Alone, confined, and drunk: 2020's best movies unintentionally captured our pandemic state of mind
Black Bear, Another Round, and Nomadland speak directly to a time we won’t forget
Clockwise from left, Aubrey Plaza hits reset in the mindbending Black Bear; Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg are stuck in an existential loop in Palm Springs; Mads Mikelsen drowns his midlife paralysis in Another Round.
HOW IS IT that 2020 saw such a strong contingent of films that seemed to speak exactly to this pandemic moment?
After all, there’s no way the makers of the movies below could have predicted the crisis that a microscopic virus would set off across the entire planet.
When the year’s best films were being made, no one was up on the terms “PPE”, “Zoom fatigue”, or “contact tracing”. Corona was a Mexican beer and masks were reserved for the nonstop barrage of Avengers sequels.
And yet, isolation, confined spaces, inescapable limbo, family friction, and rivers of alcohol were all recurring themes in the most memorable movies that came out in 2020.
STUCK IN A RUT
Feel like you’re caught in an endless Groundhog Day loop? Two of the most clever movies of the year took that concept in surreal new directions, with thrilling results.
Palm Springs rode the idea hilariously over the top, Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti stuck starting each day at a desert wedding where everything is a little off. Like, why is Samberg’s Nyles wearing a Hawaiian shirt and yellow swim trunks to the ceremony?
The leads have an irreverent, slacker-screwball chemistry and the Palm Springs setting, all pink and turquoise against the gold-earth desert, is dreamlike. But the comedy takes a dark, existential turn that really resonates right now. As Milioti and Samberg’s couple starts to realize there are no stakes anymore—literally no consequences for any bad behaviour--they start to act more and more reckless. Shrooms, shooting ranges, plane crashes, borrowed swimming pools: they’re all on the table. That’s where the pandemic angst really kicks in: does anything matter right now? And who do you want to spend this endless timeloop with?
Black Bear’s plot takes a much more darkly psychological, brain-bending approach. But thanks to perfectly cast lead Aubrey Plaza, it’s still squirmingly comedic.
Her writer-actor Allison arrives at a lakeside cabin-retreat to work on a screenplay. Soon she becomes entangled in an insanely awkward evening with her hosts--the pregnant, jealous Blair (Sarah Gadon) and her frustrated-musician husband Gabe (Christopher Abbott), who flirts with his new tenant as much as he flashes enraged resentment at his wife.
Mind and narrative games ensue, with writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine boldly hitting a kind of reset.
Stuck in a confined setting, confronting her relationships, artistic block, and how far she’s willing to go for her career: Allison’s meta journey expresses everything about the introspection and cabin-fever relationships that are happening right now. Though it employs a dream logic, there’s something acutely real about its discord, discomfort, and tension. You’ll put the endless pandemic hours to use by trying to unravel it.
Carrie Coon and Jude Law survey their grandiose new prison in The Nest (left); Julia Garner in The Assistant.
CONFINED QUARTERS
If lockdown with significant others, offspring, cats, budgies, or Siamese fighting fish has you crawling the walls, Sean Durkin’s brilliantly constructed study of dysfunctional family dynamics may make you feel better.
The Nest proves definitively that a bigger space does not improve relationships. In it, ambitious, smooth-talking social climber Rory (Jude Law) moves his family from suburban America to a grandiose mansion in his home country, England. His wife Alison (Carrie Coon) is not amused: this is their fourth move in 10 years, and they probably can’t afford the rent for a place that’s as spooky as it is spacious.
If this sounds like the setup for a horror movie, there are moments in the film that feed that idea. But The Nest is really a slow-burn look at the toxic dynamics of one relationship. An early sign of trouble comes at the couple’s first expensive dinner party in London; watch Alison’s face as her chattermouth commodities-broker husband reveals the real reason he moved his brood here—and it’s not the one he told her.
He’s an incorrigible liar overcompensating for his working-class roots; she’s strong-willed and hard-working. And it will take some time to reveal the exact contract of their relationship and why it’s consuming them so much they can’t see what they’re doing to their two children. The house becomes their gloomy prison.
Confinement takes an entirely different form in the sharp and understated The Assistant. The film unfolds on a single day in the office for the beautifully reserved Jane (Julia Garner), starting at dawn, when the movie-executive assistant arrives at the empty New York space to prepare everyone else’s minutiae.
Aussie director Kitty Green reportedly interviewed more than 100 actual personal assistants to build her composite portrait, and it’s in the wordless details that the oppressive, gender-specific tasks speak loudest. An overachieving film-production student who’s at the top of her university class, Jane now spends long hours wiping Danish crumbs from breakfast-meeting tables, washing the dirty dishes of superiors, and bundling up her boss’s discarded diabetes needles in hazardous-waste bags.
Little by little, we start to see the signs of an abusive and sexually predatorial film CEO, unnamed but clearly modelled on Harvey Weinstein: a dropped earring on the unseen boss’s carpet; the stains on his couch that Jane’s coworkers joke about; the swear-laden phone calls; and the naive, stunning, and notably young new assistant who arrives for training.
The cumulative effect is a familiar suffocating, claustrophobic feeling. You want Jane to scream at her patronizing male coworkers, to tell off the boss, and walk out. But The Assistant is more complicated than that, careful to point out the power balance and the Hollywood dream that keeps an intelligent and apparently self-assured young woman silent and submissive.
HITTING THE BOTTLE
For those who turned to day-drinking to take the edge off pandemic stress, Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s refreshingly inappropriate Another Round was sobering—but thankfully, not too much so.
In it, four bored, male high-school teachers take part in an experiment to see if booze can improve their lives. If the guys could just stay happy maintaining an all-day beer buzz, they might be fine. But of course they can’t.
The Pogues frontman Shane McGowan has seen better days in Crock of Gold.
The film spirals into some dark places, digging into the feeling of stagnancy that haunts middle age—that same kind of life paralysis that is driving many to get gooned by noon during these endless pandemic days.
But then Vinterberg takes a brilliantly unexpected flight of fancy—a resolution that will rekindle your faith in both humanity and boozing, where and when it’s used to celebrate. The stoic Mads Mikelsen dancing? That’s just the start of the kind of life-affirming release we all need to toast right now.
And speaking of drinking, the year’s best documentary was a reminder that there really can be too much of a good thing. In his artful, hyperkinetically edited Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane McGowan, master punk chronicler Julian Temple focuses on the famously out-of-it Pogues frontman Shane McGowan with fascination. Mixing brilliantly animated sequences, home movies, interviews, and still exhilarating concert footage, he creates a complex portrait that’s more nuanced than a simple nosedive into self-destruction.
On the one hand, you have McGowan in the shocking state he finds himself in at 62, slumped to one side in a wheelchair, sipping Guinness, and slurring so much he requires subtitles. It’s sad, but damn is he still sharp, opining on everything from Irish republicanism to William Yeats. Still, it’s sobering to see flashbacks to the rebel before booze took its full toll, embracing London’s punk-rock scene in the late ’70s and eventually marrying old-time Celtic songs with that amphetamined energy to create the Pogues.
The concert footage and archival film of McGowan’s old Ireland roots go great with a Guinness—but take the lesson here and keep it to nine or 10.
Francis McDormand’s Fern is here to let you know you’re not alone, in Nomadland.
ALONE IN THE WORLD
Due to pandemic delays, you’ll have to wait until early in the New Year to catch Chloe Zhang’s deeply moving Nomadland—one of 2020’s very best and most timely movies. Don’t. Miss. It.
The 2020 TIFF People’s Choice award-winner delves authentically into American nomad culture, focusing on outsiders who roam the empty roads looking for freedom and community.
Frances McDormand gives the performance of the year as Fern, a woman who seems to be running from her own grief over the loss of both her husband and the shutdown of the one-industry company town where they lived. It’s not easy: she pays her way with holiday Amazon shifts and odd jobs. It’ll make you think twice about the people who scrub your campground toilets, deep-fry your donuts, harvest your potatoes, and pack your shipping orders.
Along the way we meet a colourful and refreshingly straight-talking array of nomads, some of them plucked from the real-life vans they live in. You’ll also journey through stunning American West landscapes: pink-hued Badlands, lush old-growth forests, and rushing canyon rivers. The subtle question: who are the impoverished ones, the people grinding it out 9 to 5 or these self-styled “tramps”?
But as this unforgettable 2020 portrait unfolds, you start to wonder if its lead loner is not so much escaping life as finding it. And that might just be enough to inspire you to carry on in isolation through the first half of 2021.
Yes, it’s going to be hard, but if you learn anything from this rich year in movie offerings, it’s that we all have problems. You’re not alone.
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