Midnight Mass (5/5 Stars)

 

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The small fishing town on Crockett Island is dying, literally and metaphorically. A few years back an oil spill occurred off the coast which ruined the local economy. The majority of locals left for better opportunity, the last of them did not even attempt to sell their house. They simply abandoned it. The population is now 127, those too old to move away, or haunted by such pasts that make living in a dying place seem a good penance for past sins. The local church, a Catholic diocese by the name of St. Patrick’s, is led by an octogenarian monsignor. We are told that he was becoming senile and wished to see the Holy Land before he passed, so the church pooled its resources and paid for his pilgrimage. We never meet the monsignor. Instead, a virile well-spoken young man (played by Hamish Linklater) steps off the boat. He is explains to the congregation that the old monsignor has taken ill and is resting in a mainland hospital. His name is Father Paul Hill (there is an important biblical connotation to the neame) and he will be here for only several weeks. He expects his time to take the community through Ash Wednesday, Lent, Holy Week, and then Easter, that sacred time of repentance and death, forgiveness and resurrection.

Midnight Mass is not a movie and I did not see it in a theater. Those two conditions are generally the prerequisite for a review on this blog. I am writing this review because, well, Midnight Mass is the best anything that I saw from 2021. It is a mini-series, eight one-hour episodes, that can be seen on Netflix. Ostensibly it is in the horror genre (and it should be), but let that fool you. It is arguably the best and most artful meditation on religious faith, religious zealotry, sin, forgiveness, and redemption. It is also as scary as death.

At eight hours, it is the correct length. The one-hour episodes take their time, exploring Crockett Island and its inhabitants in depth. The roles are an actor’s paradise. There is not one main character, but several, and each character has at least one great scene that should make all the other actors jealous for having missed being a part of it. The endings of each episodes are at the same time cliff-hangers that make one want to move on immediately to the next episode but also welcome respites that allow the viewer to pause, take stock of what they witnessed, and think on it. You should probably see it alone lest the experience be not ruined by less patient companions who may not be in the mood to watch a good movie.

I watched “Midnight Mass” entirely cold (that is knowing nothing of its plot) based on a review from Red Letter Media in which the reviewers made a sincere effort to not talk about the plot as well because they went in cold, had an incredible experience, and wanted to preserve the same for their audience. For that reason, I am going to be incredibly vague as well as to what happens. I won’t even tell you what the horror element is, though you may find yourself already familiar with it once you realized what it could be. All I will say is that I was surprised by how this element and its rules which I have seen in many contexts (including teen romcoms) fits so well into the theology of Catholicism, in particular those parts wherein the Church insists that it does not deal in metaphors. The Eucharist is my body. The wine is my blood. Drink of it and you will have eternal life. The Church teaches that this is not a metaphor. In this miniseries, it really isn’t.

Midnight Mass was written, directed, and created by Matt Flanagan. I have no previous knowledge of this artist. I looked him up and immediately understood why. He does almost exclusively horror television shows (The Haunting of Hill House for one) and I don’t really watch those. He has done some movies, like Ouiji 2, but I would never see that either. He mostly has done adaptations. Midnight Mass though is original and Mike Flanagan in interviews says that he has wanted to make it forever. It feels like that. It feels like a story someone has spent ten years thinking about. I recognized almost none of the actors here for the same reason. Apparently, Mike Flanagan uses the same actors a lot and these particular actors like Kate Seigel, Kristin Lehman, Samantha Sloyan, Igby Rigney, Rahul Kohli, Robert Longstreet are all in Mike Flanagan’s other TV series. I look forward to seeing more of them acting together. The two actors that I was familiar with were Zach Gilford who I remember from Friday Night Lights and Hamish Linklater, who I know from NYC’s Shakespeare in the Park (I have seen him in Twelfth Night, A Comedy of Errors, and as Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing. He is a great thespian).

It is impossible to tell what the Church would think about Midnight Mass and I hope it says very little, if anything at all. I’m sure there is plenty to be offended about here. At the same time, the Church should welcome great art that takes theology seriously. There is a cautionary history here when it comes to the responses of religious institutions to religious movies. The best example is Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Here was a serious movie made by a devout Catholic that took seriously certain aspects of theology, explored them, and in so doing, was probably heretical in some ways. The movie was met with controversy and picket lines. In response, Hollywood studios, wanting to duck controversy, stopped making movies with distinctly religious themes for several decades. In the recent pass, really only Mel Gibson and Martin Scorsese continue to make distinctly religious films. I do not know of any great controversy or furor over Midnight Mass (maybe because it is but a miniseries on a streaming platform) and I hope that lack of controversy persuades more producers to take chances on more movies and TV shows that have directly religious themes.

The horror genre is having its own resurrection. It is a sign of the health of the movie industry when good horror movies coming out. Arguably the best period in American movies took place in the 1970s and it was not a coincidence that period had many great horror movies (Jaws, Alien, The Exorcist, Halloween, Dawn of the Dead, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Thing, Evil Dead). It is happening again. Good horror movies are a good trend in the business because these movies are generally made by young people with no money and deal with inherently risky subject matter. When good horror movies are being made in quantity it speaks to a wealth of opportunity for new artistic voices in the culture. The powers that be are taking chances on the youth and the youth are delivering with something new and profound experiences and giving. Midnight Mass is the best of them.

Spider-Man: No Way Home (4/5 Stars)

 

Making that sweet sweet corporate lemonade.

Right at the top, we should talk about the writing of this movie. Our screenwriters are Christ McKenna and Erik Sommers known for some of the best episodes of Community, the first two Marvel Spider-Man movies and the Jumanji reboot. What these two excel at is synthesis and adaptation, the ability to take existing material and turn its seeming limitations into features. The intellectual property of Spider-Man is in a unique place in the realms of moviedom due to the odd financial position of its corporate parentage. Way back in the day before Marvel created its own universe with Iron Man (2008), it was licensing its characters to other movie studies. Its most popular character, Spider-Man, was licensed to Sony, whose first movies in the deal included the Sam Raimi trilogy in the early 2000s that featured Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man and such villains as the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), and the Sandman (Thomas Haden Church). These were enormously popular movies, but as soon as Raimi and Maguire seemed to be done with the franchise, Sony rebooted it with Andrew Garfield in the title role, Marc Webb directing, and such villains as Rhys Ihfans as the Lizard and Jamie Foxx as Electro. That is, Sony didn’t continue the story, they restarted it. In the first Andrew Garfield movie, Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider etc.

Why? Well two reasons. First, Sony’s contract with Marvel allowed it exclusive rights to make Spider-Man movies just as long as they made at least one Spider-Man movie every five years. Second, Spider-Man’s defining feature is that he is an endearing teenager going through everything for the first time. These two factors combine in Peter Parker getting bitten by a spider in a new blockbuster movie every ten years or so. In 2018, someone at Sony had the great idea of meeting their corporate largess in story-form head on. The resulting animated movie was Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, which explained the multitude of variations of Peter Parker’s story over the years with the pseudoscientific application of a physics theory called the multiverse. The idea being that there are a multitude of universes and that there is a Spider-Man for each of them ranging from the traditional Peter Parker-Spiderman to Miles Morales as Spiderman (Peter Parker, but black) to Gwen Stacy as Spiderwoman to Peter Porker as Spider-Ham (a spider that was bitten by a radioactive pig) etc. This worked so well, that Marvel used the multiverse as a plot red herring in Spider-Man: Far From Home, and now in Spider-Man: No Way Home fully engages with it. There is indeed a multiverse and it includes all the villains from the Sony franchises of the last twenty years and...all the Spider-mans.

The last sentence was kept well underwraps by Sony and Marvel the past year with much credit to them. I expect now that everyone has seen this movie, it isn’t much of a spoiler anymore. Anyway back to the writing. With great ability, the screenwriters have sorted out the last twenty years of Spider anthology and put together a movie that makes it seem like the whole thing was planned from the very start. Even more so, they end this movie on a note that allows the whole thing to start all over again in the hands of Sony. It is an especially adept way to maintain and extend a giant money making machine. Chris McKenna and Erik Somners deserve to get paid a lot of money.

For the obvious reason, this movie lacks the originality of the previous movies. Like Infinity War and Endgame it feels more like the culmination of plenty of other movies, not something stand alone. It’s a nostalgia tour and one’s appreciation of it would likely be increased or decreased by one’s appreciation of the older movies. For myself, I only saw the Raimi trilogy and the latest Marvel movies (the ones with Tom Holland as Spider-Man) to the exclusion of the Andrew Garfield movies. I’ve become a little more interested than not interested at all in the Garfield movies now.

To illustrate the enduring appeal of Spider-Man one needs only to briefly summarize the plot. Peter Parker has been outed as Spider-Man by Mysterio and is now the subject of intense press speculation. Since Peter is just a humble kid, he would rather not have his private life and that of his sweet Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) intruded upon. So he goes to Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and asks him for a spell that will make the entire universe forget that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. The spell goes haywire and instead of everyone forgetting that Peter is Spider-Man, people from other universes who know that Peter Parker is Spider-Man are pulled into this one, namely villains from past movies. So now we have the same villains from the Raimi and Webb movies in this one and because Marvel is made of money, you get the same actors coming back too. In an inferior movie, this would result in a simple plot of Spider-Man fighting and defeating five villains instead of one. But here, the story takes a really nice, dare I say, cute turn. Once Peter Parker realizes what all of these villains have in common, in the previous movies they all die fighting Spider-Man, he goes out of his way to try to help them. Why, because he has the ability to do so and as Aunt May says in this movie (and this is the first time it is said in a Tom Holland movie), “with great power comes great responsibility.”

That line is as effective as ever and the context in which it is spoken (different yet the same) speaks to the seeming timelessness of the Spider-Man story. For me at least, it has not yet become cliché, instead I got chills. I made this point before in a different Spider-Man movie review and I think I’ll make it again. As Llewyn Davis said, If it isn’t new and it never gets old, it’s a folk song. The same applies to Spider-Man.