"Digging For Fire": Has A Horrible Marital Moral

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I’m going to be very blunt: Digging for Fire is a really, really dumb movie.  Like, really dumb.  Its entire thematic premise is based around a tired cliché that doesn’t even believably work within the film’s narrative.  Its characters are shallow archetypal representations that serve to make a point that not only is much too obvious to be thought-provoking, but is actually even morally unethical to put into practice. 

Married couple Tim and Lee are housesitting for Lee’s client when Tim discovers a gun and what seems to be a human bone buried in the hill adjacent to the house.  The police seem (inexplicably) disinterested in this discovery, so Tim wants to dig around and see if he can find more bones.  Lee disagrees and wants to leave it buried.  Lee then leaves to visit with her parents and some friends, leaving Tim alone at the house.  Tim invites some friends over, and both Tim and Lee find their way into flirtatious entanglements with members of the opposite sex.

Let’s disregard the fact that Tim’s clearly calm demeanor towards potentially discovering a body is more than a little absurd.  The buried body metaphor is very obviously a skeleton in the closet, a secret that perhaps shouldn’t be unearthed.  Tim eventually decides to leave the body buried and with it buries the clothes he wore to try and impress the girl he liked.  By extension, Tim and Lee’s respective extra-marital romantic encounters (neither of which culminated in sex, by the way) should be buried so as not to harm their marriage.  This is a horrible message.  Since when is dishonesty a proper way to manage marital conflict?  The fact that this film portrays such behavior as okay makes me question the relationship ethics of everyone involved in this project, and by extension the relationship ethics of society as a whole.  I sincerely hope that I’m not alone in thinking this is messed up.

But even if we were to take the moral at face value and dismiss the hackneyed metaphorical mechanism for its delivery, the film doesn’t even work on its own terms, particularly because it never gives us any reason to be invested in Tim and Lee’s relationship.  They share a few opening scenes together, just enough to establish that they are married, their relationship has some tension, but they are in love and share a young child together.  However, this simply isn’t enough for us to care about them as people or for us to root for them to stick together.  They’re both clearly tired and stressed out, and I think that is meant to make us sympathetic to how close they come to non-consensual adultery, but with that as their sole defining character traits, it’s hard to care about anything they do that would affect their so-called “relationship.”

Last year I reviewed another film by director Joe Swanberg (Happy Christmas) which I gave a lot of slack for its improvisational tone.  However, it seems that even with a script that Swanberg can’t deliver.  Between the shallow writing, clichéd execution, unlikeable characters, and completely backwards notion of what constitutes a healthy relationship, Digging for Fire is one of the unethical films of the year.  Don’t lie to your partners, people.  Even if you think that you’re protecting your relationship, that isn’t fair to your partner, and they deserve to have a relationship that isn’t built on lies.  And don’t look to Joe Swanberg for marriage counseling.

"Brooklyn": Take Greatness with a Grain of Salt

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As I alluded to in my recent review of Spotlight, there are certain types of film that critics and Oscar voters are attracted to, and one of these is the period piece.  Brooklyn is such a film, detailing an immigrant’s journey to New York from Ireland and exploring the emotional turmoil associated with that transition.  Intriguing in its own right to be sure, but it’s worthwhile to take the near-universal praise of a film like this with a grain of salt, since it may merely be a good film that aligns particularly well with critical film-viewing preferences, rather than being as much of a masterwork of cinema as the film’s Metacritic score would lead you to believe.  Brooklyn may be a really good film, but is it worthy of the accolades that are already being thrown at it in this early Oscar season?

Brooklyn is a character study, focusing on the 1951 immigration of Eilis Lacy, an Irish woman whom no one in her hometown expected to make anything of herself.  In order to pursue a life outside of her more successful sister’s shadow, Eilis heads off to Brooklyn, where homesickness sets in almost immediately and her kind-hearted nature just isn’t enough to sustain her emotional well-being.  Enter Tony, a young Italian man who is set to make her feel at home with his romantic intentions, which Eilis willingly accepts.

This is a fairly old-fashioned style of storytelling, content with a classical mode of romance between two heterosexual young people, but remarkably the film never comes across as dated or hackneyed.  Instead, the film relies on wit and humor that is as much about mocking the dull formalism and sexual attitudes of the era as it is about the quaint simplicity of the time.  In short, it’s simply a film that’s hard not to find charming.  But even in its more serious moments, Saoirse Ronan really sells the character of Eilis, whose soft-spoken and polite nature hides a strength that isn’t so much about overcoming any immense obstacles in her way as it is about simply finding her place in the world, whether that be with Tony or at a given profession or even in deciding whether New York is right for her.

However, given the old-fashioned styling of the film’s narrative, there are definitely a few glaring issues that need to be pointed out.  First of all, though I recognize that part of Eilis’s character arc is coming into her own self-discovered identity, there is a large portion of the film where Eilis is led by the actions of others rather than by her own initiative.  This is nowhere more evident than in her relationship with Tony, who seems to single-handedly erase any depression Eilis feels upon their courtship; it reeks a little too strongly of the “woman only needing a man to be happy” trope for my liking, even if it does make a certain amount of sense within the narrative. 

But that doesn’t excuse the film’s other glaring problem, which is its pacing.  The film carries with it a feel-good vibe for its first half that almost entirely eclipses any sense of central conflict, until a mid-film twist forces Eilis to head back home to Ireland for a rather contrived series of events designed to keep her from wanting to leave.  Though this does provide a nice resolution for Eilis’s arc that doesn’t rely on Tony’s influence, the film does not spend nearly enough time developing reasons for Eilis to want to stay in Ireland rather than return to a life that she had learned to love.  There is never any real tension that would suggest that Eilis should want to forego returning to New York, so the entirely rushed third act feels more vestigial than it is necessary, particularly with its shoehorned-in competing romantic interest who never feels remotely threatening to Eilis and Tony’s much better established relationship.

This review came out sounding more negative than I intended, because while these issues are glaring, they never go so far as to break the film.  The dialogue and performances are damn entertaining, and I would not be surprised to see Saoirse Ronan among the top contenders for Best Actress at this year’s Oscars.  The cinematography is grand and the film exudes a lively sense of color that darker Oscar bait will likely sorely lack.  However, despite the film’s near-universal praise, those good qualities need to be acknowledged alongside the film’s problems, which demote this film from being great to just being pretty damn good.

"Spotlight": Unsettling Societal Introspection At Its Finest

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It’s easy to be skeptical of a film like Spotlight.  Often when a film receives such universal acclaim and is also in the wheelhouse of Oscar-baiting tropes, such as adapting a barely decade-old event into a “true story” feature, it is easy to see how eyes can glaze over and awards can be handed out purely out of instinct and habit.  That isn’t to say that a film that fits this mold is usually bad, but its flaws are generally ignored in favor of elevating it above genre flicks that may have been of superior quality.  However, that isn’t what’s happening with Spotlight.  This is an honest-to-goodness amazing piece of filmmaking that will deservedly be recognized as one of the best of the year.

In January 2002, the Boston Globe exposed the Catholic Church’s protection and sheltering of pedophilic priests within its ranks.  Spotlight is the story of the eponymous team that pursued that investigation in the preceding year, tracking down survivors, finding out about more and more priests involved at an exponential rate, and coming to terms with how the Boston community turned a blind eye to these events in favor of preserving the Church’s status quo.

At first, I was a bit off-put by the fact that there were no stand-out performances in this film, no lead to latch on to in order to act as an audience surrogate.  But before long I realized that this wasn’t meant to be a film about a lone hero or even a single antagonist, but a film about people who have to come to terms with what is simultaneously the best and worst kept secret of their community.  No performance stands out because they are all necessarily excellent, from Michael Keaton as the Spotlight team’s increasingly disturbed editor, to Rachel McAdams effortless portrayal of a woman in a male-dominated field, to a slightly neurotic turn by Mark Ruffalo that is deserving of a Best Supporting Actor nomination.  There are numerous others, both in large and small roles, but the entire film pulsates with realistic human emotion and a staggering sense of community between them.

And that sense of community may be the most tragic element to this story, as the film so masterfully portrays.  Instead of veering into cliché and melodrama by making the Catholic Church into a monolithic entity of control and manipulation (though elements of that are definitely present in its portrayal), Spotlight instead opts to focus on how so many key players in Boston institutions had knowledge of the systemic rape of children, and yet nobody opted to do anything about it, or those that did choose to speak up were not acknowledged, even by the news institution that was now putting the pieces together.  Relatedly, there is a fantastic red herring subplot that I will not spoil, but the reveal is so casual that the gut-punch twist is all the more effective because of it.

The film ends on a disquieting note just after the article is published and leaves an unsettling question mark over the future of Boston and its (and the world’s) relationship with the Catholic Church.  This isn’t a film that begs for resolution, but rather asks us to examine ourselves and our communities and whether the perceived benefits of the status quo are worth the secrets we sweep under the rug to preserve it.  This is masterwork filmmaking and I will be most pleased to see this film’s inevitable Oscar nominations.