DOLLS: Veronica Phillips’ August Cinema Club Recommendations
A selection of films starring and centered upon dolls.
BARBIE (2023)
Greta Gerwig’s latest film was this summer’s smash hit, breaking theater records and leaving its campily declared “rival” in its pink dust. Part-Mattel shill, part-Gerwig’s personal favorite aesthetics extravaganza, and part-existential musing on womanhood and femininity in relation to humanness, Barbie is pink, frothy, and earnest overkill—just as the doll the film is inspired by would like it to be.
ANOMALISA (2015)
Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa is a traditional Kaufman-esque meditation on what it means to feel untethered in the modern world—this time starring a collection of carefully crafted and uncanny stop-motion animatronic dolls. In many ways, Kaufman’s continual fascination with the crisis of self in the face of humanness is a sort of “Barbie” inverse—what if a man feels like the only special stop-motion puppet amongst a million other indiscernible stop-motion puppets, especially amongst the women stop-motion puppets that he once glorified? What does it mean to feel like you are the most special being amongst a bunch of beings you deem totally plain—if not exactly the same? Anomalisa is a Kaufman slice of life turned even more miniscule, this time quite literally in the use of its mini-sized subjects.
LARS AND THE REAL GIRL (2007)
The kindly, but deeply antisocial, Lars (Ryan Gosling) is beginning to concern his family. He’s single, he’s shy, and he’s beginning to not even be willing to walk a couple hundred feet to his brother and sister-in-law’s house for dinner. But all of this changes when Lars finally meets a girl who brings out the best in him—a custom-made RealDoll sex toy named Bianca. Encouraged to play along instead of push against his delusion, Lars’ family, and eventually his community as a whole, welcome Bianca into their lives—plastic lifelessness and all. Lars and the Real Girl is a film about radical love and acceptance, even in the face of utter delusion, and it’s a total delight.
SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY (1988)
Superstar is a biopic about Karen Carpenter, of The Carpenters fame, and her ongoing battle with anorexia—made entirely with Barbies. Highly litigious and loaded with copyright music, Todd Haynes’ Superstar is a labor of love instead of attempted success. Now available in grainy, almost squint-required quality on YouTube, Superstar remains both interesting and strikingly emotionally evocative despite the literally plastic performances of its subjects.
AN OSTRICH TOLD ME THE WORLD IS FAKE AND I THINK I BELIEVE IT (2021)
An extremely meta take on films about and starring dolls, this Oscar-nominated short follows a stop-motion figure coming into consciousness. Funny, fascinating, and a testament to the bananas amount of work it takes to pull a film like this off, An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It pairs perfectly as an opener to any and all of the existential, doll-oriented, or stop-motion picks above.
BOYS DO CRY: Alisha Mughal’s September Cinema Club Recommendations
I’ve been thinking about crying a lot lately. There are a lot of different kinds of crying, spurred on by various feelings, not just sadness. The crying I’ve been thinking a lot about is the desperate or hopeless kind, the kind that stops you in your tracks, leaving you suspended in a well of grief or panicked worry or unanswered questions. It’s a kind of crying that means a person, their body doesn’t know what to do anymore. I’ve been thinking about this kind of crying because when you see a person cry like this, you can’t help but cry, too, because you don’t know how to help them, because there’s nothing to be done.
For as long as I can remember, the image of a man crying in this forlorn sort of way has terrified me; men are supposed to know what to do, patriarchy taught me, and so if they cry like this, it must mean something really, really terrible has happened. It, of course, is incredibly false that a person should know what to do in every situation, that a person ought always to be composed and collected. But there’s still something about the image of a man weeping that gets me, that vulnerability that many are taught to keep from others’ eyes — it’s a collection and collision of ill-founded but heavy societal notions that, by shifting contrasts, makes this particular kind of weeping so tender and poignant. It’s also instructive, watching boys cry — it’s okay to cry, to show emotions, to be vulnerable, they seem to demonstrate, by stunningly contextualizing sadness within humanity.
Here are a few films containing moving moments of men weeping that will never fail to make me weep.
THE OUTSIDERS (1983)
It’s become almost a meme, hasn’t it? “Do it for Johnny,” Matt Dillon’s beautiful Greaser Dally says through a clenched jaw and glassy eyes. A truly seminal film about male friendship and the suffocating binds society’s hypocritical strictures leave us in, this film is beautifully punctuated by glimmering moments of masculine vulnerability and love. And the moment that always gets me comes near the film’s end, when Dally does something foolish and all his friends run after him, with Patrick Swayze’s Darry angrily weeping, yelling “He’s just a kid!” to cops who won’t listen, who stand before the crying young men like a wall. This is a film about young people trying to live life well and find moments of bliss within an impossible system, and their unabashed demonstrations of love for each other, in moments of joy and sadness, seem a defiant and near rebellious middle finger to the polite society that doesn’t much care about them, which makes the Greasers’ show of affection, of tears, so beautiful at the film’s tragic denouement.
THE LAKE HOUSE (2006)
Keanu Reeves is a great crier, so much so that his films alone could populate this list. But I would like to note one particular performance: his work in The Lake House, a tender and sweet romantic drama from 2006. Reeves plays Alex Wyler, an architect who begins communicating with Sandra Bullock’s Kate, a doctor, through the mailbox in front of a lake house. It’s a beautiful film, telling a love story worthy of being canonized. Alex has a troubled relationship with his father, Christopher Plummer’s Simon Wyler, a famed architect and incredibly stern, distant father. After tragedy strikes Alex, he sits at a table, flipping through his father’s memoirs, and when he comes upon an image that shows him his father loved him terribly, but in his own cold, restrained way, Alex begins weeping, in a loud, unrestrained way. The first time I saw Reeves weeping as Alex, I had to pause the film — it’s a raw scene, moving for the way Reeves allows Alex to be seen in his vulnerability, shedding tears, mourning an impossible to comprehend grief. It’s such a simple act, to just sit there and weep, but what it conveys is an immense pain that Reeves understands Alex doesn’t know what to do with. And so he just cries, which is the most human, perhaps the most right, thing a person could do in such a moment.
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946)
James Stewart wasn’t scripted to cry in the scene in It’s A Wonderful Life when his George Bailey, frustrated and feeling hopeless, prays for help over a drink at Martini’s bar. But tears slowly spill from his stark blue eyes as he asks for help, for anything at all. “Show me the way,” he whispers into his hands, his eyes swimming, searching for any steady ground. He’s at the end of his rope, doesn’t know how to go on, doesn't know what he should do to support his family. It’s such a heavy scene, containing the kind of hopelessness I often compare to a black hole — it feels like being suspended in a vast darkness, this feeling of not knowing what to, where to turn, where to focus one’s gaze, anymore. This was the first picture Stewart made after returning from the war, and though it’s a Christmas staple, I have always seen it, particularly Stewart’s performance, as deftly reflecting the heaviness the actor brought back from WWII. It’s heartbreaking for the way it lays bare the direness that leads to suicide, it’s heartbreaking for its depiction of hope, but more than anything, it makes me weep for Stewart’s achingly brilliant performance.
Penny Serenade (1941)
It’s always moving when an actor who often makes you laugh cuts a somber figure. In Penny Serenade, the acrobatic and sharp-witted Cary Grant plays Roger, one half of a couple who, unable to bear a child, turn to adoption. After many obstacles, Roger and Irene Dunne’s Julie get a baby who they fall madly in love with. But because Roger can’t secure an income, the courts declare matter-of-factly that the child must be taken from them, returned to the orphanage. In a final attempt to keep his child, Roger makes his case in front of a judge. Grant’s mighty figure stands uncertain before a judge, and it’s jarring. Stammering and halting and trembling, Grant’s Roger tells the judge of the sadnesses he and Julie have come against as they have worked to achieve their dreams, how the little baby has helped tremendously, coming to mean the whole world to the two. Grant’s Roger all but begs to be allowed the ability to keep their child; his performance, his sadness, is fearless, and for this reason he never allows Roger to be without grace or dignity. Grant allows us a closeness that his other characters obfuscate with their fast-as-lightning wit and charming smile. It’s a kind of vulnerability — the frustration and desperate hope for goodness — that depicts Roger with such keenly sympathetic humanity that it’s impossible not to weep alongside Roger.