I have watched so many more movies than I have read books.
I remember the original King Kong on the Five o’clock Movie, the stop-action movements of Kong in a black and white so vivid and engulfing that at 7 or 8 I became entranced. I have remained entranced.
If you love movies, it may be because they sweep you away like a benevolent, inspiring riptide, a long blissful and tumultuous pull of body and heart that is also compacted in time and place.
The dreaming, the story, the melding of music and dialogue and image and meaning – these combine to make the spell, but it is emotion that summons the desire to submit again and again to watching, and by watching to agree to enchantment.
Four examples of several spells cast by movies I have recently watched:
The Woman King: The movie is an average spectacle, the category it best matches, but Viola Davis as the warrior King brings a mixture of resolution and suppressed grief and sadness to her role. Her face holds us in every scene because it registers an entire life of conflict and discipline and sorrow, all of those sensations present simultaneously.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: John Hurt’s face looks like the Platonic Ideal of an old spy, one whose job has required him to be paranoid for decades, one whose only friends are tobacco and whiskey, and Gary Oldman as Smiley brings to the role a watchfulness and patience that are his greatest assets. With the smallest gestures, a hand on a handrail, his back against a wall, he also shows us his rigidly controlled inner life. But it is the design of this world that drew me in this third time. This is a shabby place of thrift store furnishings and landscapes of grays and browns, of poor lighting and shadows, a world where melancholy is palpable because everyone is guilty of a range of sins.
Nope: The dread begins building in the silences, in a strange death, in a cloud that does not move, in a horse that disappears, in an isolated place. Dread, if handled well, can sustain a movie for a very long time, but the payoff has to be worth it. In Nope, it’s worth it in the design of the ‘reveal’ and in the smart combination of the comic and horrific that blends throughout. There is one moment however where I almost cheered. Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer, as fractious brother and sister, smack hands together in as ferocious a display of both love and battle prep as I have ever seen.
Tar: This movie expects you to be smart. It respects its audience. It is elliptical. It acknowledges the complexity of experience, its multifarious nature. It understands that brilliant intellect and intuition, and moral blindness, can coexist in the same person at the same time. The movie unfolds without giving itself away. It embraces the same kind of shock and surprise that comes in real life when we only possess fragments of information, and thus only gradually does the experience gain clarity. Cate Blanchett inhabits the character of Lydia Tar. Really. Like Daniel Day Lewis at his best, she is the person she portrays. She renders our normal suspension of disbelief almost superfluous.
In good movies, actors bring us in to the spell, well-directed action always, arresting images, moments of intense personal drama, and often stillness, anticipation, relief, and again, always, catharsis, the exhalation of our pent-up breath, the “my God” we utter in a whisper when we have been taken away.
