55: The Men in Rooms Trilogy

On paper, I should be more on Paul Schrader's frequency. He has roots in a strict religious tradition that has never fully relinquished its grip on him, and that shows  keep sending out rhizomes of theologically-laced questions about the brokenness of the world. His direction is formally austere, bounded by a locked-off camera and punctuated with occasional serene steadicam shots that feel decadent in comparison. His movies are capital-M Masculine, a topic that I like to tangle with precisely because masculinity is so strange and ubiquitous that I can't help but be intrigued by the ideas that masculine movies take for granted.

And yet Schrader movies bounce off me, not unlike the movies of John Carpenter. I'm intrigued and put off by the movies of both men for different reasons; with Schrader, it's the sensibility behind his informal Men in Rooms trilogy, and the way that he grapples with the collective sins of the United States using the transcendental style (which he first described). I appreciate that Schrader wants to use his latest three films to explore whether the United States, as a nation, can overcome the sins of environmental abuse (First Reformed), colonialism and torture (The Card Counter), and white supremacy and slavery (Master Gardener). Where I think these three films each fall short is in their attempts to shove those potent sins into the body of a single man. When coupled with the arms-length approach of transcendental style, which is by nature restrained almost to the point of stillness, the men in each of these movies become symbols even as they struggle against their own individual culpability as agents and penitents.

It also doesn't help that Schrader is not very good at writing women. His central men lead austere lives, confined to small, undecorated rooms where they journal their guilt, a drink to one side and a large mirror in front of them. Their sins and the performances of the actors are specific–I like Oscar Isaac's work in The Card Counter very much–but as the trilogy has progressed, it's started to collapse under the weight of the metaphor. The secondary and tertiary characters are much more thinly sketched out, leaving Schrader's female characters as the thinnest supports for his leading men. Amanda Seyfried's Mary in First Reformed is a symbol of hope, and Victoria Hill's Esther is a symbol of guilt; Seyfried is given enough space for her character to resemble an actual person, although only just. As the trilogy has grown, and its conventions have become more established, its female characters have been pushed further into the background: Tiffany Haddish plays a plot device in The Card Counter, and Quintessa Swindell plays absolution in Master Gardener, but none of these characters are afforded even the hint of an inner life that Schrader gives to his leading men.

What I talked about:

For Seeing and Believing podcast, Kevin and I reviewed Master Gardener and paired it with Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky. I've already registered my feelings about Paul Schrader above; I have a lot of complicated admiration for Elaine May's work, and I'm glad to have been able to talk about it for the podcast this week.

We also released a bonus episode of Seeing & Believing on Wednesday to talk about Kelly Reichardt's excellent Showing Up.

What I'm reading:

Infinite Jest procrastination status: still procrastinating.

In the meantime, I'm barreling through Yasuhiro Nightow's Trigun Maximum manga, which continues to be excellent character-based action storytelling. Nightow draws his sequences with such dense detail that he forces the reader to slow down in order to register everything that's happening, effectively turning fight scenes into slow motion sequences on the page. The work's beautiful and baroque and often quite funny, and I love Nightow's maximalist approach to telling a story.