The Nest tells the story of a family, a British businessman and his American wife, a horse trainer, who at his sudden & suspicious behest move with their two children from her native New York to his native England, where everything swiftly feels even more wrong, and then precedes to start falling apart.

It is in every way a throwback to those mid-budget psychological adult dramas of the later 20th-century, with an added soupçon of always maintaining this certain artistic edge where you’re thinking, this could still plausibly become a haunted house movie, there’s still time. While it never fully crosses over into horror or any of the other genres that sometimes slip along just under the surface, I still think this would be a good recommendation for people who liked last year’s Parasite, a movie so boldly, sharply crafted that it makes The Nest’s own financial spikiness seem understated by comparison, but they do contain a number of shared elements to enjoy: a narrative of social climbing & tension, a certain twistiness to the emotional landscape, a big rich house in a featured role, and just a lot of sterling direction and cinematography.

I loved this movie. “Yay,” I kept saying to myself happily. The interiors, the clothes, the particularly Reagan flavor of its 1980s, alongside a soundscape subtly but increasingly textured by the teenage daughter’s taste for the British new wave that’s coming in over the airwaves in Surrey. Loved her especially by the way, a great character for this talented young actor in a movie that definitely could have just been dominated by the adults. Though regarding them, I just continue to be so pleased by this career stage of Jude Law, Actor-slash-Producer, where so many of the roles he does now are ones where it’s like he’s having a complete ball expertly deploying his skillset and middle age to play a note-perfect commentary on a movie we associate with him from his twink younger years—here, The Talented Mr. Ripley absolutely. He even pulls out the same grimacing grabby-hands gesture he used as Dickie, and I was incandescent. 

Meanwhile, I had never seen Carrie Coon in anything before, and the impact she had on me here was probably most akin to my reaction to meeting Vicky Krieps in Phantom Thread: oh, sorry to the Famous Man, who’s of course great as ever, but that’s why I’m all the more dazzled by YOU babe! This is YOUR movie and you’re killing it! Where have you been all my life! Apparently, in that HBO show The Leftovers. Man, Leftovers fans, you’ve been dining so well.

What else did I love about The Nest? God, so much. I love the nearly impossible to pinpoint yet undeniable way in which the grand wonderful manor house is actually horrible. I love movies where a bunch of adults have a party. I love a black horse, and I particularly love when characters look at a black horse and it seems to become symbolic of their own personal holy mysteries. And I loved, so much, the final scene, going out on something I’m going to call, a certain Joanna Hogg unspokenness. Oh do I love that!

The amount of consideration and invention that went into the sound engineering of this movie should, and I have to believe will, go down in film history. This is what it means to go right up to the edge of your medium and advance the line, transforming forever the idea of what can be done in your field.

In telling the story of a drummer who suddenly loses his hearing, Sound of Metal took the approach of profound subjectivity, most immediately apparent in Nicolas Becker’s sound design, but the camera too is intimately associated with Ruben’s sensory perceptions of the space around him, and gracefully conveying to us the changes in those perceptions over time. In one of my favorite features of the cinematography, the camera position and editing subtly center characters’ signing more and more in the frame as the film goes on, a gradual shift from what initially feels more like a fluttering, disjointed movement of hands around the edges of our (and Ruben’s) perception, into what it truly is: a full and fluid language of gesture, conveying the intricacies of both mood and meaning. And god that’s remarkable filmmaking, to have taken the time and care to reflect on screen the way a character is learning to read the world differently, and to create a sense in your audience that they are sharing some portion of that increase in comprehension, all just through the framing!

I’ve wondered if there were Deaf technicians behind the scenes, in addition to all the Deaf actors onscreen. Because that part I do know: nearly all the Deaf characters were played by actors from the Deaf community, with the exception, obviously, of Riz Ahmed. But beyond how the production certainly would have gotten a bigger budget with a Name attached to the project (and that’s more hours you can spend literally inventing new microphones), I think it does make some artistic sense to cast a hearing actor in that role, as the movie is specifically about someone not previously deaf who is actively struggling to hang on to his hearing identity. 

Truly though, the cast assembled here is all terrific. It was in Paul Raci’s very first scene where I suddenly remembered that there was a supporting performance in this that critics have been talking about, and knew immediately it must be him. Olivia Cooke I had not seen since my beloved Thoroughbreds, and it was such a pleasure to get another movie with her in it. And Riz Ahmed in this, is just…god, what a captivating actor. He can act entire scenes with only his giant eyes and the way he holds his shoulders. His performance is as immersive as the technical design around it, living in every thread of a character flawed and fragile and driven—what he’s doing as Ruben would be remarkable even if it were just about him going back to rehab.

Sound of Metal is a movie about care, I think, ultimately. Different ways caring for someone can look, the different forms that can take, as well the journey of learning to take care of yourself. I thought the intersection between the long road of addiction recovery that Ruben has been on four years now, with this sudden new road of learning how to be Deaf, as Joe puts it to him, was such a smart choice, because man, life often IS multiple things at once, isn’t it. And the contrast between the worn smoothness of one road with the bumpy newness of the other was just so sensitively rendered. The wholeness of this story and this film project is something I keep coming back to, it just feels so whole, but also not too neatly buttoned up. It’s human, and being alive means continuing.

This is the kind of movie where the longer I sit with it, the more enamored of it I am. I love it, in a lasting way. The final shot is going to be in my heart forever. When things in your life are lost, when they change, when you’re coping, this is a movie to draw solace from, and I feel I will my whole life.

★★★★★

The first beneficiary of my “no more half-stars, we commit to the bit” resolution/Letterboxd overhaul, is certainly The Personal History of David Copperfield, which is probably a 3 star movie on a screenplay level, but a 4 for how it personally made me feel! Which was happy! And in 2020 2021, is that not a value to be treasured and praised?

Granted, I have not read the original Charles Dickens novel, in full: The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account), so have no idea if I might feel differently about this film’s merits or demerits if I had. I’ve read a number of other Dickens though, so while I cannot comment on whether this is a “good” adaptation of its specific source material, to me it did feel appreciably Dickensian. My working definition of a Dickensian work is that it is a long, ultimately somewhat moralizing tale that follows a colorful character through an exaggerated series of misadventures alternatively ruinous or fortuitous, throughout which there are approximately 250 other colorful characters arrayed. Critics were fairly right then that Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch has a relationship to this genre, as it hits most of those marks square on the head, with the one key exception being that the main character there is positively drained of all color, and his stuffed suit moroseness contributes to the pretentious pall cast over the whole thing, that Dickens, writing a monthly serial for a general audience, does not fall prey to so much. Now, interestingly, Aneurin Barnard is in BOTH of these 2019-released film adaptations as the lead’s Important Drunk Friend, which really is amazing, and had the effect of making me consider this exact full creative team doing the Goldfinch movie instead, with this same spry, absurdist tone, and then laugh and laugh.

Frankly, writer-director Armando Iannucci always seemed a curveball pick even for this project that he did do, given that most of his work previous has been original political black comedies shot in a faux documentary format, all but The Death of Stalin taking place in contemporary times, and all including The Death of Stalin characterized by his hallmark hilarious meanness. Copperfield, by contrast, is a PG-rated period film and just the cutest fucking thing. It’s sweet and sincere—still a comedy, still with a sense of humor you wouldn’t doubt as Iannucci’s, but without the bitter irony of a The Thick Of It or a Veep. And the nimbleness of the performances all across the board made me consider that while the classic Iannucci insult contains a cavalcade of words that Charles Dickens would NEVER use, it does contain a cavalcade of words. Iannucci is actually supremely suited to directing a script with a lot of stuff in it for his actors to say.

And what actors! Everyone in this is the best. Hugh Laurie plays a genially confused old man experiencing intrusive thoughts of King Charles I, beheaded two centuries prior. Tilda Swinton rockets brightly around every set, in between caterwauling off after donkeys in a field. You have never seen Ben Whishaw deliver a performance as sickening (not the gay definition) as his Uriah Heep. Gwendoline Christie plays an ice woman dressed in black and seven feet tall, and Peter Capaldi plays an orchestrina, badly. I had never seen Rosalind Eleazar in anything before but holy moly is she a delight, what a winning presence, manages the balancing act of a character a bit more sage than most of the others but still absolutely in the same world emotionally, and just so fun. But it is good and right that the most common descriptor I run across for this movie is “the Dev Patel David Copperfield.” Such is his impact! Dev Patel….is so charming. His vim! His heart! His beautiful face! And the little version of him: this precious boy!!

I mean really the biggest part of what I enjoyed about this movie was this cast wearing those clothes in those sets. For speaking of the colorful, this Dickens is colorful through and through, from the buoyantly colorblind casting to their color-drenched Victorian waistcoats and wallpapers, just this side of gaudy, and therefore: accurate. Peter Capaldi is dressed in mulberry velvet with pink vertical-striped socks, and Tilda Swinton is usually draped in head-to-toe turmeric holding court in her Tiffany blue sitting room. In one scene every lanky inch of Dev Patel is covered in patterned fabric and there are at least three of them. All the people and things on screen create together a world so vibrant and welcoming to the eye; it feels fairy tale but alive, fresh and living.

Now, what went wrong? Honestly I think it’s mostly just a script issue, I think there’s not enough material knitting the episodes together, and that it’s overall too quickly paced so trips over its own feet at times. I think the energy being up the whole time is a grand choice, but there were just too many plot beats to cover—I’m citing a speed issue, not a pep issue. Honestly I think Ianucci would have done really well with a miniseries, which is not something I would say for every film director, but in his case I know he’s actually very well-versed in writing for serialized television, and could do a terrific job with say, a 6-part series. I don’t necessarily think the way this was cut together was incompetent (though occasionally….a little cheesy), I think just trying to do it all in two hours was always gonna be an impossible task. The first edition of David Copperfield was 624 pages long.

But although at times this can careen all the way through rollicking into antic, with Hamlet’s unhinged connotations attached there, you can’t say it ever lacks spirit, and too many movies do, in my opinion. This was a right romp and I was glad to have it, jolts and all.

★★★★