by Nick Taylor
Never Rarely Sometimes Always is the 2020 film I've watched the most times this past year. The story of a 17-year-old girl fleeing her small town for several days to get an abortion in the city is perhaps not the kind of tale that one expects to dive into over and over again. But few films have gripped me quite like this one has. Of all the American films contending for an Oscar nomination, this and First Cow are by far the two I most want to see recognized somewhere, anywhere, everywhere. It’s always rough when the televised awards start culling from critics prize winners for their own lineups, and even harder when the whole goddamn process is strung out for two extra months. Will key nominations from the exclusive, rigorously discerning Critics Choice Association help kick it back into the conversation? Or did writer/director Eliza Hittman missing at WGA signal the end of the road? Maybe the Indie Spirits will be the last time we see this crew up for an award, but until proven otherwise, here’s my pitch on behalf of this marvelous film in any and all categories available to it.
There’s nowhere to start like the beginning, which in this case is the most internally idiosyncratic scene of the film. Never Rarely Sometimes Always begins with a talent show of sorts, as student dress up in ‘50s Teen Outfits and sing & dance to Elvis...
The first and only student we see break from this trend is Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), who belts out a slowed down, soul-bearing cover of The Exciters, “He’s Got The Power” on the guitar. It’s the only song that defies the pastiche preceding it, creatively reworking a pretty energetic bop into a sad, mournful reckoning. The sheer emotion in Autumn’s voice makes this choice feel even riskier and more personal than the other acts. So of course some guy shouts something nasty about her, and she freezes, visibly shaken as she collects herself to finish the song.
So why is it here? Are we meant to expect this is setting up a different conflict than the one Never Rarely ends up being about? Is this when Autumn decides to go to an OBGYN and see if she’s pregnant? Or did she already know? Was she already planning to skip school the next day?
For all that Hittman’s script has been recognized for starting at the beginning and finishing at the end, the actual narrative seems almost entirely built on capturing the incongruities of Autumn’s life and juxtaposing them with these fairly significant events. I think this is why the film starts with her performance at school, staying with her through the awkward conversation with her family while they're out to dinner and the shit with those guys before she walks home alone, rather than immediately kicking off the plot. Never Rarely Sometimes Always isn’t just a polemical about a teen girl trying to get an abortion, but also a movie about traveling, about orienting yourself in a world with people whose intentions on you are mostly obvious and rarely trustworthy.
Part of what makes these early scenes in particular so engaging is that Hittman is able to present such a lived-in portrait of Autumn and her town without explicitly stating all that much about the nature of these relationships. So much of Never Rarely Sometimes Always is shaped by an emotional intuition derived from Autumn’s headspace, what we as the audience can guess just by looking at her and listening to her. Autumn’s perspective is the unequivocal center of the film, and Hélène Louvart’s grainy, subtly dexterous cinematography and Scott Cumming’s sharp, propulsive editing are able to tangibly dramatize her physical and emotional relationship to the spaces she moves through, the people she meets, and the intentions projected onto her body by herself and others. The tones of these encounters are so strong that we don’t need whole dialogue scenes spelling out how Autumn feels about them. Ryan Eggold casts such a distinct, instantly recognizable aura of the bitter, disdainful stepdad I didn’t clock that the film never reveals if this assumption was right.
Similarly, Autumn’s friendship with her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) is such an immediate boon for the character, and expresses so many lived-in dynamics over the course of the film, that the script doesn’t stop and establish it in any particular way. It just is, living and breathing and showing ever more sides of itself from the start.
Forgive me if all of that reads as contextualization for scenes I haven’t yet written about. The day after the talent show, Autumn skips school to go to an OBGYN and learns that she’s ten weeks pregnant. Her primary careworker at the clinic, an older woman whose every line of dialogue is equal parts delicate handling and passive aggressive “let me show you the right way to be”, instantly picks up Autumn’s interest in an abortion and tries to persuade her against it. Telling no one about her pregnancy, she tries some home remedies to abort the fetus, swallowing pills and punching her stomach. All that accomplishes is her throwing up at work, forcing her to reveal what she’s going through to Skylar. So, that night her cousin steals some money from her till, and the next morning the two hop on a bus to New York to get an abortion.
Plot is not necessarily the driving factor of the film, or at least not in the key that many a polemical would pitch itself at. A significant amount of Never Rarely Sometimes Always functions as a road movie, with Autumn and Skylar simply existing in the liminal spaces of long-distance public transportation and walking around a new city. It’s a massive tribute to Hittman, Louvart, and Commings for giving these extended scenes their own aesthetic and emotional textures, letting us feel how Autumn and Skylar are absorbing the banality, intrigue, danger, and exhaustion these spaces can so easily accommodate. This is, after all, an entirely new world for the pair of them. Louvart deploying a slightly canted angle that straightens itself out the first time the two step foot above ground in New York marvelously conveys how unmoored they are but also their own ability to right themselves against this new setting. But it takes no time at all for them to have to extend their timeframe, learning from an OBGYN that Autumn is actually eighteen weeks pregnant (not quite four months, three weeks, and two days, but close) and will have to undergo a more extensive, more expensive procedure at a different facility. And so begins another night on the subways.
Again, if this is a script that starts at the start and ends at the end, how many versions of this story do you think would devote so much time to their time hanging out in New York, shuttering between public spaces, confident that these scenes will feel instrumental to their story rather than incongruous? How many writers would omit almost everything before Autumn learns she’s pregnant and leave out her and Skylar’s fates when they return home? It’s an incredibly self-contained piece of writing, relying on as many scenes of wordless companionship and image-based narrative as it does scenes of piercing, faux-naturalistic dialogue. If anything about the film’s titular scene has been under praised, it’s that the impact of the social worker’s inescapably framed repetitions and Autumn’s fraught reaction is partially derived from how little talk is on either side of this scene. Autumn is pinned down by those words, unable to hide or lose herself in the face of their directness.
A term of praise that gets used a lot during awards season is “Such-and-such performance is their film!”, a phrase I don’t use verbatim but apply in spirit fairly often in my supporting actress pieces. I can’t think of a character or a leading actress this year for whom this particular phrase is more apt. Autumn’s body and the experiences she’s had in the world because of it are the primary site of conflict for Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Her shifts in posture, the degrees of withholding and honesty in her expressions, the curiosity all inform her film’s emotional inflections.
The austere, controlled construction from Hittman and her craftspeople certainly provide enough of a safety net that whoever plays Autumn will remain an affecting, impactful presence to the audience, but Flanigan rewards her film’s balance of tough insight and guarded withholding of information. Much like Charlie Plummer in Lean on Pete, Flanigan inhabits the watchful, sullen, sometimes surly key of a teenager who’s learned to protect herself by largely withdrawing from her environment, only breaking from this exterior when she’s either in her comfort zone or forcibly knocked out of it. The moments her exterior breaks are all the more upsetting because she’s clearly trying and failing to shore up her defenses. She’s not an exceptional woman against a unique danger but an ordinary teenager trying to save herself, universal without becoming cliched or sacrificing complexity and personal intrigue.
Still, Flanigan isn’t up there delivering one-take bravuras by herself the whole time. For a good amount of the film Talia Ryder is right by her side, modulating her own nuanced mixture of friendship, support, exasperation, and gutsy, front-line risk-taking in order to ensure Autumn can actually procure an abortion. Her Skylar radiates an openness at odds with Autumn’s more mature, sometimes distant attitude, and one she’s able to wield against men by way of her prevaricating, customer-service-interaction chattiness. She can’t always protect herself, but she’s able to get what she needs. We also get the sense of how often she’s stuck up for Autumn in the past, and how their bone-deep friendship makes this trip a ride-or-die act of protection they’d do for each other in a heartbeat while also being an extension of how they are in the world on any other day. Hittman’s strategy of building her film atop so many small, indelible images of everyday intimacy wouldn’t work if Flanigan and Ryder weren’t able to play such a normal, casually but irrefutably muscular friendship while eating each other’s food on the subway, quietly fighting about their lack of money, making up to each other even more quietly, cracking jokes, vibing next to each other while lost in their own thoughts, holding each other’s pinky fingers.
This last shot is very much the image that has stuck with me most from Never Rarely Sometimes Always, at once an utterly unique act of solidarity and the crystallizing image of the film’s whole storytelling approach. It’s not quite the finale - Autumn still needs to get an abortion, and they still have to head home - but it’s the one shot that distills everything special about this film. The abortion itself is handled without much fuss or undue tension. Undergoing the procedure isn’t the problem, but the means to afford it and the ability to make oneself available for it are the stakes here, and every part of the filmmaking reflects this. All things considered, Never Rarely Sometimes Always is about as direct as it can be in its messaging without speaking it to the audience, yet it never reduces its characterizations or flattens itself stylistically to achieve this message. It’s a polemical that functions just as phenomenally as cinema, boasting some tremendous craft and an amazingly deep cast of resonant performers. It’s also Hittman’s most consistent film to date, incrementally adding layers as it goes rather than collapsing at the finish line like Beach Rats.
So what more you could want, thousands of Academy voters who clearly read The Film Experience? How are you planning to reward this easy, obvious peak of cinema in a relatively slim year for films of any kind? You gonna secure your status before the lord and write Eliza Hittman’s name over Aaron Sorkin’s? Pencil in Scott Cummings and Héléne Louvart over Alan Baumgarten and that devil Phedon Papamichael? Remember that Talia Ryder is just as impressive as Sidney Flanigan when you think about the many, many feats of actressing this year has given us? The joke is always that great films don’t really need the Academy’s awareness to secure their place in history, and I feel quite confident in saying that a year after first seeing it, I’m going to be thinking about this film for a long time.
If we’re being honest, many of Oscar’s presumed alternate choices this year are pretty good. But this quarantine has not been particularly giving. And I could stand a few more good things.
