takes care of its audience in a way that many veteran moviegoers feel they can no longer take for granted. It’s not that Payne lulls us into complacency; it’s that from the beginning, we feel safely in the hands of a director who knows how to shape a scene, a screenwriter (David Hemingson) who knows how to craft a narrative, and actors who know how to combine what they’re given with what they have inside themselves to make every brushstroke count. You can relax into the movie because you feel that it knows what it’s doing. Yes, you understand early on that it’s probably going to hit some familiar beats, but it’s going to hit them with grace and specificity and real feeling. That should be less uncommon than it is.

I have my own valentine to a different movie to write, but before I do, let me linger for a moment in the icy precincts of hatred. Have you read Manohla Dargis’ New York Times review of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest? Folks, it is something—not only a complete seething slam, but a complete seething slam of a movie that the critics’ association in Dargis’ own city, Los Angeles, had just days earlier voted the year’s best film. It’s a throwdown! The movie is about the camp commandant of Auschwitz and his family, who are having a bland and quotidian summer in a nice country house that lies just on the other side of the fence from the unspeakable—and, in this movie, the unshown. Dargis begins her review by calling The Zone of Interest “a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise” and ends by calling it “vacuous,” but what fascinated me is what comes in between—several paragraphs in which she describes, with the precision of the astute critic that she is, exactly how the movie unfolds, what Glazer intends to do, and what his artistic strategy is.

I put The Zone of Interest in my top 10 (barely, but it’s there), but the truth is that if I were to peel away a few negative adjectives, I don’t think I could do a better job of describing the filmmaker’s approach than Dargis does. Our takes are the same—except for the hate part! It made me realize that, for a certain kind of movie, admiring it and vigorously loathing it can be unnervingly similar. “I see exactly what the filmmaker is trying to do here” can be a nod of approval or an indictment, and there are times when those two attitudes lie closer to each other than either does to “Meh, it was nothing much.”

I’ll get back to The Zone of Interest, but first, let me hop aboard the love train started by Bilge with The Holdovers and followed by Esther with a beautiful and perceptive take on Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. The first memorable cultural experience I had in 2023 wasn’t at a movie; it was at New York City’s Museum of Arts and Design, at an exhibit called Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle. Machine Dazzle is the name under which the American artist Matthew Flower does much of his wildly innovative costume design, and the show focused largely on the outfits he made for Taylor Mac’s ultramarathon live show A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. Machine Dazzle’s clothes—well, you can’t even call them clothes. They are artistic constructions, each one a glorious assemblage of a dozen different ideas—uniforms, decorations atop decorations, wigs, notions, spangles, add-ons, anachronisms—all literally sewn together into a statement that is greater than the sum of its many parts, and wholly original despite being created out of borrowings and leftovers. (If you want to know more about Mac’s show and see some of the work, there’s a fine documentary that streams on Max.)

In the text accompanying the exhibit, the curator made a statement that has stayed with me all year—that (I’m paraphrasing) it’s an inherently queer artistic value to prioritize synthesis over purity, to rummage through the entire history of culture as if it were a bargain bin, to extract the treasures you find—which are often things that the mainstream has failed to recognize or dismissed as vulgarities—and to make new and meaningful art out of them. This bringing-together of ostensibly degraded elements, the creativity that is sparked by making connections that no one else sees, can be the approach of a great artist, especially a great gay artist.

It is, I think, the approach of Todd Haynes, as important, unique, and original a filmmaker as any the United States has produced in the last 40 years. It’s what Haynes did in his very first movie, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988), which took music that was then widely derided as Nixon-era schlock and combined it with Barbie dolls, dollhouses, and the solemn tone of reenactment documentaries about dead stars, all to devastating effect. And it’s what he does in May December, a masterpiece that is my favorite movie of 2023. The film is about Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), an ambitious, professionally charming actress who travels to Savannah, Georgia, to meet and observe the woman she’s about to play in a docudrama. Gracie (Julianne Moore) now lives reasonably privately with her husband Joe (Charles Melton) and their children. But decades earlier, they were at the center of a tabloid news scandal and criminal case, when Gracie was caught having sex with Joe, a seventh-grade student, when she was 36 and he was 13.

Once again, Haynes is drawing from a number of forms that are considered second- or third-class, the kind of stuff that is implicitly treated as unworthy of serious attention: 1990s true-crime network TV movies and tabloid newsmagazines, an array of films in which two powerhouse actresses—often playing actresses or artists of some kind—were put on screen “against” each other, and midcentury Hollywood product that was often written off as “women’s pictures.” (If you want to know how deeply he grasps and understands the 1940s and 1950s, see Far From Heaven, Carol, and his miniseries adaptation of Mildred Pierce.) What he draws from is and has always been the material ignored by straight culture and left to gay men, because straight men aren’t supposed to play with Barbie dolls or love Douglas Sirk melodramas or remember the Mary Kay LeTourneau scandal from which Samy Burch’s acute and economical script draws inspiration.

Because that’s the turf that Haynes works, he isn’t granted Nolan-sized budgets. May December, incredibly, was shot in just 23 days, and Savannah only became the story’s location when a planned shoot in Camden, Maine, fell through. But that kind of make-it-work scrambling is how most movies are made—not the blank checks for Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon. Haynes is a veteran of knowing how to make it work; he is boundlessly resourceful and always serious of purpose. Which makes it frustrating to me that the praise he has received for this movie has occasionally been tinged with faint condescension or misapprehension. It gets called camp (a word that people use to mean so many things, from knowingly bad to unknowingly bad to bad-but-great to great-but-gay, that it should probably be retired), or kitsch, or over-the-top, or pastiche, or other terms that have an undercurrent of “It’s good, but it’s minor.”

But what Haynes does in May December, not for the first time, is to take “low” forms and, by the freshness of his vision and his deep sincerity—an underappreciated quality—elevate them to drama and even to tragedy. May December can be very funny, but to reduce it to Twitter memes, as some have done, can be a way of insulating oneself against the fact that it is also heartbreaking. The haunted portrayal of Joe, a deeply decent guy who is both a survivor and a broken man, has stayed with me for months, not just because of Melton’s uncanny physical embodiment of his wrecked emotional condition but because Haynes never makes him the butt of a joke. Nor is Gracie; Haynes fully understands that she is both pitiable and terrifying, a genuine danger to herself and others. Esther, you and I could probably go another five rounds on what you rightly cite as a spectacular year for women on screen, and let’s start here: This is the fifth film Julianne Moore has made with Haynes, and more people should talk, as Dana did, about their collaboration the way they talk about Scorsese and De Niro. Like Haynes, Moore never puts air quotes around a character, even when the character herself is mannered or hyperconscious of her self-presentation. She lives inside them, and she forces us to do the same. If the movie has a comic figure, it’s Elizabeth, who, in Portman’s phenomenally sharp, droll, and tough-minded performance, is a walking, talking essay on the ruthless, thieving, and manipulative elements of acting. Haynes’ vision in May December is capacious enough to make room for her to have some good nasty fun without ever losing sight of the fact that at the center of this story is exploitation—the exploitation of a child by an adult, and the exploitation of that exploitation by an interloper.

Are we complicit too, as viewers? Warning warning warning! I’m about to get very spoilery, so if you’re a reader who doesn’t want to see several movie endings discussed, I’ll see you in the next round.

At the end of May December, Haynes shows us Elizabeth working on the movie that was the reason for all of her assiduous and heedlessly damaging quasi-research. It’s a moment that asks us to interrogate our own complicity—after all, what have we just been doing but entertaining ourselves by watching someone else’s nightmare? And it’s also an invitation to interrogate Haynes himself—is what he’s just done so different from what the movie within the movie is doing? Maybe it’s because we live in an age when none of us can make a public assertion without at least wondering if we should try to anticipate and correct for possible social media blowback, but I am struck by how many movies this year ended with some form of autocritique. Cord Jefferson’s astringent American Fiction tells a publishing-world story of a serious Black novelist (a magnificently grouchy Jeffrey Wright) calculatedly selling out by writing a “gritty” and “street” story that will flatter the vanities of a white bourgeois readership—then, at the end, it essentially throws the question of how the movie itself should conclude to the audience and, in doing so, tells us that the finger we thought was pointing just to the left or right was, in fact, pointing directly at us, and at the filmmaker. Killers of the Flower Moon’s penultimate scene is not the by-now de rigueur half-dozen white-on-black closing titles about what happened to everyone in the story, but a re-creation of an old-timey radio show, complete with cheesy live sound effects, that gives us the same information. It’s a reminder that there’s big business in reprocessing national crime, trauma, and sin into entertainment, and that Scorsese—who’s right there in the middle of the scene, hamming it up—is as guilty for doing it as we are for watching it.

And that takes me all the way back to The Zone of Interest. I watched most of this movie with fascination but also with reserve. It is, as Dargis argued, more exercise than narrative. Its aim is to show us the Holocaust by showing us people ignoring the monstrosity they were engineering right in their own backyard. It’s a movie about how the human ability to avoid looking at evil fuels that evil, and it left me aghast. But honestly, it left me aghast within the first 30 minutes, and “aghast” is, for a movie about the Holocaust, not all that hard to achieve. I sometimes wondered, over its next studious and methodical hour, whether it had anything more to tell me. And it did—in its last few minutes, when it makes a daring, non-narrative leap in time to say something vital and challenging about the perils (for viewers, but also presumably for artists) of attempting to put horror in an aesthetic frame. That didn’t make me aghast. It made me anxious and deeply uncomfortable. And for me, it elevated the movie.

Then again, maybe deep discomfort is my comfort zone. So was I being pandered to after all?

Yours in ambivalence,

Mark

Read the next Movie Club post: Sandra Hüller Is the MVP of 2023