Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz's Wonderful "The Peanut Butter Falcon"

A few nights ago, I watched Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz’s The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019) on crave.ca. I enjoyed it immensely. For an excellent capsule review of this movie, I recommend The New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” note by Bruce Diones. Here it is in full:

Zack Gottsagen, an actor with Down syndrome, stars in this affectionate drama as Zak, a young man with the same condition, who escapes from the Georgia nursing home where he lives in order to search for a professional-wrestling camp that he wants to enroll in. Along the way, he meets a small-time tidewater fisherman on the run (Shia LaBeouf), who reluctantly agrees to help him in his search. As their rafting trip begins, a nursing-home attendant (Dakota Johnson) looking for Zak catches up with them and eventually agrees to become a part of the adventure. The trio meet colorful characters in the course of this journey through photogenic landscapes (the cinematography is by Nigel Bluck). Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz wrote and directed the film; despite their screenplay’s clichés, they don’t let life-lesson dialogue distract from the genial Mark Twain-esque settings. Both Gottsagen and Johnson deliver endearing performances, and LaBeouf’s scruffy, ramshackle manner lifts the film above its predictable roots into something lived-in and surprisingly memorable.

June 6, 2011 Issue

I feel a tad guilty picking David Denby’s “The Hangover Part II” review for comment when there are several articles on much more serious matters in the magazine this week to choose from. But seriousness is not my ultimate guide, as I navigate my way through the magazine’s riches; pleasure is. And Denby’s review, titled “Where The Boys Are,” is a tremendous source of reading pleasure, in terms of both analysis and description. It’s also illustrated by a terrific, eye-catching, Pepto-Bismol pink artwork by Kirsten Ulve. The first film, The Hangover (2009), received only a brief “Now Playing” blurb in The New Yorker. But the piece, written by Bruce Diones, was enthusiastic: see “Goings On About Town,” The New Yorker, June 22, 2009, in which Diones says, among other things, “what makes this bromance work is the performers’ contagious camaraderie.” Now the sequel has caught Denby’s attention, and he’s written a dandy review. What I like about it is, firstly, that it illuminates The Hangover’s clever structure. Denby says,

Philips and the first set of screenwriters, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, did something brilliant in “The Hangover.” They showed us not the long night of vice but the longer day after it, when the men, stone-cold sober, are forced to realize, with increasing horror what they have done to the world and to themselves in the preceding twelve hours.

Secondly, I like Denby’s humor. For example, he says,

The two movies offer a comedy of types, a kind of Freudian allegory, with Bradley-Cooper enacting the ego, Ed Helms the superego, and Zach Galifianakis the id. Or, to put it more simply, aggression, caution, and stupidity.

And thirdly, I like this description:

“The Hangover” has the physical freedom and the wildness of a great silent comedy, though, heaven knows, none of the innocence.

For all these reasons, David Denby’s “Where The Boys Are” is this week’s Pick Of The Issue.

Credit: The above artwork is by Kirsten Ulve; it appears in The New Yorker, June 6, 2011, as an illustration for David Denby's "Where The Boys Are."

December 13, 2010 Issue

This week’s “Goings On About Town” (GOAT) is a cornucopia of verbal and visual pleasure, brimming with succulent details such as English Beat’s “punky edge,” Angie Wang’s stunning “Nellie McKay” portrait, “neo-fusion mashup” at Iridium, Warhol’s “tossed-off party pics,” Giacometti’s Montparnasse studio “overflowing with plaster dust,” a beautiful color picture of Rauschenberg’s 1955 “Short Circuit (Combine),” Joan Acocella’s “battle of the ‘Nutcracker’s,” Richard Brody’s memorable “depicts to the limits of consciousness” in his eloquent “Critics Notebook” tribute to “Shoah,” Andrea Thompson’s impeccably rhythmed “Whitewashed brick walls and green patterned wallpaper have the spare beauty of a homestead” in her superb “Tables For Two” review of Northern Spy Food Co., Bruce Diones on Cher (“her voice still has the roughness that can sandpaper the dullest lines to sharp finish”), and Laurie Rosenwald’s ingenious “On The Horizon” illustration, “Picasso’s guitars, at MOMA.”

Some of these great GOAT details triggered pleasant memories of past New Yorker pieces. For example, Joan Acocella’s mention of the possibility that the mice in Ratmansky’s “Nutcracker” will be “truly nasty-looking, with red eyes and yellow teeth” called to mind Arlene Croce’s “Baryshnikov’s ‘Nutcracker’” (The New Yorker, January 17, 1977), in which she describes the mice in Nureyev’s “Nutcracker”: “His mice were rats who tore off the heroine’s skirt.” Croce’s piece is included in her 1982 collection, Going to the Dance.

The illustration of Rauschenberg’s “Short Circuit (Combine)” took me back to Calvin Tomkins’ Robert Rauschenberg profile “Moving Out” (The New Yorker, February 29, 1964). I first read it twenty years ago in Tomkins’ 1965 collection The Bride and the Bachelor. It contains some great descriptions of Rauschenberg working, including this detail: “From time to time he paused to replenish a tall glass of vodka and orange juice.”

And Richard Brody’s powerful “Critic’s Notebook” on Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah,” in which he says the film “has transcended the cinema to become the primary record of the extermination of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War,” brought to mind Pauline Kael’s controversial 1985 “Shoah” review (The New Yorker, December 30, 1985), in which she dares to criticize Lanzmann’s technique, e.g., “Lanzmann’s closeups can be tyrannically close – invasions of the face.” Kael’s review is included in her 1989 collection Hooked.

Last week at newyorker.com, Brody posted a scathing critique of Kael’s “Shoah” review (see “‘Shoah’ At Twenty-Five,” December 7, 2010). In his piece, Brody comes perilously close to calling Kael’s review anti-Semitic. He says:

So when Kael charges that the movie ‘doesn’t set you thinking’ and adds ‘When you come out, you’re likely to feel dazed, and confirmed in all your worst fears,’ it’s clear that she simply doesn’t know what to think about it – and so, falls back on her own prejudices.

He also says, “Pauline Kael’s misunderstandings of “Shoah” are so grotesque as to seem willful.”

Kael faced this type of criticism back in 1985 when she wrote the review. According to Craig Seligman, in his book Sontag & Kael (2004), Alfred Kazin considered Kael’s objections to the film and found her "incapable of responding to the material.” Seligman says that Leon Wieseltier also strongly objected to Kael’s review. He quotes Wieseltier as saying that her dissenting view of the film is a “dissenting view about the film and the catastrophe.” And Seligman quotes another angry objector, the film critic J. Hoberman, as saying, “Imagine, he [Lanzmann] actually found anti-Semitism in Treblinka. If he’s not tied up again, he could probably find it in The New Yorker.”

Seligman correctly points out that “Kael was reviewing a film – she wasn’t reviewing the Holocaust.” He says that Kazan and Wieseltier “ignore the core of Kael’s argument, which is that “Shoah” fails as a film.” He says, “To deduce from her misgivings about “Shoah” that she viewed the Holocaust with insufficient gravity is malignantly unfair. (And, by the way, untrue.)” Regarding the implications of Hoberman’s statement, Seligman says, “That sentence has haunted me ever since I first read it, in 1986. Could it possibly mean what it appears to mean – that Kael’s review is anti-Semitic?” Seligman concludes that Hoberman’s charge is “an accusation of astonishing coarseness.”

I agree with Seligman. Richard Brody’s statement against Kael falls into the same category as J. Hoberman’s; to borrow Seligman’s words, it is an accusation of astonishing coarseness.

Credit: The above portrait of Nellie McKay is by Angie Wang; it appears in “Goings On About Town” in this week’s New Yorker.