The Film Experience

by Nathaniel R

Marielle Heller is, we suspect, a real deal cinematic treasure. Her debut film, the sexually charged, inventively imagined Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) showed a ton of promise. Her second feature Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018), while more modest at first glance, was yet more complex and successful.

We think she ought to have been one of the Best Director nominees with Oscar this year, which is why she's in our Film Bitch Awards Best Director lineup...

(That lineup was just posted so check it out here...)

But while we're on the topic of Heller, just as I was completing this chart, I realized that friend of TFE Kyle Stevens had recently had an essay published about her fine work. It's very thought-provoking and you should absolutely read it.

I love this part of the essay which comes directly after a section about the scene in which Jane Curtin's agent character criticizes Lee Israel for not being more like bestselling novelist Tom Clancy:

Moreover, Le's Agent fails to understand the nature of the writerly voice Lee already has. A style that does not announce itself as style - often dubbed "transparent" in critical parlance - is still a style, and queer in the sense that it is there for people who know to look for it. (Nothing is straighter than believing what one thinks, sees, or feels about the world is simply the case.) This is, I think a mistake that film critics are in danger of repeating. Every review, without exception, so far as I can tell, regards Can You Ever Forgive Me? as McCarthy's movie. Rolling Stone's Peter Travers puts it succinctly: 'the film belongs to McCarthy'.

McCarthy is great, but calling it her movie is simply lazy. Stars are visible, opaque. When we see an A-list star's face it is hard to forget that we are watching that star. (It is partly for this reason that we tend to talk about screen characters by their actors' names.) But to call the film McCarthy's suggests it is not Heller's, and so, to reinforce a history of sexist and anti-queer criticism that does not understand how to appreciate films that do not perform the macho stylistic flexes for which critics have been trained to look. For example, Heller could have slowly panned the empty, tatty bar stools at Lee's favorite watering hole, the still-standing gay bar Julius's, to enjoin the audiences to think about the ravages of AIDS. Instead, her shots position Lee amidst the barren seats - we always see them, as well as signs about the crisis - but it is up to us to note then. The stools are no less empty and no less visible. This is not about 'hidden' meaning or subtext. The baroque camera movements and editing patterns of directors from Hitchcock to Kubrick to Cuarón function as another form of opacity, already reminding the audience of the hand of their maker. In terms of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, they are Clancy-esque. If Heller did present such overt choices, she would betray the far more complex values about style that the story she tells demonstrates have merit.