Elsewhere

Without really planning it, all of my recent film and TV writing has ended up at Lawyers, Guns & Money, while the book-related writing has ended up here. I'm not entirely sure why that happened—I tend to divide posts between the two blogs based mostly on vibes, so I guess things just broke that way. But because I know that some of these posts will be of interest to AtWQ readers, and out of a general desire to maintain a proper record, here are some of the media posts I made over at that blog in the last few weeks:

First up, a review of the National Geographic/Disney+ series A Small Light, a biopic of Miep Gies, one of the people who concealed eight Jews, including the family of Anne Frank, in a secret annex in an Amsterdam warehouse, and who discovered and preserved Anne's diary after the annex was betrayed and its inhabitants taken to the death camps. I found a lot to admire about the show, while also wondering whether it was capable of facing up to the true, awful reality of the situation it depicted.

The show sticks surprisingly close to events described in the diary—even seemingly trivial incidents such as Miep giving Anne a pair of red suede pumps are taken from Anne's own narrative. On the other hand, it sometimes feels as if A Small Light isn't convinced that what the actual Miep and Jan Gies did—in addition to caring for the people in the secret annex, Jan was active with the Dutch resistance and passed fake documents and ration cards to them in his capacity as a social worker, and he and Miep hid a student who had run afoul of the Nazi party—was quite enough. It keeps piling challenges on their heads, furnishing them with more Jews to help hide, and in one particularly egregious instance, suggesting that Jan was involved with the planning of the 1943 bombing of the Amsterdam records office, and very nearly participated in the attack itself. This is, presumably, at least in part an artifact of that quintessential Peak TV problem, the limited series that should have been a movie—even at only eight episodes, one can sense A Small Light struggling to fill its running time. But it also feels rooted in the need to prove, beyond any possible shadow of doubt, these characters' heroism.

Next, some brief thoughts on Wes Anderson's Asteroid City, a film that felt slight when I first watched it, but which continued to grow in my mind and climb the ranks of Anderson's storied filmography the more I thought about it. As I write in the review, what most strikes me about Asteroid City is that it is, like many Anderson films, a story about parents and children, but that it approaches this topic with a great deal more maturity and benevolence than his previous efforts.

What’s special about how Asteroid City handles this theme—what makes it, as I said, joyful rather than tragic—is that it doesn't forget that its parent characters are also people in the midst of their own lives, and that those lives, despite their complexity, despite carrying behind them a weight of disappointment and loss and bad decisions, are still exciting and vibrant in their own right. Augie and Midge both worry that they are too wrapped up in their own careers to be good parents, and Augie, of course, is bowed down by the responsibility of parenting Woodrow and his young daughters alone. But while these concerns are probably warranted—Augie briefly considers leaving his children with their grandfather (Tom Hanks)—the film doesn't treat this as a sin or a failure. It respects the fact that these people still have their own lives to live, and reinforces it by reminding us that the children are doing the same—they have their own storylines, their own burgeoning relationships, their own plans for the future, which are no less significant because they're happening to young people. Sometimes the parents need to play a part in these dramas—Schrieber, whose son (Aristou Meehan) has been daring himself to do increasingly ridiculous and dangerous things, finally breaks down and asks what that's about, and when he learns that the kid is just looking or attention, gives it to him. And sometimes they need to step back and let their kids be people, as Park does when his son (Ethan Josh Lee), who has leaked news of the quarantine to his school paper, insists to the military that he will "fight [them] all the way to the Supreme Court and win!"

Next up, a post rhapsodizing about the second season of The Bear, which took a show that was already excellent to simply unimaginable levels. 2023 has not been a great TV year so far, but The Bear almost singlehanded saves it, not just by expertly crafting and presenting its story about launching a haute cuisine restaurant, but by being a show about the joy of creativity.

Each of the Bear's staff ends up struggling with anxiety over the project. Carmy, who has convinced himself that he can't perform at an elite level while also having a happy personal life, reconnects with a high school sweetheart and ends up neglecting the restaurant in the rush of a new infatuation. Sydney, who has already lost one business venture, veers wildly between concocting ever more elaborate, impractical menus, and worrying that the whole thing is doomed to failure. Loud-mouthed blowhard Richie worries that he has no value in the restaurant's new incarnation. And sandwich shop holdovers Tina (Lisa Colón-Zayas) and Ebrahim (Edwin Lee Gibson), who have been sent to culinary school to learn the skills they'll need in a very different sort of kitchen, worry about reinventing themselves in middle age. Characters like Carmy's Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt in a performance that is nothing short of a revelation), who puts up the money for the remodel, and Sydney's father Emanuel (Robert Townsend) repeatedly give voice to fears about what this project's failure could mean for our heroes' future stability, both financial and emotional.

At the same time, part of the genius of The Bear is that it leaves you in no doubt why its characters nevertheless continue in this mad pursuit. With every scene it conveys their love of food, their excitement at being able to test and refine their skills, and their ideas for what the restaurant could be. Like the best "let's put on a show" stories, it is infectious in its exuberance. You walk away wanting to make something, anything, merely in order to share in the characters' joy of creation.

Finally, and hot off the press, my review of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, a film with many fine points that is nevertheless hobbled by a conventional biopic structure.

Ultimately, however, Oppenheimer's conviction that it has to take us through J. Robert's whole life before he splits the atom renders the film so much less interesting than it might have been. Though broadly chronological, the film intercuts the story of the Manhattan Project with two additional storylines, the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission hearing in which Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance, and the 1958 confirmation hearings of former AEC chair Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), in which Strauss's nomination to the post of secretary of commerce was scuttled by lingering anger over his mistreatment of Oppenheimer. It's in those last two storylines, I feel, that the film's thematic weight lies. A stronger movie, one less indebted to the biopic structure, would have placed its emphasis on them from the start instead of waiting until its final hour to do so.