Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Feb. 9-15

Women in trees

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Up a tree

I have not done anything this week besides watch three Bridget Jones movies and get a Playstation 5. That’s not completely true, but it feels true. Most of what feels remarkable about the past few days is the recurring theme of “woman in tree” to depict literally that a woman is, say, “out of her depth” or “lost” or “in a perilous position.”

Margot at the Wedding

I wrote about this film last week, Noah Baumbach’s Squid & the Whale¹ 2007 follow-up about a mean writer (Nicole Kidman) who goes to her estranged sister’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wedding to wreak havoc. Everyone behaves insane and mean to each other in a way that feels true to life in a mostly East Coast sort of way.² Almost immediately upon arriving at her sister’s home — the family home — Kidman’s Margot goes out to the backyard and climbs their old tree to prove she still can. She gets up too high and gets scared.

It felt crazy to see Kidman do this, not because she’s not capable of doing a small-scale stunt but because most of her work over the past decade has been sighing or being digitally imposed onto the Aquaman movies. I guess I haven’t seen Destroyer, in which I’m told she “runs a lot.”³ The tree bit is one of the great moments in the film, almost classically Baumbachian, I suppose: a self-hating mean person immediately getting their comeuppance when trying to prove their self-worth.

Redwood

Right now on Broadway you can see Idina Menzel climb a giant redwood tree in the middle of the stage at the same theater where they once put on RENT.

the show looks like this

I was lucky enough to see Redwood in previews. I can’t in good faith recommend anyone see it for quality-related reasons (it’s bad) but I also can’t tell someone to stay away. It’s Idina Menzel — in a tree! Redwood was co-conceived by Menzel over the past few years, and like anything written about “grief” and “trauma” post-2020, it’s saccharine and lecture-y and not saying much of anything. I mostly like Manchester by the Sea, but I often consider critiques from friends who accused the film of making up a sad thing and then repeatedly reminding you of how sad it would be.⁴ So too does Redwood invent a terrible thing to happen to a Jewish lesbian such that she has to drive as far away as possible from Long Island and climb a redwood tree.

Now: I didn’t know you could climb redwood trees. I guess this “makes sense” — how else would we know what’s going on up there” I suppose I always thought the answer to that question was “we just don’t” — but I was surprised to learn that this is a relatively safe and normal practice. Or: safe and normal enough that Idina Menzel could do it for real in an Instagram promo for the show.

idinamenzel

A post shared by @idinamenzel

The whole affair has a “from the twisted mind of Idina Menzel” type of tone to it: weird relationship to sexuality, weird relationship to Judaism but also spirituality at large. The more new wave-y of the botanists she meets sings a whole song about “‘Big Tree Religion.” Right. All the songs sound like Christian pop music, and they also all sound like they’re being made up on spot. A lot of “bad/sad,” “tree/free,” type of rhymes. Taylor Swift is innocent when this happens repeatedly with “bar” and “car,” but I’m not sure the same can be said about Redwood. All in all, if you ask me, “Fran, should I go see Redwood on Broadway?”, my answer is: “Not at market price.” Idina is Idina — a star of stage and screen — and it’s worth seeing her in the flesh if you never have before (I certainly hadn’t). She’s a bizarre star to me: there’s a rugged unpleasantness to her that’s extremely entrancing. She is not really ever feigning likability, and that harshness lends her a natural edge. Much of Redwood is built around the fact that people do not want to hang out with her — which isn’t nothing. If you do go, I encourage “hitting the pen” or “half a gummy,” and not making eye contact with anyone you go with during its 110 minute, no intermission run time.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

credit peacock

Bridget Jones is also in a tree this week. I spent the week catching up on the series; I had only seen the first Bridget Jones a few years back with Veronica. The whole wave of interest in these movies missed me when I was a preteen, due to a then-indifference towards romcoms and anything that had “Austen vibes”⁵ because I had a bad attitude. Bridget Jones’s Diary — this movie is fine, though I said it once and I’ll say it again: she chose the wrong guy. There was a vague nostalgia in catching up with the series, which includes 2004’s Edge of Reason (no kidding!) and 2016’s Baby. Edge of Reason is quite a bad film, a series of sketches, mostly, and dense with a kind of racism indicative of early aughts British comedy.⁶ Bridget Jones’s Baby… I actually quite like this movie, though it is not especially great either. The films get better as Bridget is forced to take on more responsibility; my patience wears thin with Amelia Bedelia types otherwise. Same goes for Paddington Bear, for what it’s worth. He needs to get it together.

Still, I was surprised to be as walloped as I was with Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth film unceremoniously dropped on Peacock this weekend. On surface level and in title alone, this seems like some typical Bridget Jones nonsense: she once again has to choose between two hot guys (Leo Woodall and Chiwetel Ejiofor — good work, these are two hot guys) for some reason and she continues to show up to work with bad hair because she is frazzled. Those aspects of the franchise, for lack of a better word, don’t especially interest me but they don’t piss me off either. I don’t think the who-will-she-wind-up-withs of the Jonesiverse really tell us anything or show us anything compelling about this character or modern womanhood. What a relief, then, that this is so mismarketed — a much stranger movie than any of the previews or promotional material would let on. It’s a romantic comedy that asks, Does getting the guy do anything to prevent the slow and inevitable march of time or cruelty of the world? Well, no! The film is mostly about getting on with life which I find, time and time again, to be a much more interesting plot than many.

I wrote for Vulture about how Mad About the Boy justifies the existence of further sequels, that we so rarely have a series continue with aging actors outside of, say, Mission: Impossible, that is about aging and dying and illness and friendship. If nothing else, I think Mad About the Boy is a great showcase for Renée Zellweger, a real movie star, and for Hugh Grant, who is on a relatively unparalleled streak here. I like that Grant’s Daniel Cleaver has gone from wayward malicious lothario to “just some guy Bridget has known for twenty years.” There’s a mellowness to the film that’s gentle and affirming. It’s too long, but I would have watched it for several more hours.

Last but not least: the PS5

he is so awesome

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How was your week? What are you watching and reading? Is AstroBot just a Super Mario Odyssey knockoff or is it doing something different (and/or better)? Do you remember when Renée Zellweger thanked first responders in her Oscar speech for Judy like one week before COVID started? She was really ahead of the curve…

1. In doing red carpet coverage last night, it was sort of awe-inspiring to see Jesse Eisenberg do his “be bitchy to reporters/bloggers” routine all down the press line. It’s not targeted; it’s simply routine.

2. There’s a case to be made, maybe, that this is Baumbach’s WASPiest movie, but I’m willing to hear the case against.

3. Can someone confirm or deny or did none of us see Destroyer?

4. The case could maybe be made that this happens in Margaret too, but Margaret is such an all-encompassing portrait in a way that allows it to escape its own misery from time to time. Manchester’s much more local, small-scale approach really makes you sit with tragedy.

5. This changed with the Joe Wright P&P adaptation but, yes, I’ve still never seen the Colin Firth miniseries.

6. Actually a lot of British comedy…