Let Nothing Happen
I’m completely averse to action movies. When cars start chasing each other or Tom Cruise leaps from an exploding building, I’m like “I would really rather be on my phone right now.” The movies I like best are ones where when the credits start rolling you have to wonder, “Wait… did anything even happen?”
To me, hell is a room where you are strapped to an uncomfortable chair and forced to watch all the Fast and Furious movies on loop, forever. The chair could actually be comfortable and it would still be hell. But give me the slow burn of friendship? A complex family dynamic? A scene in a local grocery store where a cashier makes a snippy comment? A searing look from Annette Bening? I’m completely engrossed, nearly gnawing my fingers off while shoveling popcorn down my throat, feeling the most alive a person can.
It’s all about the emotional journey for me, the less flashy in its flourishes the better. Anything labeled an “indie darling” or “a character study of lonely people” that has “made its rounds in the festival circuit” is catnip to me. If Bleecker Street acquired it, I’m probably buying it.
Take Together Together (2021). I’m not trying to flex when I say this, but you probably haven’t seen it. Because why would you! It hasn’t been on any streamers (until very recently, Hulu put it up), it premiered at Sundance, had a very little release, and near-instantly moved to video-on-demand last spring. I want to recommend it to you because I liked it a lot, but I fear you’ll come back to me irate that not much occurs. It follows Anna (played by firecracker Patti Harrison) and Matt (Ed Helms, who I’ve recently become endeared to? If you’re not sick of my recommendations, go watch Rutherford Falls on Peacock) - a surrogate and an app developer, forging a complicated friendship, tied together solely because of the baby that will one day become Matt’s child. In a scene depicted on the movie poster, the pair slowly peel different paint swatches off the future nursery’s wall, trying to land on the perfect color for the baby they refer to as “Lamp.” It is sweet. It is specific. I still think about it sometimes, which I believe is a hallmark of a “good movie.” In basically every way, it is the antithesis of Vin Diesel’s filmography, and therefore, paradise.
At the beginning of March, my friend Sarah and I saw Cyrano. We got mildly drunk off a few margaritas and had the time of our lives. Our theater was mostly empty (it was the premiering night of The Batman). A couple in our row actually got up and left 20 minutes into the movie. In our stupor, Sarah and I both momentarily believed it was because of our comically loud reactions, but it was more likely this: the adaptation is a musical. There is almost nothing more polarizing than a theatrical musical number, particularly when one appears unexpectedly (despite its absence from The Pudding’s Most Contentious Topics, which does include many things I tend to discuss ad nauseam - namely: Katy Perry, HBO’s Girls, Pilsners, McDonald's, country music, and Guy Fieri).
Cyrano is based on a play that is exactly 100 years older than me called Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand. In 2097, I suppose we’ll have an adaptation that is simply called Cy. (Fine, I’ll write it). The story is simple: a man writes love letters for another to a woman they both love. In the original play, that woman, Roxane, is Cyrano’s cousin, but it’s his decidedly large nose that keeps them apart, not their shared bloodline. Ultimately she falls for the writer of the letters, thinking it’s their signatory, a guy with a smaller nose and way more confidence, Christian. She marries him. He dies. Fifteen years go by. She gets herself to a nunnery. Cyrano is revealed to be the writer of Christian’s letters and dies. I’m summarizing, but pretty bleak, no?
Ultimately, the 2021 film, like most of the adaptations of the story, is about loving someone so much you want to throw up and die, but resisting true vulnerability in an act of self-preservation. For this Cyrano, played by Peter Dinklage, it’s not his nose, but his size, that keeps him at a torturous distance from pursuing Roxane. It’s infused with the passion and care of many real-life lovers: the director is married to the film’s leading lady, the screenwriter is married to Cyrano himself. The songs were written by The National, specifically Matt Berninger and his wife, Carin Besser. You can tell by the way Haley Bennett is framed, or the lines Peter Dinklage delivers that the people who loved them had them in mind - that the songs overflow with the kind of love between two people who see one another in all of their glorious dimensions, who found a better way to say, “I love you so much that I want to throw up and die.”
When the credits rolled (spoiler alert: Christian and Cyrano die in this one too), Sarah and I both agreed that we loved it, and most importantly, that we loved Peter Dinklage as Cyrano. The next day, I fell into a Dinklage deep-dive - missing the public’s original wave with Game of Thrones (just as I am not big on general action, I’m fairly squeamish about graphic violence. I’m super fun at parties, by the way) I have barely seen him act. I spent the morning watching and reading interviews, and compilations of him as Tyrion Lannister. Most of my reading encouraged me to get my hands on Sundance-darling little indie, The Station Agent (2003), a film written and directed by Tom McCarthy and beloved by many Youtube commenters. I purchased a 24-viewing pass that day and watched it twice.
The Station Agent is a movie made for me. Why? You guessed it! Nothing happens. It is the kind of film where the viewer is embedded as an invisible participant in its scenes - the veil is distorted in that it feels like you’re trespassing a bit because of its true-to-lifeness.
It follows Fin (Dinklage), a very solitary man who works at a model train shop until the owner, his only friend, dies. The man leaves him some property with a rail station on it in Newfoundland, New Jersey, and so he quietly goes. It's there that his loneliness is interrupted by the mere existence of others who challenge his isolating nature, and together, they find some comfort in living day-to-day.
Bobby Cannavale’s character, a chatterbox named Joe who operates a food truck near the station, relentlessly pursues conversation with Fin. His persistence earns him the opportunity to join Fin for daily walks where the two literally wait to watch trains pass by. Patrica Clarkson plays Olivia, a depressed artist grieving the death of her son, who is a frequent customer at Joe’s truck. She meets Fin by almost running him over not once, but twice. The odd trio falls into a friendship, one that relies on the kind of quiet that translates into compassion.
Once they fall into a rhythm, Fin most reluctantly, they stage a dinner and screening of some footage of Fin and Joe train chasing (which is exactly what it sounds like) at Olivia’s house. Joe shouts down to Fin and Olivia, who are sitting levels below on a dock, to ask if she has a garlic press.
Olivia: No.
Joe: How can you not have a garlic press?
Olivia: Still no.
Joe: Alright. You keep talkin'. I'm gonna go cook without the garlic press.
Olivia says she’s not used to having people in her house, especially loud people, and goes on to talk with Fin about where she used to live before her son died. She asks him what made him choose to live in Newfoundland. He hilariously says, “I wanted to live near Joe.” A beat later, Joe, runs back out from the kitchen and whines, “Guys! Would you come up here and talk? Seriously, this sucks.”
It is the first time in the film you feel that they are a trio, and it is magic to me. More than anything, this movie is about the simple necessity of connection. While a character like Bobby Cannavale’s is more keenly aware (by way of boredom), Clarkson and Dinklage’s are the kinds of people who are unaware of their loneliness. When it’s self-selected, we feel more in control, and therefore comfortable. It’s a life we choose. But when someone shows you what’s been missing, all you can wonder is what you’ve been doing up until that realization.
Another movie that is mostly about human connection is, believe it or not, another adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac - a Netflix teen rom-com called The Half of It, written and directed by Alice Wu. Instead of a man with a big nose, the film’s Cyrano is a closeted Chinese-American teenage girl named Ellie Chu who lives with her widowed father, their small town’s station master and signalman (a gorgeous coincidence).
Ellie is socially unpopular, but wildly favored by her classmates when it comes to essays - she writes other students’ papers to make extra cash to keep her family’s lights on. After a persistent jock (though goofier than the traditional trope would lead you to believe), Paul, propositions her to write a love letter on his behalf to the very popular daughter of the town’s deacon, Aster, things get complicated. Not only does Aster already have a boyfriend, but Ellie herself is harboring a crush on her, which only grows as they begin to correspond - the sweet and clever volleying of their letters. It’s gay, and tender, and shows its audience what can bloom between people unexpectedly (yes, friendship included, and frankly, preferred). For an added bonus, no one dies in this one.
By now you know that a delightfully simple premise is all it takes for me, and The Half of It delivers with all the charm and angst in the world - plus specific, erudite cultural references (from Remains of the Day to Criterion Channel classics) and a transcendent needle drop of Sharon Van Etten’s masterpiece, “Seventeen.” More than a traditional teen rom-com, it’s a story that captures the slow, barely clockable change of growing up just a little bit. Actress Leah Lewis, who portrays its lead, Ellie, told Teen Vogue, “these characters don't really end up with each other, but at the very end, they end up with something. For me, that's even more valuable than just finding your other half; it's finding a part of yourself along the way.”
One day I will write a loose adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac about a very funny fat girl who ghostwrites tweets and Instagram captions for a thin, vapid influencer in an attempt to make her seem down-to-earth and in on the internet’s jokes. An adorable pop culture writer will start DM’ing her for an article about her meteoric rise to fame. The influencer will be incredibly into the idea of such coverage and offer to pay the ghostwriter more if she keeps up the ruse, but none of them, least of all the pop culture writer, would suspect that LOVE could brew! Barely anything will happen and no one will see it. I started this entire paragraph and idea as a joke, but I would totally watch this movie. Did I just… Cyrano… myself?
Anyway, this newsletter has just been a long ploy to get you to watch Cyrano (2021), The Station Agent (2003), and The Half of It (2020) in that order. Only the brave, lionhearted will take on the challenge. Only the brave, lionhearted will refrain from informing me, “that movie was [negative adjective].” What can I say? Filmmakers of the world: keep letting nothing happen. I’ll always be there, poised to wonder about life’s muted eccentricities, so implausibly ready to be knocked back by what critics may call “banal,” “uneventful,” or even, “not worth your time.”
At some point, isn’t nothing, well, something? I’ll be expecting my Genius grant in 3-5 business days.
Big stupidly simple love,
kaylasomething