C'mon Down with “C'mon C'mon”

 

C’mon C’mon is a movie that has to grow on you, like an ornery kid with whom you’ve suddenly been saddled. He ricochets around, talking a blue streak, and mostly you wish for a modicum of peace and quiet. But all at once, just before you reach the end of your tether, you realize that life with him in it has gotten a great deal more interesting. That he is, in fact, irreplaceable.

 What I’m describing, of course, is the central situation in Mike Mills’ small movie, which debuted last summer at the Telluride Film Festival, to much critical acclaim. It’s too modest in its ambitions to be an Oscar sort of movie, but it was up for various independent film awards. I saw it on an airplane, not the ideal place to follow a flick that bounces around in time. Still, its small scale and basic simplicity made my trip through the skies pass nicely, and its ultimately upbeat message helped make those skies seem more friendly than usual.

 Writer-director Mills, who’s married to fellow indie phenom Miranda July, has attracted attention with some bigger films. In 2012, Christopher Plummer won his Oscar for portraying a character in Mills’ Beginners who was in fact a version of Mills’ own dad. (It’s one of those amazing stories: Six months after Mills’ mother died of brain cancer, his father came out as gay at age 75. After 45 years of marriage, he was suddenly ready to try his newly revealed orientation on for size, creating much consternation among his offspring.) In 2016, Mills wrote and directed 20^th Century Women, which gave Annette Bening a much-heralded role, along with an Oscar nomination for Mills’ screenplay.

 Clearly, prominent actors like to be challenged by Mills’ character-driven material. His star in C’mon C’mon is Joaquin Phoenix, in his first feature since winning an Academy Award for the macabre title role in Joker. Phoenix’s Johnny in C’mon C’mon is far more of an everyday guy than was Batman’s nemesis, but Johnny too has his share of oversized problems. Johnny, living in NYC, is pretty much alone in the world. There’s a soured romance in his past, and he and his West Coast-based sister, Viv (Gaby Hoffman) haven’t spoken since they quarreled over the handling of their Alzheimer’s-ridden mother. (I, in my economy-class seat, had a hard time figuring how the mother’s death fit into the story’s basic chronology.) But now, with Viv’s husband having suffered a mental breakdown that requires hospitalization, she is desperate to find a place to stow her precocious but clearly troubled son, Jesse, while she tries to salvage what’s left of her marriage.

 Johnny works as a radio journalist, traveling the country to record interviews in which children talk about their hopes and fears. So he’s used to being around kids. But that’s a far different thing from hanging out with Jesse on a daily basis in his tiny New York walk-up.  Jesse likes to butt up against the adult world,  testing his limits, but he’s also grappling with his own fears of following in his father’s footsteps. It’s only when they end up in New Orleans together, as part of Johnny’s work, that man and boy finally coalesce and form a genuine bond.

 The role of nine-year-old Jesse is crucial to the success of this film. He’s played with impressive authenticity by young Woody Norman. I was stunned to learn that this very L.A. kid was played by a boy born and bred in North London. There was a time when Brits couldn’t convincingly do American accents. Clearly, no more.

C’mon C’mon is a movie that has to grow on you, like an ornery kid with whom you’ve suddenly been saddled. He ricochets around, talking a blue streak, and mostly you wish for a modicum of peace and quiet. But all at once, just before you reach the end of your tether, you realize that life with him in it has gotten a great deal more interesting. That he is, in fact, irreplaceable.

 What I’m describing, of course, is the central situation in Mike Mills’ small movie, which debuted last summer at the Telluride Film Festival, to much critical acclaim. It’s too modest in its ambitions to be an Oscar sort of movie, but it was up for various independent film awards. I saw it on an airplane, not the ideal place to follow a flick that bounces around in time. Still, its small scale and basic simplicity made my trip through the skies pass nicely, and its ultimately upbeat message helped make those skies seem more friendly than usual.

 Writer-director Mills, who’s married to fellow indie phenom Miranda July, has attracted attention with some bigger films. In 2012, Christopher Plummer won his Oscar for portraying a character in Mills’ Beginners who was in fact a version of Mills’ own dad. (It’s one of those amazing stories: Six months after Mills’ mother died of brain cancer, his father came out as gay at age 75. After 45 years of marriage, he was suddenly ready to try his newly revealed orientation on for size, creating much consternation among his offspring.) In 2016, Mills wrote and directed 20^th Century Women, which gave Annette Bening a much-heralded role, along with an Oscar nomination for Mills’ screenplay.

 Clearly, prominent actors like to be challenged by Mills’ character-driven material. His star in C’mon C’mon is Joaquin Phoenix, in his first feature since winning an Academy Award for the macabre title role in Joker. Phoenix’s Johnny in C’mon C’mon is far more of an everyday guy than was Batman’s nemesis, but Johnny too has his share of oversized problems. Johnny, living in NYC, is pretty much alone in the world. There’s a soured romance in his past, and he and his West Coast-based sister, Viv (Gaby Hoffman) haven’t spoken since they quarreled over the handling of their Alzheimer’s-ridden mother. (I, in my economy-class seat, had a hard time figuring how the mother’s death fit into the story’s basic chronology.) But now, with Viv’s husband having suffered a mental breakdown that requires hospitalization, she is desperate to find a place to stow her precocious but clearly troubled son, Jesse, while she tries to salvage what’s left of her marriage.

 Johnny works as a radio journalist, traveling the country to record interviews in which children talk about their hopes and fears. So he’s used to being around kids. But that’s a far different thing from hanging out with Jesse on a daily basis in his tiny New York walk-up.  Jesse likes to butt up against the adult world,  testing his limits, but he’s also grappling with his own fears of following in his father’s footsteps. It’s only when they end up in New Orleans together, as part of Johnny’s work, that man and boy finally coalesce and form a genuine bond.

 The role of nine-year-old Jesse is crucial to the success of this film. He’s played with impressive authenticity by young Woody Norman. I was stunned to learn that this very L.A. kid was played by a boy born and bred in North London. There was a time when Brits couldn’t convincingly do American accents. Clearly, no more.

The Joker is Wild

Yes, it’s Friday the 13^th, and I’m not exactly in the best of spirits. (So say we all, I’d imagine.) With COVID-19 seemingly lurking around every corner—and even Tom Hanks afflicted!—it’s hard to feel perky. Which explains, of course, why I chose this time to finally catch up on Joker. Frankly, the problems of his Gotham, exemplified by a garbage crisis and a lot of morose people in clown masks, didn’t seem so bad in the face of current reality.

Not that I’ve ever had much affection for clowns. I’m one of those who consider them creepy rather than fun. The dual nature  of clowns—the painted-on smiling lips hiding the woebegone interior—has not escaped a number of theatre artists. There is, of course, Leoncavallo’s famous  1893 opera, Pagliacci, in which an actor must “put on the costume” (“Vesti la giubba”) of a comic character despite his real-life wife’s infidelity. In the world of cinema, Fellini was fascinated by clowns, as was Charlie Chaplin, who mastered the art of conveying heartbreak through comedy. It was Chaplin who wrote the music for “Smile” (“Smile, though your heart is aching” ), a long-popular song based on his score for Modern Times. This song, in the classic Jimmy Durante version, is one of those oldies cannily featured on the Joker soundtrack.

The Joker score won an Oscar for Hildur Guðnadóttir (no idea how you pronounce that), an Icelandic composer with a background in classical cello. Her ominous cello-heavy orchestral passages are certainly both appropriate and distinctive, and it’s marvelous to see—for the first time ever—a solo woman honored for her film music. But the tunes that stands out for me in Joker are the vintage pop ditties that serve as a counterpoint to Arthur Fleck’s morbid view of life. Along with “Smile” (and, apparently, a number of cues from Modern Times) these include Fred Astaire singing the lively “Slap That Bass” from Shall We Dance? as well as the cheerful kids’ perennial, “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” One of songs featured over the closing credits is the all too ironic “Send in the Clowns,” Frank Sinatra’s poignant version of the Stephen Sondheim classic. And popping up throughout the film is another song we generally associate with Sinatra, the wryly philosophical  “That’s Life.” It’s fully apt that Sinatra be part of this film: his Only the Lonely album, one that scored a 1959 Grammy for its cover design, featured a black-and-white image of the man himself in Harlequin makeup.

One reason for all the pop-culture nostalgia in this film seems to be that Arthur Fleck and his mother are suckers for the vibes of an earlier, and perhaps simpler, era. Their favorite home entertainment is a family-friendly TV talk show hosted by the avuncular Murray Franklin (played by Robert De Niro, of all people, as a cross between Johnny Carson and Oprah Winfrey.) It is Murray’s discovery of Arthur, and his airing of an embarrassing clip from Arthur’s attempt at a standup routine, that triggers the film’s climactic catastrophe. The fact that Arthur is so hungry for the sort of celebrity that a TV appearance can usher in says something about our societal determination to grab our fifteen minutes of fame. Not that Joker can be considered in any way a profound movie. Frankly, despite a gutsy and mesmerizing performance by Joaquin Phoenix, a lot of its ideas don’t particularly hang together. But in giving a backstory to Batman’s nemesis, filmmaker Todd Phillips smartly considers the way mass media (though, curiously, not comic books) shapes American lives.