Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)

Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Tom Noonan, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest. Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman. Cinematography: Frederick Elmes. Production design: Mark Friedberg. Film editing: Robert Frazen. Music: Jon Brion.

Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)

Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, Allison Williams, Daniel Kaluuya, and Betty Gabriel in Get Out

Chris Washington: Daniel Kaluuya
Rose Armitage: Allison Williams
Missy Armitage: Catherine Keener
Dean Armitage: Bradley Whitford
Jeremy Armitage: Caleb Landry Jones
Walter: Marcus Henderson
Georgina: Betty Gabriel
Andre Logan King: Lakeith Stanfield
Jim Hudson: Stephen Root
Rod Williams: LilRel Howery

Director: Jordan Peele
Screenplay: Jordan Peele
Cinematography: Toby Oliver
Production design: Rusty Smith
Film editing: Gregory Plotkin
Music: Michael Abels

Jordan Peele's witty, scary Get Out seems to have hit just the right nerve in Trumpian America. It's not only a strong contender for Oscar nominations for picture, director, screenwriter and actor, it's also one of the sharpest films about race in the United States in years. That's because, I think, it's a genre film: a horror comedy. It's not so hard to make a statement about race in a drama like last year's Oscar-winner Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) or an earlier best picture winner like 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013), which white audiences could watch and feel satisfied that they've learned a lesson. But the essence of comedy, especially one that blends horror into the mix, is to make audiences feel uncomfortable: We laugh almost in spite of ourselves because we see people doing things that we recognize and feel embarrassed about in our own lives. I sometimes think the words "racism" and "racial prejudice" are inadequate depictions of what really afflicts most Americans today, which is race-consciousness: the constant awareness of racial difference that we carry around with us. It works both ways, as Peele demonstrates in the opening of his film. Chris Washington is as aware of the cultural differences between him and his white girlfriend, Rose Armitage, as she is. They're about to visit her family in the deep affluent suburbs, and she jokes about how race-consciousness will manifest itself during their visit: Her father will try to establish his liberal, non-racist bona fides by telling Chris that he would have voted for Obama for a third term if he could have. And we laugh when, sure enough, he does. (Having Rose's father played by Bradley Whitford, star of that liberal feel-good series The West Wing, adds a touch of irony.) If Peele had stayed on this note, Get Out would have been just an amusing social comedy, but he introduces real tension with his opening scene, which shows a then-unidentified black man walking down a suburban street at night, muttering to himself about how disoriented he is. Suddenly a car appears, passes him, then makes a U-turn and begins following him. The man panics, and before we know it, the car stops and a man gets out and attacks him and shoves him into the trunk of the car. Then we're introduced to Chris and Rose while retaining the awareness that their relationship is shadowed: Get Out is not going to be an update of Stanley Kramer's 50-year-old Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Eventually, as tension builds and comedy shades into horror with sci-fi touches, Get Out moves from race-consciousness comedy into an actual statement about racism, in which black people are valued for the services they can provide for white people. As a director, Peele has Hitchcockian gifts, though he sometimes misses: There's no need for an orchestral sting in the scene in which Chris is walking through the Armitage house at night and a figure passes behind him -- it should have remained almost a subliminal moment for the viewer, leaving a "did I see that?" impression. But the real strength of the film is in its screenplay and its performances. Daniel Kaluuya is near-perfect as Chris, at first preternaturally calm and self-possessed even in the awkwardness of meeting his girlfriend's parents, then showing his gradual uneasiness with the anomalies that manifest themselves. The ending of the film was reportedly, and smartly, changed: Chris was to be arrested after the violence that takes place. But in the context of the wave of headlines about police mistreatment of black suspects Peele felt that ending was heavy-handed and substituted a "happy ending" that still feels unsettling: What will happen to Chris when the cataclysm at the Armitage house is discovered and investigated? Peele has said he has ideas for a sequel, but I hope he doesn't make it. 

Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998)

George Clooney, Ving Rhames, and Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight

Jack Foley: George Clooney
Karen Sisco: Jennifer Lopez
Buddy Bragg: Ving Rhames
Maurice Miller: Don Cheadle
Adele: Catherine Keener
Marshal Sisco: Dennis Farina
Glenn Michaels: Steve Zahn
Richard Ripley: Albert Brooks
Chino: Luis Guzmán
Kenneth: Isaiah Washington
White Boy Bob: Keith Loneker
Moselle: Viola Davis
Midge: Nancy Allen
Hejira Henry: Samuel L. Jackson
Ray Nicolette: Michael Keaton

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Screenplay: Scott Frank
Based on a novel by Elmore Leonard
Cinematography: Elliot Davis
Film editing: Anne V. Coates

When George Clooney left ER in 1999, there were some who thought it was a case of David Caruso Syndrome: a TV star whose ego had led him to think he had outgrown the medium that made him famous and was ready for movie stardom. There was evidence to support this premise: Clooney had done a disastrous turn as Batman in Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin (1997), a film that Clooney himself has disowned, and his forgettable appearances as a leading man with Michelle Pfeiffer in the romantic comedy One Fine Day (Michael Hoffman, 1996) and with Nicole Kidman in the thriller The Peacemaker (Mimi Leder, 1997) had done little to establish his credibility as a film actor. The one exception was Out of Sight, and among other things it cemented a working relationship with the director who had brought out the best in Clooney, Steven Soderbergh. The two have since worked together numerous times, with Soderbergh serving as director and/or producer, as well as mentoring Clooney's own directing and producing career. What Soderbergh found in Clooney was a kind of puckishness and vulnerability that has been further developed into broad comedy by directors like Joel and Ethan Coen in such films as O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and Hail, Caesar! (2016). But at the same time, Soderbergh helped Clooney figure out how to be a romantic leading man: His scenes with Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight have a kind of heat that Clooney never generated even with Pfeiffer or Kidman. That said, the romantic scenes in Out of Sight are probably the least entertaining part of the film. Much better are the scenes in which Clooney plays off against such wizardly character actors as Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Steve Zahn, and Albert Brooks. Out of Sight puts such superb actors as Catherine Keener and Viola Davis in tiny roles, and also supplies unbilled cameos for Michael Keaton -- as Ray Nicolette, the character he played in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown (1997) -- and Samuel L. Jackson. It's wittily put together, with such teases as the opening sequence in which Clooney's Jack Foley angrily dashes his necktie to the ground before going across the street to rob a bank -- an action that isn't explained until halfway through the film, after numerous flashbacks and setting changes. It includes audacious surprises, such as the macabre-comic death of White Boy Bob, whose klutziness has been subtly hinted several times before he brains himself with a slip on the staircase. (Clooney's reaction to the death is priceless.)

Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)

John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich

Craig Schwartz: John Cusack
John Horatio Malkovich: John Malkovich
Lotte Schwartz: Cameron Diaz
Maxine Lund: Catherine Keener
Dr. Lester: Orson Bean
Floris: Mary Kay Place
Charlie: Charlie Sheen

Director: Spike Jonze
Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman
Cinematography: Lance Acord
Production design: K.K. Barrett
Music: Carter Burwell

I find it interesting that David Fincher has a cameo -- as the critic Christopher Bing in the documentary about Malkovich's puppeteering career -- in Being John Malkovich, because Fincher and Spike Jonze seem to me to represent two distinct career paths in contemporary filmmaking. Both came out of the heyday of music videos, with their quirky and extravagant special effects and camera tricks, but Fincher has followed a more "commercial" direction with adaptations of bestselling novels like Gone Girl (2014) and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011). His films are fine ones, with professional polish and careful attention to storytelling. He seems to me a major director who subsumes himself into the material, the way such classic studio-era directors as William Wyler and George Cukor did. Jonze, however, has steered a steady course into the offbeat and personal through his four features. Being John Malkovich, Adaptation (2002), Where the Wild Things Are (2009), and Her (2013) are all marked by an irrepressibly eccentric imagination, an ability to think things not often thought, to imagine the impossible and make it plausible. The collaboration with the similar sensibility of Charlie Kaufman on the first two films suggested that the writer had the imagination and the director the skill to visualize it, but Jonze's later films show him to be a great assimilator, able to merge the ideas of his writers and the interpretations of his actors into a special and unique whole. Being John Malkovich plays with its themes of power and sexuality brilliantly. Jonze and Kaufman affirm the value of a hungry imagination with their special insights into the way we are all striving to transcend the limitations imposed by consciousness confined in a body. We probably wouldn't choose to be John Malkovich, but the possibility of escaping into someone else, even for only 15 minutes, tantalizes us.