Movies You Should See In Case You Didn't

When a feature film lacks the requisite $40 million PR budget—the average for a major film—and if it isn’t Marvel Comics or made with a 15-year-old boy in mind (the demographic favored by too many film production companies), then it gets scant traction for its grand opening—and you, a bright, intelligent person, may miss it altogether through no fault of your own.

$30 million is needed for the media buy, of which seventy to eighty per cent is spent five weeks before the film opens on saturation bombing of TV so that viewers see the 15-second ad spots an average of 15 times. Marketers split the audience into four groups: older men, men under 25, older women, women under 25. The picture has to attract at least two of these groups to succeed.

In time gone by the studio system assiduously built films, stars and technical prowess and kept its eyes on the prize—longevity and classic status, as in “Turner Classic Movies,” TV’s go-to source for all things movie. Today, mass media is as fleeting as a tweet. Well-made films, or crummy, heavily-marketed films can do well in the early going, but then they’re gone, maybe forever. This is the life we lead as we hurtle through the 21st century.

Consider these five excellent films: Dark Waters, Green Book, Harriet, Loving, and Nebraska, all of which pushed every contemporary button.

Dark Waters (2019), produced by and starring an intrepid Mark Ruffalo and skillfully directed by Todd Haynes for Participant Media and Killer Films, was critically praised and grossed over $23 million world-wide. But the film’s budget was $60 million.

Though bypassed by the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes, the film won the 2020 Environmental Media Award, the 2021 French Cesar Award for Best Foreign Film, and a few smaller awards.

The film took on the DuPont Company’s deadly C-8 chemical that is the basis of Teflon. The film concludes that C-8 is in the bodies of some 99% of U.S. residents and more world-wide.

The story follows the quest of up-and-coming corporate defense lawyer Robert Bilott (Ruffalo) to find out who killed 190 cows on a farm in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The desperate farmer gives him a case of videotapes depicting the carnage and says he “knows” the culprit is DuPont. Bilott’s firm, Taft Stettinius & Hollister, is appalled.

“Dupont is the government,” says his boss in response to Bilott’s frustration at the EPA’s (Environmental Protection Administration) refusal to document DuPont’s dumping of PFOA, “forever chemicals,” that never leave the bloodstream of its victims.

In other words, Dark Waters is serious stuff. It details 20 years of death, heartbreak, corporate greed, horrendous pollution and official cover-up.

Haynes and Ruffalo should be praised for their clear storytelling. Yet, as The Guardian wrote (02-24-2020) “Oscar-Bait No More…Worthy movies such as Dark Waters used to be the toast of Hollywood. But is the audience for them drying up?” Well, is it?

Lawyer Bilott’s memoir Exposure details his 20-year battle against DuPont. He risked his career, family, marriage, destitution, and even his life to battle the multinational, Delaware-based company. Ultimately, he sued Dupont, case by case, winning $671 million for over 3,500 disease cases in West Virginia and Ohio.

After a limited release, Dark Waters is now streaming and can be rented from Netflix and others. Run, don’t walk.

Green Book (2018), directed by Peter Farrelly for Participant Media is based on the true story of African American classical and jazz pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali, terrific) and the Don Shirley Trio, which tours the Deep South in 1962. Needing a driver and protection, Shirley hires Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortenson, applause), a former bouncer at New York’s Copacabana nightclub.

Frank’s son, Nick Vallelonga, teamed with Farrelly and Brian Currie to write the script and bring the story of an unusual friendship to the big screen. The title refers to The Negro Motorist Green Book by Victor Green, published annually from 1936-1966 for African American travelers in the U.S. so they could locate service stations, hotels, restaurants and other establishments safely serving Black clients.

We learn early in the film that Shirley was the first Negro student at the Moscow Conservatory of Music. We learn that the Chopin he loves and performs brilliantly takes a back seat to jazz because “that’s what Negroes are good at.” We learn that he set up the Southern tour to help break ground for Negro artists in the wake of the savage beating of Nat King Cole in a southern bar. Then we learn Shirley is gay.

The film got three Oscars (Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor for Ali). On Oscar night, famed Black filmmaker Spike Lee was livid when his nominated film, BlackKlansman, was passed over. In a childish display, he waved his arms, shouted and turned his back while the Green Book team accepted its Oscars and spoke. Good grief.

Possibly because of the black-white friendship that develops between the thuggish Villelonga and the elegant Shirley, some critics and sore losers like Lee termed the film “schmaltzy”, “patronising” and even “fake.” This, in the face of the Civil War-era racism vividly portrayed in the film, Villelonga’s own casual racism (“Chink”) before he learns better, and Shirley’s steely refusal to accept an outhouse as a bathroom or a host’s refusal to seat him with white dinner guests.

The film is often funny, but it’s underlying message is not. The film ends on a wintry Christmas Eve in New York with Shirley driving his exhausted, sleeping guardian home to his wife and kids after two months on the road (the actual tour lasted a year). Shirley refuses to come in, heads home, then realizes he has a true family in the Villelonga clan, where he is introduced by a delighted Frank as “Dr. Donald Shirley.” They died within months of each other in 2013 after a lifelong friendship.

Go to this website for a good biography of the multilingual Shirley, https://www.biography.com/musician/don-shirley, and for goodness sake, see the film (again) and show it to your family and friends.

Harriet (2019) finally gives Harriet Tubman, the “Moses” of the Underground Railroad, her due. Directed and co-written by the gutsy, gifted Kasi Lemmons and starring Cynthia Erivo as Harriet, the film cost $17 million, earned $43.3 million worldwide, received respectful, if not exactly rave, reviews, and impressive awards. Cynthia Erivo, the fiercely committed lead, won the Oscar, Golden Globes, Hollywood Critics, Screen Actors Guild and many others for best actress and “breakthrough” performance. Lemmons was given short shrift, but won best director at several film festivals and women’s groups.

Some thoughtless critics dismissed Harriet as “not a Civil War epic,” and “sincere but formulaic,” and even “dull.” Good grief. Thanks to Lemmons’ detailed direction and a powerful cast, we witness the nature of slavery, the extraordinary courage of Tubman (born Araminta Ross on a Maryland plantation), and the baked-in cruelty of slaveholders.

Tubman was married to a freedman, John Tubman, to whose name she added her mother’s given name, Harriet. She escaped to freedom after jumping off a bridge into a torrential river to get away from her slave master, who then gave her up for dead. Fearing that her husband would lose his freedom, she did this on her own.

Thanks to the Underground Railroad established in the late 18th century largely by white and black religious denominations, Tubman had an established series of way stations, secret routes and anonymous helpers as she struggled to bring hundreds of escaped slaves to the north. In a closing scene, she declares, “People are not supposed to own other people.”

The Underground Railroad is a huge story deserving of big-screen treatment that would highlight heroes like William Still (“Father of the Underground Railroad”), who brought out as many as 60 escaped slaves a month. But Lemmons and her team have fired a shot across the bow. Not only did they show their cinematic prowess, they told a critically important story for the vast movie-going public that should stay in the forefront of consciousness.

Loving (2016) is billed as a “biographical romantic drama,” but is actually a riveting documentary drama about Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple who grew up in the aptly-named Central Point, an unusual community in Virginia where people are black, white, Native American and more. “They don’t know what they are,” says the local (white) sheriff contemptuously.

Jeff Nichols wrote and directed the film with understated emotional clarity and historical accuracy that make the story of one of America’s greatest Supreme Court victories all the more remarkable. Nichols based the film on “The Loving Story,” a 2011 documentary by Nancy Buirski, who was one of Loving’s producers.

His two leads, Joel Edgerton as the taciturn, white bricklayer Richard Loving and Ruth Negga as the African-Native American, sensitive housewife Mildred Jeter Loving, are absolutely wonderful. The hardest thing any actor can do is portray a plain, everyday, ordinary/extraordinary human being. Edgerton and Negga do their jobs superlatively, making this wrenching film a portrait of a time in our country—1958 when racism was rampant, lynching was still commonplace, and “colored people” used separate entrances.

Loving was widely praised, cited as one of the best films of 2016, and nominated for major awards, but won nothing. Shame. It should have won every award known to man. Indeed, the Cannes Film Festival greeted it with a five-minute ovation. but no award.

The plot centers on Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Knowing they are breaking the law, the Lovings get married in Washington, D.C., then return to Central Point, where Richard is building their home. After deputies raid the home and arrest them, the sheriff says their marriage license has no validity and jails them (in the actual jail still there today). A lawyer gets the judge to suspend their one-year sentence provided they stay out of Virginia for 25 years. They move to D. C. and rent an apartment from a family friend.

With their first child due, they return home so that Richard’s mother, a midwife, can deliver the baby. Of course, they are arrested again, but their lawyer stops the court hearing by saying he erroneously advised them to briefly return home for the birth.

Back in D. C. two more children are born, traffic increases and Mildred yearns for a country field back home, where her children can safely play. She writes to Robert Kennedy, who alerts the ACLU, which takes the case (Mildred’s letter is in the John F. Kennedy Library archives). The State of Virginia declares the Loving children “bastards,” but the two ACLU lawyers fight on until the Supreme Court rules on June 12, 1967 that “marriage is an inherent right,” thus dismantling every anti-miscegenation law in the nation. Our great Constitution was changed and for the better.

Richard Loving was killed by a drunk driver in 1975. Mildred lived on in the house he built for their family and died in 2008.

Loving cost $9 million, grossed $12.9 million worldwide and just over $2 million on DVD distribution. As modern film budgets go, these are extremely modest figures, for Loving was in every way a labor of love.

If you haven’t already, view this fine film. Add it to your home collection and make sure your teenagers see and discuss it, for it is an important social and history lesson.

Nebraska (2013) had a budget of $13.5 million, earned $27.7 worldwide, and has since been in DVD distribution. The film was the final project of Paramount Vantage before it shut down at the end of 2013. Also known as Paramount Classics, the company was owned by Viacom and was the “art house” wing of Paramount Pictures. “Art House” has come to mean “box office poison” in some circles, but “hey, that’s really interesting” in others. Either way, the phrase killed off a major company.

Alexander Payne expertly directed this low-key, black-and-white comedy-drama, which stars veteran actor Bruce Dern. The film received critical acclaim, earned back its costs, was nominated for a slew of awards, but received nothing — except for Dern’s well-deserved Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival.

One would think this quintessentially American film, like Loving, would win accolades from American festivals, but no. But it got them from us. We have it on DVD and it never fails to delight. It’s one of those small stories about ordinary people, who hail from a remote small town on the Nebraska prairie, but are now living in Billings on the Montana prairie.

This film does what so few can achieve because too much glitz, too many stars with tough demands, too much soundtrack noise, too much need to clean up in Southeast Asia, too much lack of interest in what makes this country tick. For example:

Nebraska centers on something we all get in the mail, the ubiquitous sweepstakes notice, dangling visions of sugarplums and get-something-for-nothing.

Aging alcoholic and dementia victim Woody Grant (Dern) gets such a notice and is convinced he’s won a million bucks. He sets out on foot for Lincoln, Nebraska, home of the sweepstakes folks. He’s wandered off before, driving his wife and sons nuts. Son David (the excellent Will Forte) rescues him several times and finally concludes that the trip to Nebraska is the only way to prove to Woody the fake nature of the sweepstakes (a come-on to buy magazine subscriptions). David also believes Woody deserves a last hurrah, like a new truck and an air compressor.

Along the way, the Grants visit their awful relatives in Hawthorne, Nebraska—a town lacking trees, character and almost everything else—and encounter a venal former friend (Stacy Keach, bravo), who believes Woody’s tale of of imminent largesse. Let the predation begin. We also learn the old reprobate never loved his wife, never wanted kids and, though he can no longer drive, wants to spend the million on a new truck.

By now David’s older brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk, exemplary) has arrived to help. He works for a small-town TV station and finally has a chance to fill in for the news anchor—a plot detail that enriches the lives-of-quiet-desperation theme.

Ultimately, they reach Lincoln, where the marketing secretary in a cluttered office in a strip mall says Woody lacks the winning number, but gets the hat emblazoned with “Prize Winner” as a consolation. David trades in his Subaru for a late model truck and Ross helps him buy a compressor. With David crouched on the floor of the truck, Woody drives slowly down the main street of Hawthorne in a last hurrah for the locals.

Like life, the film ends when it ends. Well directed, scripted, shot and played, there is nary a false moment from start to finish. Critics praised it, major nominations poured in, it made back its costs, then faded into the sunset.

That’s why distributors ponder, “What will get them out of the house? What will make them pay for a babysitter? Will this be the movie America wants to see? Forever?”