Week #7 2020: Destination Wedding
This is a change to your regularly scheduled programme. The film I’d wanted to write about this week was Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s Chameleon Street (1989), but tide, time and circumstance means I didn’t have to rewatch it, and it’s too good a film and too little written about not to take a decent run at it. I’ve been moving house. Having only moved in recent years under a cloud of heartbreak has obscured to me its specific, individual horror, even with a ruthlessness with personal effects that would make a stone weep. Every item you have to pack moves you one closer to going full Michael Landy. At every moment, I was willing on the next stage of evolution when we can all become gaseous consciousness. It’ll take me a while not to feel that my belongings are a secret army marshalled against me, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice but with endlessly recreating tchotchkes that people who could never afford a deposit fill their space with to feel some other sense of ownership.
So, the only film I watched this week and feel qualified to write about was Destination Wedding (Victor Levin; 2018). Did I expect this film to be any good? No. Would it fill the needs of two very exhausted people on Valentine’s Day? Also no. But was it what we watched? Yes.
I live in the real world: most of the time, most people – even if they’re inclined to ever watch films with subtitles, films about ‘depressing’ subjects, or with unassuring, ambiguous endings – would sooner take the path of least resistance. Life feels more tiring now than it ever has, the spectrum of things we could potentially worry about is endless and most good art asks us to think, provokes a reaction or stirs emotion, which is a lot more than I (and most other people) can cope with when things are difficult. If I want to watch a key feminist film, a world cinema classic, a programme of shorts, a powerful documentary, my preference is to watch it in the cinema, partly to blot out everything else in my peripheral vision (literally and metaphorically), partly to stop me jumping off the train before we reach the destination. But again, it’s a huge privilege to have the time and money to regularly go to the cinema to watch work that – even when it does what it’s supposed to do, which is a massive roll of the dice in itself – is invigorating and draining in equal parts.
Balanced against work that asks something of you: an unprecedented abundance of work that doesn’t ask much of you. Even if you’re choosing from new material (rather than, as is my personal preference, endlessly rewatching the American version of The Office, Mad Men and I’m Alan Partridge), streaming has massively reduced the barriers to starting to viewing (no trip outside, no shop, no DVD tray, no specific viewing time, feeling as free as water from the tap). One would imagine that this turn would inspire more choice. But, just as the endless screens of a multiplex and the arrival of the Digital Cinema Print could potentially have meant the range of material on offer could have become infinitely broad, it has actually had the opposite effect. What we actually got was literal replication, with No Time To Die on ten screens simultaneously (offering choice of when to watch it, not what you can watch). But there’s also standardisation of product. Marvel or DC? Take a look at 1987’s list of top box office films in the United States if you want to get a remember how full multiplexes were of work with no assurance of experience. On average, it takes people 18 minutes to select what they are going to watch on Netflix. Today even selecting to watch anything is more of a risk than we can take.
I’m not making a declinist argument here or looking down on anyone for their taste. It'd be ridiculous to think that in the week something as sui generis as Parasite is anointed both critically and commercially. I’m sure people are regularly wading through situations twice as hard as moving house (AKA the worst thing a suburban male could imagine) and twice as much in need of reassurance and comfort from their leisure time. And people have been watching bad television to pass the time for a long time. In the streaming era, there’s definitely more chance to see work that more broadly represents the people on the other side of the screen, and people who can’t go to the cinema (either financially or physically) now have a lot of great things to watch. Yet, most of what the content machine is spitting out are familiar shapes, seeking the middle gear of satisfying everyone with a new take on a flavour you know. When Hollywood has struggled before, it’s usually spit out a lot of bizarre misshapen things, but also some wild, wonderful mistakes have slipped through the net. Part of me is quite surprised to see David Lynch clearing out his back closet onto Netflix, or to see Mati Diop’s elusive, cryptic (and superb) Atlantics given a worldwide deal straight from Cannes. I don’t know whether these kinds of acquisitions are part of an unseeable laser-targeted strategy from the eye of Sauron, or if having more money than God puts you in a position to throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. Because what I mostly associate with Netflix is taking an established idea (baking shows! Makeover shows! Auteur directors!) and giving you a tonne of it (either durationally or expense-wise). Knowing what you’re getting yourself into by the time ten seconds of the autoplay trailer is done is their business model.
So, anyway, Destination Wedding. Why did this particular film seem like my own personal path of least resistance? Well, for the very reason that the film exists, rather than sitting on an unused Final Draft file: because Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder are in it. Stars are comfort food. Is this going to be good pizza, a good Keanu Reeves movie? No, probably not, but at least I got to a minimum standard (bread, cheese, tomato; seeing his face, physicality, charm, basking in the reassurance of other pizzas I have eaten and better films he has been in). Secondly, I was pretty sure that it wasn’t going to risk being a good movie I would feel frustrated at not being fully present for. And it’s not a good film, but not in the way I hoped. I was looking for mild deviation from pre-established tropes. Instead, it’s a mile-a-minute talkfest that makes His Girl Friday look like Tarkovsky. And moreover, it’s a stylistic experiment, no less, as from the moment the stars meet in the opening scene until the film’s close, no other characters speak apart from Reeves and Ryder. There are lots of moments that land and will make you laugh, but it’s a low batting average given how many punchlines it’s throwing at you. Reeves is not well suited to the hyperarticulate, brittle Whit Stillman-esque dialogue. It’s in the rare moments when he’s working as laconic backstop to Ryder’s cynical logorrhoea that it hits the right rhythm. It’s pleasing to see The Nicest Man in Hollywood Keanu Reeves playing someone close to David Thewlis’s in Mike Leigh’s Naked, and Ryder feels like she’s playing a continuation of her Heathers’s character with thirty years of bitter experience behind her. But it ends up feeling like an airless, enervating exercise, a radio play with that could be about two brains in jars talking to each other.
I wasn’t hoping for a ‘Bad Movie’ (that I could look down on), nor for a good one either (that would have asked too much of me). But working out the above – why what could have been good was only passable – was also tiring in its own way, counter to what I needed. A film’s not a pill you take, and it doesn’t owe you anything, but still. What I’m saying is, I shouldn't have taken a risk in this context, even the mild one Destination Wedding represents. I should have watched To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You.
Recommendations this week
Three films that I could definitely have watched pleasurably in the above context: Midnight Run, Moonstruck and Friends with Money (two out of three of which are on Netflix).
‘Xtal’ by Aphex Twin. I have needed softness this week and this is the kind I’m after.
This article about diamonds in the New Yorker, the only thing I was able to get even half way through this week.