By Dave Itzkoff via NYT Movies https://ift.tt/39OfykK
Today news: Beck Bennett On Leaving Saturday Night Live And His 5 Favorite Sketches
When Beck Bennett walked out onto the Saturday Night Live stage in May in a Vin Diesel skull cap, he knew it might be his last time there as a cast member. Bennett was there to anchor the season’s last skit: a spoof of Diesel’s recent AMC commercial, in which he listed an increasingly outlandish list of reasons to go to the movies in a husky growl (“The music … the heavy doors … the pre-show video where you’re on a rollercoaster”). As Bennett delivered his lines to raucous laughter, he saw his wife sitting in the front row and SNL creator Lorne Michaels grinning next to the cue cards—a moment that he says felt prescient.
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“It really felt like the universe was telling me, ‘This is in fact time for you to leave. You’re not gonna do better than this,’” Bennett tells TIME in a phone interview on Wednesday.
Earlier this week, SNL announced that Bennett would not be a part of the cast of its 47th season, which begins on Saturday. Bennett, who was on the show for eight seasons, is now living in Los Angeles, where he says he plans to stay full time to focus on new projects and be near his wife and friends. “It’s been eight years of basically long distance with my wife, and if we are going to start a family at any point, I think we have to start that at some point soon,” he says.
In his near-decade on SNL, Bennett became an integral member of the ensemble, a glue guy tasked with playing straight men and raging idiots alike. His characters have ranged from Vladimir Putin to Mitch McConnell to the Salt Bae; last season, he had the most screentime out of anyone in the cast, according to Vulture. Ahead of the show’s 47th season, Bennett spoke with TIME about some of his favorite SNL sketches and characters, and reminisced about how they came together. These are excerpts from the conversation.
Office Boss
A staple of Bennett’s early tenure on the show was his “Office Boss” character, a high-powered CEO with the body of a baby. He shared scenes with Louis C.K., Drake and Cameron Diaz, flailing his arms, spitting up on himself, and sitting in giant booster chairs.
Bennett: Right before my SNL showcase in L.A., I was on a plane, and there was a guy with a baby in his lap sitting next to me. The baby kept putting his headphone cord into his mouth, unplugging it and throwing it on the ground, then getting upset and crying that he didn’t have it anymore. I was like, ‘Oh, man, it would be fun to create like a fully functioning person like that.’
I must have watched a couple baby videos early on when I was developing the character. Really, it came down to the act of grabbing something, shaking it, getting overwhelmed by the shaking, shoving it in my mouth, throwing it away and finding it again. After that, I would watch baby videos for how they react to eating a lemon, or somebody shaking keys, or how they put their feet in their mouths.
With Cameron Diaz, I think we did a spit-kiss type thing that was absolutely disgusting—and she was fully game. And the giant chair was actually fun. I was like, ‘This is great. Why don’t people do this?’
Brothers
“Brothers” is one of the many SNL sketches that Bennett shared with Kyle Mooney. The pair went to the University of Southern California together and were in the same sketch group, Good Neighbor; both were hired on SNL at the same time.
Bennett: From the moment we left our childhood homes, Kyle and I have been doing sketch comedy together. It kind of clicked right away—we always wrote together and had fun performing. For “Brothers,” we did a version of those characters in college in our sketch comedy group at USC. We were these brothers who were just wrestling, and their parents finally interrupt them and tell them that they’re getting divorced. It was not as well written as the one we ended up doing.
It’s rare for a sketch to do well at the table and during blocking, and there’s nothing that gets in the way. Especially because in this one, there are so many physical things that could have gone wrong. We’re getting sprayed, going through walls, breaking plates. It felt like a classic SNL sketch, like Chris Farley or Molly Shannon breaking things, falling through things—the things I watched and wanted to do on SNL if I ever got there.
But you learn that it’s really hard to do that because of the cue cards, the camera blocking. There’s so many restrictions to doing live sketch comedy on stage like that. So that experience was kind of a dream. The other people in the scene were having trouble not breaking, and it was so fun to do. It was like my best performing experience at the show, also because I got to do it with Kyle.
Take Me Back
In this pre-taped sketch, Bennett spoofs the climactic scene of a rom-com with Ego Nwodim.
Bennett: Manchildren, idiots: it’s what I love to do. I think it’s something about my instrument: My voice, my looks—it’s just what comes out, the idiot. It’s an extension of who I am, and is also what I saw around me growing up and wanted to make fun of. People who are confidently dumb are just really funny to me.
And being at SNL, I think writers are able to see something in you that you may not even fully see, and help bring that out of you. Over time, it was like, “Oh, people are writing me in this way.” And on SNL, where it’s very competitive and difficult to find your niche, you kind of go towards what works.
I also think some of the parts I play can be more nuanced on film as opposed to live: some of the angry idiots, or the out of control people freaking out, can be captured in a more disarming and funny way on film. When I got to SNL, I realized some of the things I found funny or wanted to write were maybe a little too not fun—a little too intense and scary.
In my second to last year, I did this sketch with Idris Elba where I was a competitive actor who was jealous of him. It was really big and over the top, and it did well enough to get on the show. But I look back at a similar one I did in my first year that never made it to air: it was like, much smaller and darker and intense and not fun. Film sketches can make some of those characters succeed a little bit more than in person.
Jules Who Sees Things A Little Differently
Bennett appeared several times on Weekend Update as the pig-headed contrarian Jules.
Bennett: There are some people out there in the world that Jules is based on. This is definitely an L.A. guy, although he definitely exists in New York, too. I think you see a lot of it on social media: someone on the internet thinking they have something to say, and trying to put a twist on it, but they actually aren’t saying anything at all. I sat down in Colin Jost’s office one night, like many nights, and would tell him stuff, and usually nothing would come of it. But he was always very good about finding something funny in what I’d pitched him, compile a bunch of stuff, and turn it into something a little different.
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Bennett: It’s so fun to mimic Vin Diesel because he takes himself so seriously. He’s so tough, such a guy and has an incredible voice. It’s fun to step in those shoes: “I’m so cool, masculine, badass, anything I say is amazing.” I love playing confident characters, and those are often awful people. I’m not saying Vin Diesel is—but confidence is a very fun thing to play.
That sketch was written by Steven Castillo and Dan Bulla. It was something they came up with three in the morning on Wednesday, so I didn’t find out about it until right before the table read. That’s what happens a lot: it’s not an impression that you’re working on for weeks. It’s something that people hand you right before the table read.
That was one of my favorite things to perform on SNL, and it was the last thing I was in. That sketch should not have gone as well as it did, and almost should not have gotten onto air: the worry is that a long, rambling list would get old and the audience would stop laughing after a minute. But they found ways to keep it creative and interesting.
One of the reasons it was so fun is because I was the front of the audience; it was really fun and comfortable. And as soon as it ended, the band started playing the good night music, and I knew that was likely going to be my last sketch and show.
I just felt happy, relieved, grateful. With the ‘goodbye sketches,’ I don’t think it happens that often, and I’m not really one to want that. There are so many people that have been there so long and you never know who’s leaving. So it was nice to have what almost felt like a goodbye sketch.
Today news: Just Try to Look Away From Jake Gyllenhaal’s Gripping Performance in The Guilty
There are some actors so intense, their nerve endings sizzling so close to the surface, that they can make you want to look away. That’s Jake Gyllenhaal, as a disgraced Los Angeles police detective demoted to 911 dispatcher, in Antoine Fuqua’s stripped-down cop drama The Guilty. The film is opening in select theaters and will be available on Netflix on Oct. 1 as well, though Gyllenhaal’s performance is a test of what we look for in, and take away from, those two modes of watching. Viewing at home, you can take a break if the intensity of Gyllenhaal’s performance becomes too much. But the big-screen effect would surely be different: you may want to look away from Gyllenhaal, a jittery hypnotist, but it’s doubtful you’ll be able.
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On the eve of his trial for a crime whose nature is only hinted at (though we can guess), Gyllenhaal’s Joe Baylor receives an emergency call that sets off every sensor. The woman on the line, her voice vibrating with nervous tears, acts as if she’s speaking to her child, but Baylor knows how to read her code. He deduces that she’s been abducted, and he pulls every lever in the system to locate and save her, though raging wildfires in the area have left all local branches of law enforcement understaffed. Somehow, the woman’s plight mingles with Baylor’s own personal problems, complicating her rescue.
This picture, a remake of Gustav Möller’s 2018 Danish film of the same name, isn’t strictly a one-man show: it’s Riley Keough’s voice we hear as the abducted caller. Baylor’s exasperated boss is played by Christina Vidal—she corrects him repeatedly and wearily, a suggestion that his snappish anxiety has alienated everyone around him.
But it’s Gyllenhaal who owns the screen. He has worked with Fuqua before—they made the brutalist boxing drama Southpaw together—though this time, thanks to COVID-related complications, Fuqua directed the movie from a van, maintaining contact with cast and crew from a distance. What must it have been like to capture the serrated intimacy of this performance at that remove? Gyllenhaal’s Baylor is a man on the edge of time, reckoning with a deed he can’t take back and a possible future built on lies. Few actors can put this kind of raw yet strangely companionable self-loathing onscreen—and make you glad you didn’t avert your eyes, no matter how much you wanted to.
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Today news: The 5 Best New TV Shows Our Critic Watched in September 2021
Just because there’s no longer any downtime on the TV calendar, doesn’t mean that what we used to think of as fall premiere season is any less crowded than it ever was. Indeed, as broadcasters unveil new primetime slates following a year plagued by pandemic shutdowns, streamers from Netflix to Paramount+ are upping their promotional games to hold the ground they gained during that time. Meanwhile, September brought an overwhelming bounty of new shows—including plenty of frustratingly flawed prestige projects (American Crime Story: Impeachment, Foundation, Y: The Last Man, Scenes From a Marriage) that are nonetheless worth watching if you’re into the genre or topic. Although networks have more or less canceled the sitcom, ABC’s The Wonder Years reboot shows promise despite a somewhat heavy-handed pilot. And Fox rolled two extremely watchable new dramas, The Big Leap and Our Kind of People. Netflix’s Billy Milligan doc Monsters Inside and the buzzy Amazon series LuLaRich vied for true-crime eyeballs.
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In the end, only one of my five favorite September shows would’ve turned up on my most-anticipated list for September: Midnight Mass, the latest and greatest of Mike Flanagan’s annual horror extravaganzas. The rest were surprises—a hit Korean thriller, a morbid cartoon, one emotional docuseries about a queer family and another about anti-Black racism in the UK. For more recommendations, read about the shows I enjoyed most last month and during the first half of 2021.
Midnight Mass (Netflix)
Is it even Halloween anymore if Netflix isn’t unveiling a hot new horror series from Mike Flanagan? Over the past few autumns, the writer-director behind the Stephen King movies Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep has contributed to TV’s small but growing horror canon with hit reimaginings of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (rebranded as The Haunting of Bly Manor). This year’s offering, Midnight Mass, is an original story from Flanagan—one that has been on his mind for over a decade and centers on topics, like sobriety and the Catholic Church, to which he has an intense personal connection. [Read TIME’s full review.]
Nuclear Family (HBO)
In 1979, Robin Young and Sandy Russo fell in love at first sight, moved in together and embarked on a romance that’s still going strong. All that was missing were the children they longed for but assumed that they, as a lesbian couple, could never have. Then a friend passed them a guide to DIY artificial insemination. Russo got pregnant with baby Cade; Young carried their second daughter, Ry. While the girls grew up knowing their respective sperm donors—both gay acquaintances of their mothers—the men ceded all parental rights as part of the original bargain and only occasionally saw their genetic offspring, mostly during vacations. But by the time Ry was 9, the relationship between her donor, Tom Steel, and her moms had soured. Faced with the prospect of losing contact with a child to whom he’d grown attached, Steel filed a paternity suit.
The four-year legal battle that ensued raised questions—about gay parenthood specifically, but more broadly about whether it’s genetic material or love, care and intention that truly make a family—that were just starting enter the mainstream conversation in the early ’90s. While the three-part docuseries Nuclear Family benefits greatly from 30 years’ worth of perspective on the family’s ordeal, what really makes it unforgettable is the person sitting in the director’s chair: Ry Russo-Young. From the intimacy she captures between her doting mothers to the rhetorical force of a filmmaker confronting the adults involved in the trial to ask why they made the decisions they did about her vulnerable, young life, she infuses emotion into every scene. And while her affection for her moms is unmistakable, Russo-Young extends empathy and provides nuance to characters on all sides of this bittersweet story. [Read TIME’s interview with the Russo-Young family.]
Squid Game (Netflix)
Though it arrived with little stateside fanfare, Korean thriller Squid Game quickly (and no doubt with the aid of the service’s all-powerful recommendations algorithm) unseated heaps of English-language content to become Netflix’s single most-streamed title in the U.S. after less than a week on the site. What’s so special about it? Much of the appeal is inherent in the premise: Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), a hapless, debt-ridden gambler with an ailing elderly mother and a 10-year-old daughter he seldom sees, finds himself among hundreds of similarly desperate souls enlisted for a mysterious, high-stakes competition. After being transported by an army of masked, uniformed minions to the undisclosed, underground location where they are to reside for the duration of the contest, the participants are subjected to a series of five games that they might remember from the elementary-school playground, like Red Light, Green Light. Except this time, each win brings Gi-hun and his rivals closer to a cash prize equivalent to tens of millions of dollars—and elimination means instant death.
From The Most Dangerous Game and Battle Royale to The Hunt and The Hunger Games, the market for narratives that transform anxiety about inequality into blood-streaked death games springs disturbingly eternal. And for viewers whose first exposure to South Korean entertainment came via Bong Joon Ho, Squid Game offers a combination of dark humor, baroque violence and class satire similar to the one that made Snowpiercer and especially Parasite global sensations. It’s also simply a twisty, fast-paced, action-packed show whose episodes end in killer cliffhangers—in other words, the ultimate binge bait.
Teenage Euthanasia (Adult Swim)
Teenage Euthanasia sounds like an ’80s hardcore band, but it’s actually something even better: an Adult Swim cartoon, about a partially undead family that owns a Florida funeral home, created by author and Made for Love creator Alissa Nutting and At Home With Amy Sedaris executive producer Alyson Levy. The darker-than-black-velvet comedy’s eponymous hero, Euthanasia “Annie” Fantasy (voiced by Jo Firestone), is an awkward high schooler who lives with her immigrant grandmother Baba (Bebe Neuwirth doing a Natasha Fatale accent) and slacker Uncle Pete (Tim Robinson, of I Think You Should Leave fame) because her her mother Trophy (Maria Bamford) abandoned her as a teen mom. In the first of many surreal twists, Trophy finally returns home—but in a coffin—and is miraculously reanimated on Baba’s embalming table. Her gross, undead superpower: she can weaponize the swarms of beetles that live between her legs.
On top of the first-rate talent involved, the show distinguishes itself from the recent glut of adult animation with its macabre, female-grotesque sensibility and a punkish, candy-colored visual style to match. Euthanasia obviously isn’t for everyone, but if any part of this summary sounds intriguing, it’s probably for you.
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Uprising (Amazon)
Black liberation isn’t just an American story. Filmmaker Steve McQueen offered a stunning view from across the Atlantic in Small Axe, five features set amid London’s West Indian community in the 1970s and ’80s that arrived on Amazon last year. Now, the service has added three companion nonfiction titles: Black Power: A British Story of Resistance, the education-focused Subnormal: A British Scandal and, as a centerpiece, McQueen and James Rogan’s three-part Uprising, which looks back on a horrific 1981 fire that killed 13 young, Black revelers at a birthday party and catalyzed a movement against racist violence. As in Small Axe, it is the sensitivity and specificity with which the directors capture the humanity of those who lived through—and those who died in—the New Cross house fire that makes the latter doc unmissable.
Today news: No Time to Die Is an Imperfect Movie. But It’s a Perfect Finale for the Best James Bond Ever
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
No Time to Die, the 27th movie in the James Bond franchise and the last to star Daniel Craig, isn’t the best Bond movie. Yet it may be the greatest. At two hours and 43 minutes, it’s too long and too overstuffed with plot—more isn’t always better. And it features one of the dullest villains in the series’ history, played by Rami Malek in mottled skin and dumb silky PJs. But forget all that. No Time to Die, its flaws notwithstanding, is perfectly tailored to the actor who is, to me, the best Bond of all. With his fifth movie as 007, Craig is so extraordinary he leaves only scorched earth behind. There will be other Bonds for those who want them. For everyone else, there’s Craig.
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A summary of No Time to Die’s labyrinthine plot would be boring to write and even more boring to read, so here are a few bullet points: The evil scheme engineered by Malek’s inscrutably named Lyutsifer Safin involves bioengineered weapons tailored to an individual’s DNA; his plan is to threaten to infect the world, for no known reason other than pure villainy. Bond’s love interest is MI6 shrink Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), introduced in 2015’s Spectre, and she may or may not be above board—because although Bond is always a man of his word, he often has good reason to doubt others’ loyalty. There’s an assassin skulking around in a spooky white Noh mask.
The current and extremely likable incarnation of the franchise’s second-bananas, Naomie Harris’ Miss Moneypenny and Ben Whishaw’s Q, both get adequate screen-time (and Q has a hairless cat for a pet, occasioning one of Bond’s driest quips). Bond, who’s retired as the movie opens, has been replaced by a smart, peppery new agent, Nomi (Lashana Lynch), whom he doesn’t like one bit—at least at first. The action sequences are cleanly shot and edited and generally superb: a car chase in a sun-drenched Italian village is a highlight—who doesn’t love watching a Bond vehicle rattle down a set of stone steps? Ana de Armas shows up all too briefly and is awesome. And there’s a guy with a computerized fake eyeball that’s occasionally given to popping out and rolling around—everything about this phony eyeball is funny.
There. Now that that’s out of the way, we can talk about Craig. Because that’s really what you came here for, isn’t it? The early scenes of No Time to Die are so swoonily romantic that you know none of it can last: Bond and Madeleine have swept into that little Italian town on a cloud of amour; the minute they close the door on their picturesque hotel room, they tumble into each other’s arms and into bed. On the drive up, along those characteristically twisty Italian roads, Madeleine had urged Bond to drive faster. He looked at her, amused but also sure of the words he was about to speak, and said, “We have all the time in the world.” The man who quotes Louis Armstrong, the voice behind one of the loveliest Bond themes—from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, until now the most romantic Bond movie of all—is one you want to keep close.
Bond has plans to visit the grave of his lost love, Vesper Lynd (who was played, seemingly ages ago, by the regal Eva Green), as a way of clearing the brush so that new love can thrive. Something happens; he and Madeleine are separated, seemingly forever—the betrayal he feels settles on his face like cold fog. His eyes—as blue as ice, or cornflowers, or the Earth as viewed by astronauts, and previously alive to everything Madeleine might have done or said—simply close up shop. With her, he’d seen glimpses of a life that had long been held away from him in the years he was busy playing the game of being James Bond. Now there’s nothing left to do but retreat to a small tropical island and, in his sad and sexy way, put on some tiny shorts and head out to sea in a little sailboat and catch some fish for dinner.
His old CIA friend, Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), lures him back to work for a one-off, because why not? What else is there to do? Bond goes to Cuba and puts on a tuxedo. Of all the Bonds (Connery, Brosnan, Dalton and so forth), Craig’s Bond is the least suited to tuxedo-wearing. He’s a bit stocky, not as reedlike as the others, and yet somehow he wears it best, perhaps because his vaguely sunburnt face, with its distrustful scowl, is so radiantly transformed by this most magical piece of menswear. It bottles his energy without diluting it. In it, he’s both vulnerable and powerful—none of the other Bonds ever achieved this mystical combination.
And that’s the key difference between Craig’s Bond and all the others: This Bond chooses not to charm or blast or karate-chop his way out of every scrape. He allows time to catch up with him, because he knows he can’t outrun it. The other Bonds seemed immortal—when it was time to quit, they were simply sent out to pasture, gently, to be replaced quietly by another, as if mega-producer Cubby Broccoli’s grand enterprise thought we wouldn’t notice. Though we’ve all had our favorite Bonds over the years, we almost didn’t.
The series will continue, either with a new Bond or some clever workaround. But in this imperfect picture, Craig—who nudged 007 into the 21st century, re-envisioning him as a scrapper with a soul—has drawn a closed circle around the character. What kind of life do you want for your favorite James Bond? In No Time to Die, Craig’s Bond finally gets the one he deserves, but the price he pays for it is wrenching.
Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek
There are far too many little chunks of story wedged into the nooks and crannies of No Time to Die (which was directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga and cowritten by Fukunaga, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and regular late-era Bond screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade). The movie could be sleeker, more nimble. But its closing sequence, an operatic whirlpool of romantic tragedy so intense it could be opera, serves Craig’s Bond so perfectly—and sees him out of this five-movie adventure with such grandeur—that the movie’s flaws fall away. In general Bond—first brought to life long ago in Ian Fleming’s novels—is a fantasy figure of freedom and licentiousness, but Craig is the only truly erotic Bond. By the end of No Time to Die, he understands what his freedom has cost him, and he doesn’t want it anymore. He throws it away for something greater.
When French screenwriter, director and producer Roger Vadim died, in 2000, he left behind one widow and four ex-wives, and all spoke of him fondly. Brigitte Bardot, Vadim’s wife from 1952 to 1957, and a woman who went on to marry several more times herself, said this of him at his funeral: “The rest were just husbands.”
Everyone has a favorite Bond. I’m sure years-long friendships have ended over drunken fights about who’s the best. Most people put their money on Connery, and he was perhaps the most coolly seductive, an elegant freeze-pop who wouldn’t melt under your touch. But as Craig has played him, Bond is a man whose blood runs close to the surface. Principled but also a bit thuggish, witty yet vaguely ornery, taciturn yet capable of being wounded, he became—by stealth, across five pictures—the best version of the character, the one we didn’t know we wanted. The rest were just Bonds.
Today news: Netflix’s Maid Is an Empathetic Portrait of Poverty That Dispels the Myth of Bootstrapping
In the opening scene of Netflix’s Maid, a young woman hastily straps her toddler into a carseat, kisses the girl’s forehead, takes the wheel of a creaky jalopy and, as a man screams “Hey, what are you doing?” from the driveway, peels out into the darkness. It’s an archetypal image—a victim of domestic violence flees her abuser—but one that recurs, hauntingly, throughout the series. Sometimes the escape takes place in daylight, or from another place, or in a different car, or mother and daughter aren’t alone in the vehicle. Over time, the cycle takes on a new meaning: there’s no such thing as safety when you have no money and no support system.
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It’s not that the woman, Margaret Qualley’s Alex, is entirely alone in the world. But, as this poignant, layered and persuasive drama based on Stephanie Land’s best-selling memoir Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive so vividly illustrates, having friends and family doesn’t always mean having anyone you can count on. Which is why so many Americans must rely on social services when precarity swerves into crisis. A wrenching (though not unremittingly bleak) portrait of a 25-year-old mom who’s desperate to give her daughter a more stable childhood than she had, Maid, which comes to Netflix on Oct. 1, also demonstrates how the families our society refuses to help can get trapped in cycles of poverty and abuse.
The first place Alex goes after leaving the trailer where she played housewife to little Maddy’s (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet) alcoholic bartender father, Sean (Nick Robinson from A Teacher), is the home of the couple’s best friends—who immediately call Sean in a misguided attempt at peacemaking. Mother and daughter hit the road again, curling up together to sleep at a scenic overlook until a cop sends them to social services, because they can’t park here. It’s in that office where Alex explains to a social worker that staying with her family is “not an option.” Her mother, Paula (Qualley’s real mom Andie MacDowell, in a zany yet soulful performance), turns out to be a manic hippie artist, living in a camper van with a younger dude named Basil (Toby Levins) whose Australian accent Alex suspects is fake. And her dad, Hank (Billy Burke), an apparently nice guy who’s remarried with kids, is out of the picture for reasons we can only guess at first.
This is where the public safety net comes in, right? But even if Alex can be coaxed into admitting that she was being emotionally abused (Sean didn’t hit her or Maddy, but he did throw things, punch walls and control her access to money) and that she and her daughter are now homeless, none of her options seem sufficient. There might be some free beds at a church mission to which she’s told, ominously, to “wear DEET.” And that’s about it, because she doesn’t have any pay stubs that would qualify her for subsidized housing or childcare. “I need a job to prove that I need daycare in order to get a job?” Alex demands. “What kind of f-ckery is that?”
The social worker ultimately points her toward Value Maids, a shoestring operation that cuts corners by keeping employees part-time to avoid paying benefits and making them pay for most of their own expenses, from uniforms to cleaning supplies. Working with a majority-female team of writers and directors, showrunner Molly Smith Metzler (Orange Is the New Black) maintains viewers’ awareness of Alex’s dire financial straits by periodically printing her declining bank balance right on the screen. So we see that her first “clean” leaves her in the red even before the client—Anika Noni Rose’s snobby Regina, who comes to play a somewhat unfeasibly large role in Alex’s life—stiffs her.
A few more disasters and a fair bit of soul-searching later, she and Maddy wind up staying at a shelter for victims of domestic violence. The nonjudgmental, no-strings-attached care they get there, from the DV survivor (BJ Harrison’s Denise) who manages the place, feels bittersweet; it’s apparent that Alex has never really had her own needs catered to before. A neighbor at the shelter gives Maddy a big bag of sparkly My Little Pony dolls that another child left behind, and it’s as if they’ve won the lottery. It struck me, watching these scenes, that we almost never see shelters for abused women and children depicted on screen. Might that be the result of having a dearth of survivors and people from disadvantaged backgrounds working in creative roles, or of a lack of interest in this unglamorous sort of women’s story from the entertainment industry at large? Either way, it can be hard to imagine—or empathize with—experiences we haven’t seen.
Not that Maid is some kind of grim, didactic explainer on the plight of DV victims, poor women, single moms or any other demographic category into which one might slot Alex. Unlike Showtime’s recent, misery-drenched American Rust and so many other generic dramas about rural poverty, the show is grounded in a genuine sense of place—the forests, ferries and islands of the Pacific Northwest—and intimate knowledge, via Land’s book, of how the labyrinthine, interconnected legal and social-services systems can so profoundly fail the struggling people they’re supposed to aid. We observe the way Alex exasperates employers, daycare workers and grocery clerks by simply existing in her current, impossible state. Maddy “needs you to do better,” a doctor lectures her. “Parents do not get a day off,” sniffs the condescending instructor of a parenting class that Alex must take for legal reasons but could actually teach.
Despite a few hit-or-miss surreal touches, the series belongs in the same category as feminist-minded, social-realist features like Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace and Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy. Like them, Maid’s greatest strength is its multidimensional characters. Alex is neither a saint nor a cypher; she’s an intelligent, self-possessed aspiring writer who is fiercely devoted to her child, but she also messes up, backslides, spirals. Qualley gives her a bright-eyed tenacity and a wry sense of humor (she names Maddy’s off-brand, dollar-store mermaid doll Schmariel). Protagonists battling psychological trauma have devolved into a trope, yet Metzler and the show’s directors avoid vagueness by translating Alex’s symptoms into discrete visual terms, from the muffled perception of someone who’s dissociating to the dark cave of depression. The people in her life become similarly complex. Sean and Paula can act like monsters, but they’re not evil so much as wounded and out of control. An old friend who wants to be Alex’s white knight (Raymond Ablack) isn’t quite the deus ex machina that a more simplistic show might make him out to be.
“People with money have everything,” Alex tells a Tinder date she hosts, in one episode, at a luxurious house that she pretends her parents own but which she is, of course, only cleaning. She has been through a lot in her short life, yet on this point she remains remarkably naive. In sorting through wealthy strangers’ detritus at work and imagining the pathos behind it, Alex not only becomes a worldlier person, but also finds her voice as an author. (That writerly style can sometimes bleed into the dialogue in slightly unfortunate ways, with characters speaking in overly metaphorical language.) It’s an important one. Raised on false welfare-queen stereotypes and bootstrapper self-reliance platitudes that have never solved anyone’s actual problems‚ we as a culture can be maddeningly incurious about lives like Alex’s. In taking care to show us complete people rather than dusting off the old clichés, Maid stands a chance of changing that.
Today news: First Mrs. Maisel, Now Joan Rivers. Why Hollywood’s Jewish Women Are Rarely Played by Jewish Actors
Friday, September 24, 2021
When we learned this week that Kathryn Hahn would play Joan Rivers in a series on Showtime called The Comeback Girl, the choice seemed like a no-brainer. Hahn, who recently stole the show as the nosy-neighbor-slash-powerful-witch Agatha in Marvel’s WandaVision, truly has the chops to channel the iconic, sharp-tongued comedy legend.
But something about the casting also landed funny. That’s because of a troubling trend: by playing Rivers, Hahn will swell the ranks of non-Jewish actresses who have portrayed Jewish women, fictional and real, recently. It’s happened with big-budget films like On the Basis of Sex, the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic in which the notably Jewish justice was played by (the lovely but not Jewish at all) Felicity Jones, as well as indie breakouts like Shiva Baby, featuring the talented rising star Rachel Sennott (not Jewish either) navigating the most awkward mourning gathering ever. Jones’ casting drew some outcry, while Sennott inhabited her character so successfully that most Jewish fans assumed she was the real deal.
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Between those two extremes lie many other examples: all of the Pfefferman children on Transparent were played by non-Jews (as was as a rabbi played by Hahn herself); Mrs. America gave us Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan in the form of Margo Martindale and Tracy Ullman (neither Jewish); the distinctly Rivers-like lead role in Amazon’s hit The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is played by Rachel Brosnahan (not Jewish); Rachel McAdams (not Jewish) failed in an attempt go undercover as an Orthodox Jewish woman before she played an Orthodox Jewish woman in love with Rachel Weisz (O.K., at least she’s Jewish) in 2017’s Disobedience. Even the actresses in the homebirth drama Pieces of a Woman, whose characters are subtly Jewish, were played by a trio of non-Jews.
As Sarah Silverman said in a vent session to Howard Stern last year discussing this phenomenon: “Is it the biggest injustice in the world? No, but I’m noticing it.” On the one hand, acting is acting—it shouldn’t require perfect alignment with the character you’re playing. On the other hand, the fact that it keeps happening when Hollywood doesn’t exactly suffer from a lack of Jewish actors shows that something is off. It seems that the idea of letting an actual Jewish actress interpret a Jewish role is pushing a cultural boundary we didn’t realize was still there.
What can we call that boundary? It’s not exactly racism or cultural appropriation, because Jewishness does not fall neatly into the categories of race, religion or ethnicity—some consider it one or another or some combination of the three—and because white Jews have access to white privilege in America (and let’s be honest, we’re often confused with white people of other backgrounds). Jewish actresses like Weisz, Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson are among Hollywood’s most feted stars. When a white actor or actress snags a role written for another race or ethnicity—like Johansson herself in The Ghost in the Shell—it’s blatant erasure. This isn’t that.
For that reason, individual instances of a non-Jewish actress doing a spectacular job playing a Jewish woman feel totally fine. As Helene Meyers, an academic who studies Jews and film, put it: “I think that Jewish literacy rather than Jewish identity is what matters.” For instance, Sennott clearly was Jewishly-literate, especially in a film directed and written by a Jewish woman, Emma Seligman. But Meyers adds: “My Brooklyn-accented gut wonders whether Jewish actresses are being deemed ‘too Jewish’ for these roles.”
The trend certainly raises the question. There’s a long tradition in Hollywood of actors changing their names and getting plastic surgery to flatten their ethnic identities out of existence. Perhaps, even subconsciously, casting directors and decision-makers are replicating that tradition by overlooking Jewish women for Jewish roles. And perhaps internal biases play a role here too—Jewish actresses avoiding roles that could pigeonhole them on one hand, and on the other hand the many Jewish people (especially men) who make decisions in Hollywood falling prey to internalized bias with a whiff of misogyny too. After all, when is the last time you saw a notably Jewish male auteur cast a Jewish woman as the love interest of the nebbishy male lead (looking at you, Woody Allen and Larry David)?
When she spoke to Stern, Silverman expressed frustration with the fact that an actress like herself, whose voice and features clearly mark her as Ashkenazi Jewish, had been cast throughout her career in a way that reinforces dated stereotypes about domineering Jewish women: As she put it, an actress who looks and sounds like her ends up playing “either a sassy friend of the main character … or you’re this c-nty girlfriend before the guy realizes what love really can be, or you’re that guy’s book agent.” The flipside of Jewish actresses being reduced to one-dimensional secondary roles, she added, is that they’re also being shut out of juicier Jewish parts, those that are nuanced, vulnerable, strong and fully realized. And if a white actress with a vague ethnic vibe and some sass is enough to read to casting directors and producers as “Jewish” over and over again, we’re not getting a chance to view the real diversity of Jewish women, who come in all shapes, sizes, colors and physical types. (In fact, if you look at three famous Jewish actresses working today–Mila Kunis, Natalie Portman, and Tiffany Haddish–they are as different as can be.) This flattening effect also subtly indicates that Jewish women aren’t beautiful or compelling enough to be the center of their own stories. And that hurts.
We keep learning that Hollywood and the entertainment world aren’t nearly as progressive as one might imagine. Whether it’s astonishing new anecdotes about sexism, racism and harassment in the industry that keep surfacing, similar debates over straight actors being continually cast as gay characters or the recent colorism discussion around Latinx characters in In the Heights, we see a broader picture of missed opportunities and subtle exclusion. Even when marginalized groups’ stories make their way onscreen, a kind of whitewashing or sanitizing often sneaks its way in.
That’s why this pattern in the casting of Jewish roles is significant. The mainstream entertainment industry isn’t committed to showing “otherness” in its true fullness, messiness and realness yet. The only solution seems to be letting people with different backgrounds make art themselves, with creative control. When Jewish women like Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson and Rachel Bloom take over the helm of their own shows, the trend stops: we see complex stories with Jewish women playing Jewish women at the center. That’s a nice start, but there are so many more stories to be told.
Sarah Seltzer is a writer in New York City and an editor at Lilith Magazine
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