MAKING THE CASE
PARASITE
Bong Joon Ho’s film explodes any lingering notion that great art must bear some relation to subtlety, as well as any presumption that unsubtle art is, by extension, uncomplicated. What might have served as subtexts of Bong’s diabolical class critique—the tenacity of patriarchy, the imminence of climate cataclysm, the baseless aura conferred on all things American—emerge very much as text. The fearsome machine that is Parasite keeps rotating, flaunting different faces of its argument and intricacies of its engineering, somehow coaxing us toward frequent cheers or laughs despite its devastating diagnosis: it has so got all of our numbers. I’m wary of the reflex to elevate immaculate form over provocative mess, but coming off two prior Bong features, Snowpiercer and Okja, that uneasily balanced competing impulses toward precision and chaos, momentum and disarray, the shape and focus of Parasite feel all the more remarkable. If there’s something slightly pitiless about the exercise—and the performances, especially by Jo Yeo-jeong and Song Kang-ho, thankfully invite our compassion—well, the emergencies Bong confronts, the emergencies we all confront, don’t allow much time for pity.—Nick Davis
THE IRISHMAN
“Crazy that the real life events in [Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman & Rolling Thunder Revue], happening at the same time, actually occurred in the same country or even on the same planet.” Filmmaker and archivist Gina Telaroli’s tweet has rattled around in my head as I watch and rewatch The Irishman, a film that trades Rolling Thunder’s late-20th-century utopian striving for a purgatorial dirge through the same era. In Rolling Thunder Revue, Bob Dylan creates an ever expanding world, moving beyond the real into the fabulous. That type of generative expression, or any type of expression, is in short supply in The Irishman. Mafia soldier Frank Sheeran moves through history in a dissociative daze, watching reports of his own actions on television like a passive observer. Words are used to obscure, avoid, insinuate, and misdirect, Sheeran remains willfully, necessarily unknowable to himself and his loved ones, and his world steadily narrows until he’s all alone with nothing but the view through a cracked door.—Nellie Killian
