The Great Comedy of Manners of 2023
In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2023, Bilge Ebiri, Esther Zuckerman, and Mark Harris—about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here.
My fellow crix,
In a recent interview, Brit Marling, an actor and screenwriter who’s worked in both movies and television, shared what I thought was a sharp analysis of the present industry landscape. Asked about the abrupt cancellation, back in 2019, of her critically and popularly successful Netflix series The OA, Marling decried entertainment companies’ growing embrace of
this idea of applying economies of scale to storytelling, or this idea that you can just make more stories reach more people and make them faster and cheaper. We’re in a weird world if stories have to appeal to 50 million-plus people in order to function. Eventually, it means that you’re progressing in large part toward just telling stories that have already been told before.
Marling’s point about the misapplied concept of “economies of scale” echoes what Mark had to say about the crop of underperforming Marvel and DC superhero releases this year, and about the apparent strategy, on the part of the CEOs of those studios’ parent companies, of withdrawing into their well-funded lairs and steepling their fingers villainously while they plan out their next phase of multimedia viewer entrapment. Five 2025 DC superhero movies interlinked with five new spinoff television shows? In this economy? It’s an odd conclusion to draw from the fact that audiences are less and less interested in the content you put out that what they must really want is a whole bunch more of the exact same kind of content, but after a yearlong break.
What exactly “this economy” is at the moment in Hollywood is still in flux after a year of labor unrest, on the part not only of actors and writers, but of below-the-line crew members, like the fed-up Marvel VFX artists who recently voted to unionize. I honestly think that a part of why the bloom is starting to come off the comic-book-adaptation rose has to do not just with superhero fatigue, but with a growing resentment on the part of audiences that they too are merely another widget to be instrumentalized by the five remaining studios’ long-term plan to extract the maximum possible shareholder value from every warm body in their perimeter, employee and customer alike.
There will always be a certain segment of hardcore fans that embraces the advent of each new iteration of a beloved franchise, in whatever medium. And that’s great—fandom has long been a crucial part of the industry’s economic functioning, as well as a (usually positive) source of community among viewers. But the waning of superhero monoculture over the past few years seems to have come with a widespread realization that the net effect of that genre’s decade and a half of box-office dominance was one of impoverishment: of the movie landscape as a whole, certainly, but also of the consumer experience of each individual viewer. We were promised, at the very least, that after the “streaming revolution” (to the barricades!), home viewing would cost less than cable TV and open up space for more customized niche programming. Instead, the grand innovation of the finest minds in entertainment circa 2023 is … to recycle old DC movies on the ad-supported free network Tubi, thereby re-creating the experience of watching TV with commercials in 1979? By God, Zaslav, I think you’ve done it!
Speaking of economies of scale, let me now shift down by several dozen degrees of scale to respond to something Mark wrote concerning not the business but the (much-nicer-to-talk-about) art side of movies. In my Top 10 list write-up of Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings, I call that sui generis writer-director the underappreciated éric Rohmer of contemporary American cinema. The protagonist of Holofcener’s latest comedy of manners, an anxious, needy writer played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, could easily be a Rohmer heroine. I hope, for the sake of your own self-care, that all three of you have seen The Green Ray, Rohmer’s 1986 film about a single Parisienne whose big driving conflict is that, because of the changed plans of a traveling companion, she now has to spend her summer holiday … her enviably long, European summer holiday … wandering various attractive beach towns on the coast of France … alone. The Green Ray is a whole-ass movie about being a lonely, aimless, dissatisfied whiner, a state most of us have experienced at some point in our lives. It’s also one of the French master’s greatest works, in its curiosity about and tenderness toward its subject as well as its stubbornly idiosyncratic definition of what counts as “stakes.”
The fate of an infinity of multiverses may not depend on whether Beth, Louis-Dreyfus’ character in You Hurt My Feelings, emerges from the funk she falls into upon overhearing her husband casually trash-talk her novel to a friend. But Beth does control the fate of some things most of us prize far more in our daily lives than the most powerful portal-unlocking space-gem: her ability to keep going, to trust that her marriage will survive this wound to her vanity, that the people closest to her still love and respect her, and that her work has value in itself. Mark, I’m right there with you on being open to a Hobbit-length trilogy about the further neurotic adventures of Beth, maybe sans Peter Jackson’s eye-wounding ultra-high-def cinematography—though, come to think of it, that unflattering format might add a cool body-horror element to the movie’s recurring theme of its middle-aged characters’ dissatisfaction with their own sagging faces and bodies.
What makes the peevish domestic comedy of You Hurt My Feelings really sing is the collaborative chemistry between Holofcener and Louis-Dreyfus. The two first worked together a decade ago in the now-bittersweet-to-watch Enough Said—bittersweet because it was one of James Gandolfini’s last roles before his early death, and seemed to augur a new era for him as a comic leading man. Though this director-actor combo has made only two films together, their pairing has the tongue-in-groove rightness of a long-standing creative partnership like the one between Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro or Todd Haynes and Julianne Moore (all of whom also made innovative new work together in 2023). Holofcener is a miniaturist of a screenwriter, and Louis-Dreyfus understands that; she delineates Beth’s petty vanities and social humiliations with the precision of a chef on The Bear adding daisy petals to a micro-dessert with tweezers.
Bilge, since we spent much of the last round talking about large-scale stuff—blockbuster culture, box-office trends, Barbenheimer—can you chill out the room with a discussion of a smaller title on your capacious Top 20 list? Kelly Reichardt, a director who’s typically one of my My Guys, made a microscaled indie this year, Showing Up, that to my own surprise didn’t make my list. I appreciated Michelle Williams’ and Hong Chau’s performances as a pair of art frenemies with a fraught tenant/landlady relationship, as well as the specificity of the Portland gallery scene captured by Reichardt’s ever-patient camera. But the ending (by which I mean about the last 20 minutes, not just the final scene) struck me as irresolute in a way that seemed less delicately ambiguous than simply vague. Reichardt is usually great at endings, but for all its observational detail I had a hard time grasping what this film was finally trying to say. Bilge, I see Showing Up on your list, so I wonder if you could help us see the beautiful sculpture you discerned underneath what seemed to me like a still-rough clay surface—or if you could discuss some other small, independent masterpiece you loved.
Off to seek the final space-gem to embed in my cosmic gauntlet,
Dana
Read the next entry in the Movie Club: The Beautiful Slice of Life I Couldn’t Stop Thinking About
