And the Nominees Are 2021: Round 4

For all my anxiety about how long the movie list is last week, I watched a bunch of really good (and weird) stuff this week! (It also helps that we are in the lull between nominations and the shows starts – BAFTA and Oscar nods always come after the prelim shows have started…)

The Personal History of David Copperfield

Despite having a long established love of costume drama, Dickens (outside of A Christmas Carrol) has never really ranked high in my excitement, but Dev Patel will get me to watch a lot of things. And I’m glad I watched this! The whole cast is delightfully bonkers and director Armando Iannucci adapted the brick of a novel into a quick, engaging story about self-creation and the power of narrative.

But the real draw here is Patel, he is so charming and manages to carry off 8 tones in the course of one scene. We really need to start casting him in more things.

The Mole Agent

Whatever great force brought together director Maite Alberdi and the subject of this documentary, Sergio Chamy, we should be giving thanks to it. This movie unfolds so perfectly, and is shot so beautifully, that I genuinely didn’t believe it could be non-fiction for the first half.

Sergio is hired by a private investigator to go undercover at a retirement home to investigate to possible mistreatment of a patient. Quickly, the spy-movie conceit drops away because “the mole agent” turns out to be an extraordinarily, lovely and compassionate person who begins “investigating” the lives of the residence instead. (AKA he actually listens to them when they talk about their lives.) Within days all the women are in love with him and it’s not hard to see why.

I’m pretty sensitive to the ways we often treat the elderly as either tragedies or jokes, if we don’t ignore them completely, so I was a little apprehensive about this, but its exactly the opposite of the exploitative story I feared. It’s on Hulu if you want to watch, truly heartwarming, but never saccharine.

The Prom

Is this essentially an overlong episode of “Glee” with inexplicable lighting? Yes.

Is it worth it just to see Meryl Streep do a full Patti LuPone impression and fall in love with Keegan-Michael Key? Almost.

Look, it’s too long and the score is only fine, but as a way to spend a weekend afternoon, it was fun.

Dick Johnson Is Dead

This is a hard one to describe, a documentary made by a daughter (Kirsten Johnson) about her father (the titular Dick Johnson) who is developing dementia. She’s terrified at losing him so she enlists him in a project of making a series of short films staging various ways that could die. (Which also includes a very funny montage of them trying to cast stunt men to step in for him.) It could be morbid (and at times it is), but both subject and director seem possessed of an exceptional amount of goodwill, and Dick’s sense of fun and spirit and Kristen’s love for him really come across in every frame. It’s a heartbreaker (obviously), but it’s also (maybe paradoxically), a joy.

Straight Up

An argument for including the Indie Spirits in my list again this year, this charming little alternative rom-com, was never going to get attention for the Academy, but I’m glad I watched it, even if it was kind of baffling. A blend of rapid fire dialogue and frank discussions of sexuality and OCD, it raises some really interesting questions about love and attraction and where the lines are (and aren’t) between them. It could have been tedious chemistry between James Sweeney and Katie Findlay was genuine and compelling. This is Sweeney (who also wrote and directed)’s first feature, and I’m definitely intrigued to see where he goes from here.