MOVIE DIARY 2023: FUCK IT. WE BOTH DIE.
Hello! Happy new year! It’s 2024, so it’s looking like I gotta start wrapping up this blog, huh? I’ve got two more posts before we close the door on this blog. This one that you’re reading right now is the final regular style post, and the next one will be our big MOVIE DIARY 2023 year end wrap up. My final special guest of MOVIE DIARY 2023 is none other than Tessa Strain! She’s here for a record setting 100th* (*8th) special guest appearance. Who else but Tessa!
Mistress America (2015) - dir. Noah Baumbach
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: TESSA STRAIN
Okay! I’m here to make one last guest post on Movie Diary 2023, and it’s about a movie co-written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach about projecting a childlike fantasy of joyful, independent adulthood on a zany blonde woman who has one thousand jobs and a zest for life but who eventually experiences a crisis of confidence at being the target of objectification: that’s right, Mistress America!!!!! All contrarianism aside (jk, I will never leave contrarianism aside, it is as much my partner in life as EIC of Movie Diary 2023 Geoffrey Lapid), if Barbie posits early on that Barbie’s very appeal lies in the opportunity she offers girls to imagine a joyful adult life beyond motherhood, Mistress America is a movie that actually delivers on that promise.
Lola Kirke’s Tracy is introduced to Gerwig’s Brooke in the doldrums and dislocation of her first semester of college in New York. Brooke is her 30-year-old soon-to-be stepsister, the kind of charismatic wastrel dilettante, who, to Tracy’s inexperienced eyes, represents the sort of person you move to the city to become. She identifies herself, with varied degrees of accuracy, as a singer and a philanthropist and a clothing designer and a tutor and a SoulCycle instructor and an interior decorator and an aspiring restaurateur.* She lives in a commercially zoned building in Times Square and goes to three parties in the same night but unaccountably wears a business casual outfit to all of them. She delivers an endless stream of bon mots that invite Tracy’s bemusement and admiration in equal measure—where Brooke’s more respectable peers have become exasperated with her, Tracy sees her as an avatar for chaotic glamor.
Brooke is resilient to setbacks (the strength of her self-delusion forming a protective barrier against actual harm to her ego), but discovering that Tracy used her as a character in a short story ends up being her breaking point, inasmuch as she has one. Although she enjoys being a figure of fantasy to others, she bristles at being so explicitly used for material, even if she appears to court that kind of attention. In putting Brooke on the page, Tracy violates an unspoken code of both admiration and ephemerality that animates their relationship and strips Brooke of her agency. In one of the funniest scenes in the movie, Tracy is corralled into a tribunal on her story by Brooke, Brooke’s rich friends she’s trying to squeeze for money, and Tracy’s own classmates, and forced to answer for her crimes against Brooke’s feelings and by extension feminism as a whole (extremely lmao to later see this logic applied with total sincerity in Barbie, but once more I digress…).
In the wake of this rupture, Tracy and Brooke go their own ways for a time before finding their way back to each other. Tracy still needs her fantasy heroine, and Brooke still needs to be that for somebody. A lesser movie would see Brooke changed, tamed, cowed into respectability, but instead she remains a blessedly cheerful fuck-up, using the money her friends throw at her to move to allegedly Los Angeles and start over. Whether she ends up doing this at all is up for debate (she’s “leaving tomorrow” but her apartment is barely packed); the gesture is what matters to Brooke, not the follow-through. Maybe she runs out of road somewhere down the line, but we don’t have to see it—why place the yoke of responsibility on a fantasy?
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*Incidentally, Barbie bumps up against this problem when it has to give a name to the Platonic Barbie at the center of the story—they settle on “Stereotypical Barbie” which is clumsy and nonsensical, but a movie that exists to sell toys can’t risk the implication that you can repurpose one doll for multiple uses. Sure, Barbie can be a doctor as long as you buy Doctor Barbie, like the difference between the open-ended possibilities of a tub full of legos (no I’m not going to call the plural of lego “lego” like some kind of NERD) compared to a set that exists for the whole purpose of being assembled into, say, the Millennium Falcon or whatever the fuck else—it all becomes play by instruction, by qualification. Woof!
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Tessa Strain is a writer (and actor????) living in Geoff’s apartment. Her work has appeared in Bright Wall/Dark Room and The Comics Journal. She is @tessastrain on Twitter, where she does a pretty good job, and on Instragram, where she does a bad one.
Ferrari (2023) - dir. Michael Mann
Pretty solid movie! Adam Driver plays the titular Ferrari, a man who’s just out there doing his best and trying to have it all—a championship racing team, a successful business, and a secret other family. Ferrari is about Ferrari’s relationships and trying to balance the opposing forces of his business matters and his family matters. On one side we have Ferrari the former racer, the national hero, the savvy businessman preparing for the most important race of his life, a race that could determine the fate of his company and his legacy. On the other side we have Ferrari the man, grappling with the weight of whether he should publicly acknowledge his mistress’ child as his own son. Doing so would be the right thing to do, but it could also mean the financial ruin of his company, his life’s work. What’s to be done?
I don’t really know anything about Ferrari, so for all I know this could all be way off base but I enjoyed what Adam Driver was doing here. He plays Ferrari as stoic and largely inscrutable, maintaining a steady confidence about him. Driver’s Ferrari is also an imposing figure, someone who knows he is important and well-respected, a natural leader who moves through the world with a practiced deliberateness. When he speaks, people listen. It’s Italy in the 1950s and Enzo Ferrari is talking to you? You’re gonna shut the fuck up and listen to what he has to say, that’s ENZO FERRARI, man. He invented the Ferari! He’s a powerful guy, and Driver sort of lurches and stomps through the movie the way that a man who expects the world to move for him does, but there’s also a vulnerability to him that we only see small flashes of when he is around his inner circle. I think my favorite scenes are the ones where Ferrari is addressing his team of racers. It’s obvious that he’s a serious man, a true competitor, and that he expects everyone to be on his level the way that all the best and most demanding leaders do, but what’s fascinating to me is how deeply the racers buy into Ferrari. They respect and admire him so much because he doesn’t treat the racers as simple extensions of his will. Ferrari, a former racer himself, knows what they go through when they’re out there racing. He knows all about the thrill and the danger, but more importantly he knows that he could never race the way these men can. They need each other to win, and that necessitates a level of trust and respect and commitment, not unlike a marriage.
Ferrari is great at managing and inspiring his team because of the trust, the respect, and the commitment to victory that they unselfishly share, so you’d think all that stuff would easily translate to Ferrari’s personal life, but alas, no. It turns out when you’re accustomed to moving through life as if the world will move for you it kind of makes you a big asshole (yes, even if you are carrying around a bunch of emotional turmoil in your heart). We see this a lot in his relationship with his wife Laura (Penelope Cruz). Their marriage is strained after Ferrari and Laura’s son dies from muscular dystrophy, and Ferrari begins his affair with Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley, the least Italian anyone has ever been in the long history of cinema). Laura knows that Ferrari isn’t faithful but they sort of have an arrangement that keeps them together. Their passion for each other has cooled down and turned into resentment, and Laura has thrown herself into running all the details and financials of Ferrari’s business. Cruz is amazing here, maybe the best performance in this movie. Laura could have very easily been played as nothing more than a vindictive, bitter woman whose only aim is to clip Ferrari’s wings and keep him from reaching great heights merely out of spite, but Cruz gives Laura a really human depth that makes her sympathetic and compelling. You can see why Ferrari and Laura loved each other in the first place (they’re both ambitious, driven, all business, and extremely stubborn), and you also see that while their passion for each other has flamed out, they’re still bonded together—not just in the business, but in the life that they shared together and in the memory of their son. Laura is Ferrari’s equal, commanding respect from everyone around her, even the great Enzo Ferrari himself.
The big misstep here I think is Shailene Woodley. I’m not a Shailene hater, I think she’s great when she fits, but I think she was really miscast here. Her Lina Lardi, Ferrari’s other woman and the mother of his only living son, is set up to be an idyllic counterpoint to Laura. Where Laura is fiery and demanding, Lina is unassuming and supportive. She’s not exactly a pushover, and she knows exactly what this relationship with Ferrari is, but I don’t think we ever really get to see in her what Ferrari claims to see in her. Ferrari insists that he challenges him and he likes that, but we kind of only see her just hanging out, picking plums, and making dinner. The only time she really speaks up in any meaningful way is when she pushes Ferrari to acknowledge their son as a Ferrari in name at an upcoming christening ceremony (I wasn’t actually clear on what this was, my brain just sort of filed it away as “Italian Catholic thing,” sorry). Ferrari is with Lina because it is easy and peaceful, and having a son together helps ease the pain of the loss of Ferrari’s other son. However, Woodley’s performance feels really simplistic when you compare it with Cruz’s, to the point where you’re wondering why they even bothered with all these scenes with Woodley. It’s not a competition, but you can’t help but make the comparison when these two women are set up as counterpoints to each other, representing two very different but equally important aspects of Ferrari’s life.
The racing portion of Ferrari is really compelling and exciting, and it’s filled with a lot of cool bits. I loved how much they emphasized that these racers could die at any moment. Ferrari is a man who lives with death around him (the death of his son, the death of his fellow racers and friends, the possible death of his company and his legacy), and death sort of stalks around the periphery of Ferrari until it inevitably comes to the center where it becomes violent and impactful and it really fucks people up and changes things for everyone around. The monologue where he talks to his team about why they lost to Maserati in a race is so sick. He’s pretty much just telling the Ferrari drivers that in order to win they need to be ready to die, and it sort of follows the same tone and beats as a coach’s speech in a locker room, except you know that by nature of the competition, they actually could die out there.
While the racing and death and danger is really exciting, with Ferrari it’s less about the racing itself than it is about creating a parallelism between Ferrari’s business/racing life and his personal life. I don’t know if you know this, but racing… racing is like life (you know, the human race? Ever heard of it?). There are a lot of moments where the script just sort of feels a bit arch or convenient, where the metaphor is absolutely not subtle, but it works fine because Adam Driver just sort of powers through it with a deadly serious face. There are points when he or someone else is talking about racing and it’s obvious that it’s really also about Ferrari’s life, and you might be tempted to give it a little eye roll or whatever, but I think Driver’s deadpan scowl actually helps to ground it, almost like he’s said the most obvious thing and you’re tempted to laugh but he just sort of stares you into submission, forcing you to take it seriously because Ferrari is taking it so seriously. There’s no such thing in this movie as a winking nod. I don’t even know that Michael Mann has that in his cinematic vocabulary. I wouldn’t want him to!
The third part of the blog, where I plug the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord
Fran Magazine’s Best of 2023 Extravaganza is one of the most fun year end posts out there for the second year in a row! It’s so cool to see the wide variety of what people are into, there’s just so much cool stuff out there!
The only Maestro (2023) writing that matters is only ever Fran’s, and she’s got a big one on what makes a Bradley Cooper film over on Vulture.
The Boy Movies 2023 Celebration Issue is yet another classic Boy Movies entry, and Allison has kicked off 2024 by setting the tone for the year with her unimpeachable ins and outs list.
Next post will be the final MOVIE DIARY 2023 post! It’s finally time for our year end wrap up, and I’ll be bringing in a whole bunch of friends from the MOVIE DIARY community as well as some former MOVIE DIARY special guests to help me say goodbye to MOVIE DIARY 2023.
See you next time, for one more time!