Style over 'The Substance'
In today's newsletter: The Substance. Daredevil. Paradise. And the first installment of my A to Z.
The Oscars was on Sunday, and I absolutely loved the broadcast, since I've been in the tank for Conan O'Brien for over 30 years now. I thought his precise energy is something that has been desperately missing from the show (which I usually don't even have a problem with), and was my favorite Oscars-host act since Steve Martin.
As for the awards themselves, I don't have a lot of gripes, but that's mostly a function of the fact that, for the first time since approximately 2011, I saw a mere 30% of the nominees for Best Picture prior to the ceremony. Not for lack of trying, mind you. It turns out that when every Best Picture nominee is 2.5 hours long (at minimum) and half of them aren't on VOD, it's exceedingly difficult to find the time to watch them when you have a five-year-old at home pulling pretty much all of your focus.
The day after the ceremony, however, I watched Best Picture nominee The Substance, and somehow no one told me how exceedingly French this movie is. I knew pretty much everything about it beforehand: that it was a deep satire, that it was an extreme body horror film, that it was caked in gore and viscera, and the broad strokes of the story. (As it turns out, this story is only broad strokes.) But no one mentioned that this is the most French film to hit our shores since Delicatessen. It's a big, goofy, sledgehammer-subtle piece full of big, goofy performances and a lot of silly and extremely good practical effects.
I'm not saying the movie is bad, not by any means. It's just not my tempo. I enjoy splatter and body horror as much as the next person who enjoys those things – I love the Evil Dead trilogy, Cronenberg movies, Lynch movies, etc. – but some consensus-beloved cult pieces fall flat for me. I didn't like Mandy or Psycho Goreman, just because the tone of both felt incongruous to the intent (or the content, maybe), and the same was true of The Substance.
I'm not making any judgment on the film as a work of satire. It's very explicit about what it's saying, and if its message lands with the people it's intended to land with, then great! At 141 minutes, it's about 41 minutes too long (give or take), and the thing I was least prepared for is just how unabashedly goofy it is. These are massively over-the-top performances, with a lot of couldn't-be-more-on-the-nose dialogue written by someone who primarily writes in French and wasn't given another pass by any of the actors in the film.* There are a lot of moments in the movie where Demi Moore's line readings evoke the spirit of Jiminy Glick (without even getting into the body suits and prosthetics), and I simply wasn't expecting that from the acting role for which the (always very good) Moore has been winning the only awards of her career. Once again, this is a movie where the tone, for me, doesn't match the intent. I'm happy so many people are enjoying this movie so much. I was honestly shocked at how little I enjoyed it and how tedious it became for me during the Grand Guignol third act.
*I've always had an ear for accents and turns of phrase, and it bothers me to no end when a writer places words in the mouth of an actor that no one would ever expect that actor to even conceive of saying. The most evident example is Andie MacDowell in Four Weddings and a Funeral, who was done an all-time disservice by being given some of the most English dialogue of all time, courtesy of Richard Curtis, that not even the most "I just picked up the accent on my vacation" American would ever deign to say. Not even Terry Gilliam would turn the phrases that she was forced to utter in that movie. There are so many moments in The Substance where it's like, "Wow, a French person sure wrote that line!" But I suppose I must, at some point, digress.
And now on to the rest of what we're talking about today!
