Gotham Nominees: Natalie Morales in "Language Lessons"

by Nick Taylor

Every year or two at the Gotham Awards, there’s a nominee in the Breakthrough Performance category whose storied career in film or television generates a few raised eyebrows. Yes, the category is clearly meant to honor film breakthroughs, and this shouldn’t automatically be any more suspect or praiseworthy than a familiar face being recognized for reaching a new apex in their careers. Nevertheless, it’s always a bit odd when a performer who’s already highly prolific in a different medium gets slotted here. Kathryn Hahn, Michael B. Jordan, Mary J. Blige - it makes sense, but there’s also a wildly celebrated career being 'broken through' for the sake of movie stardom.

Natalie Morales, a regular supporting player on film and television for the past decade, has gotten those notices this year. Morales has been recognized for her starring role in Language Lessons, which she also directed and co-wrote with her producer/co-star Mark Duplass...

Morales is eminently deserving both on the grounds of her twinkling, utterly human star power, and as a lovely tribute to how much she’s responsible for the film as a whole. Language Lessons, a film made during the COVID-19 lockdown about the winding relationship a Spanish teacher and her newest online student, certainly isn’t perfect, and the writing makes several choices that are hard to square with, but it’s better made than a film made over video chat has any right to be, and it’s savvy and knowing about its subject matter. 

Morales stars as Cariño, a language teacher who has recently acquired a new student named Adam for digital Spanish lessons. On her first day with him, Cariño begins the video call and finds herself staring out at an empty, expensive-looking dining room. She learns from Adam’s off-screen partner that he’s bought the lessons from Cariño as a gift, and that her new student doesn’t actually know anything about this new arrangement. Cariño sits uncomfortably in her screen as a barely-awake Adam wanders through his kitchen, catching her on his laptop screen and asking who she is before his husband fires a confetti gun and scares him half to death. It’s an awkward, uncomfortable start to their first lesson, but once it begins in earnest and Adam knows what’s going on the conversation flows easily from both of them.

From the outset, both characters are cognizant of the stark differences in their lives that inform their identities, even as their relationship takes on dramatically new angles from “student and teacher with a decent rapport”. Adam is a white gay man in his mid-40’s living in California, newly endowed with a fuckton of money after marrying his husband a year ago. Practically every video chat with Adam shows him in a new part of his giant house, which apparently includes an outdoor pool, a few living rooms, a home gym, a deck that may or may not be on the roof, and some type of hangout room with more than enough space for a piano and a decently sized fish tank. He doesn’t exactly flaunt his wealth, but it’s unavoidably present. Cariño is a 30-something straight woman born in Cuba and currently living there, despite spending most of her childhood and college years in Miami. Unlike Adam, we see far less of Cariño’s house, only the room she’s set up for teaching and her bedroom. There is every chance that these two will patronize, over-invest, misinterpret each other, in ways compounded by the specific moment in history they’re living in and who they are individually.

This refusal to show all of Cariño’s living space speaks as to her own sense of boundaries with her students as it does her financial situation. These boundaries are tricky to hold onto over Zoom, and become even more difficult to maintain after a major event happens in one of their lives, putting a temporary hold on their lessons but instigating more personal interactions between the two of them. I mainly experienced this upheaval as a plot event that will hopefully allow some fruitful character developments to spring from its wake.

As it turns out, the following half hour-ish of Language Lessons is the most engaging and personally nuanced section of the film. Cariño and Adam start to actually feel out each other’s personalities and histories, riffing together and dodging questions and leaning on each other a bit more than they should, even if they make a point of trying not to completely disrupt their student-teacher dynamic. The characters but especially their writer/actors conjure a real connection, ensuring Language Lessons functions as a character drama and a straightforward allegory about how Zoom relationships prohibit real intimacy with another person while simultaneously accelerating a sense of familiarity. Morales is especially charismatic, and does some of her best work in scenes where she’s alone, sometimes recording a funny message off-the-cuff or rehearsing how to deliver some bad news without losing composure or phrasing it incorrectly. Cariño will largely refuse to share whatever circumstances are happening in her life, while Adam seeks to talk his way through new realities and tries to get her to open up.

It’s also worth noting that much as Language Lessons is a showcase for Morales and Duplass, it also looks and sounds good in a format where looking shitty is easy to excuse. The lighting and camera placement flatters the performers and the space they inhabit, and their Zoom calls do a more convincing job of looking good and having a bad connection than plenty of films with even one scene of video chat, let alone 90 minutes of it. It’s a savvy use of the limitations and realities imposed by the pandemic’s self-isolation, and though I don’t want to praise the film simply for being a piece of art made under intensely stressful conditions, it’s remarkable that Language Lessons boasts such creative premises and artful execution. As with Paper Spiders, this is quietly impressive work in a genre with a lot of lazily made films strewn about, and the fact that each sequence lacks any obvious in-camera edits highlights the rigour of the filmmaking and the performers.

In short, Language Lessons works as a light, entertaining, yet thoughtfully direct comedy that suffers only when it has to navigate some very heavy confrontations with Plot. This problem resurfaces in a big way for the final third, where Cariño and Adam’s interactions hit a self-consciously climactic pitch before resolving in a way I hadn’t expected and really wasn’t hoping for. Maybe it’s actually savvier about how potentially fraught the choice these characters are making might be, though the score suggests this is as happy an ending as we could get. It mostly plays as a disappointing capitulation to trends the film had previously critiqued. Even as I type out how much I enjoyed Language Lessons until this ending sequence, it’s surprising how badly the last scene retroactively sinks a lot of what made the film feel so lived-in and effective. Still, I've thought about the film more than I expected to since watching it, and the good stuff is a memorable as its worst impulses. Morales the actress shows wonderfully, and I hope her next outing as a writer and director is even more consistent than her debut.

more on the Gotham Awards which will be held on December 1st.

Comments

[Ben Miller]

A great performance that is still hanging around in my top ten.

Make sure to catch Plan B on Hulu (also directed by Morales).

[Pam]

Looking forward to this one. She's great and Mark is the best Duplass.