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    Hollywood Still Matters. This Year’s Best Actors Showed Why.

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    Even as theaters suffer, cinema has been thriving during the pandemic — thanks to the intimacy movies create between performer and audience.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Right now, individually and as a species, we spend more of our time looking at moving images of other people than at any other moment in human history. I don’t have data to support that claim, but come on: You and I both know it has to be true. What else have we been doing for the last two years?Even before the pandemic annexed previously I.R.L. interactions, turning work meetings and family gatherings into extensions of screen time, the writing was on the wall. Maybe that’s the wrong cliché: The shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave stopped being metaphors. They were us.A history of how this came to be — how screen life came to dominate reality, replacing large swaths of it and reconfiguring others — might begin with movies, with one of those origin myths about how early audiences mistook projected pictures for physical phenomena. Our naïve ancestors, one legend tells us, saw a black-and-white silent clip of a train pulling into a station and scrambled to get out of its way. Nowadays, our gullibility runs in the other direction. We might doubt the fact of a real locomotive if there were a video on YouTube questioning its existence.Really, though, what is happening to our minds, our morals and our politics has very little to do with movies, or television, or the other technologies that we used to blame for corrupting our youth and messing with our epistemology. What Susan Sontag called “the image-world” is now just the world. “The powers of photography,” she wrote in the 1970s, have made it “less and less plausible to reflect upon our experience according to the distinction between images and things, between copies and originals.” And, we might add, between experience and performance.That, along with everything else, complicates this Great Performers, traditionally an annual celebration of movie stars.In 2020, when Covid all but halted movie openings and made in-person photo shoots hazardous, we responded by opening up Great Performers, for the first time, to include performances in nonmovie media: actors who worked mainly in television; stand-up comedians; TikTok artists and Twitter jesters. We could have gone further, of course, making room for politicians and public health officials, anti-mask tantrum-throwers and their designated shamers, influencers and meme-mongers and toddlers who tumbled into frame during parental work Zooms. All of them could be classified as performers, and some of them were pretty great.This year, we faced a similar quandary. Movies are back, sort of, but it isn’t as if the status quo has been magically restored. This time, the urgent questions felt a little different. Not so much “Who is a performer” — because finally, who isn’t? — but rather: “What does a performer do to earn our attention?”What is the matter of performance, and why do some performances matter? The first part is to some extent objective. It’s possible, and can be a lot of fun, to analyze the particulars of technique that make the work work. Will Smith’s Louisiana drawl, thigh-hugging shorts and rounded shoulders in “King Richard,” details of an impersonation of Venus and Serena Williams’s father that relies on and repurposes Smith’s own familiar and durable charm. Gaby Hoffmann’s sparrowish quickness and hawklike focus in “C’mon C’mon.” Joaquin Phoenix’s shambling, loose-hipped movement in the same film. The menacing stillness and disarmingly graceful brutality of Benedict Cumberbatch in “The Power of the Dog.” The vocal, facial and gestural counterpoint of Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson in “Passing.” The heartbreaking naturalness of Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz in “Petite Maman,” twin sisters using their resemblance and rapport to play, of all things, a daughter and her mother.Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz in “Petite Maman.”Lilies FilmsBut analysis can only go so far. The effect that actors have — the source of their power and fascination — is more than just subjective. It’s interpersonal. Watching them act, we don’t simply appreciate their discipline or admire their craft. Whether they are professionals or not, whether they are pretending to be well-known figures from literature and history (Macbeth, Princess Diana), ordinary people or themselves, they offer the potent, sometimes uncomfortable possibility of intimacy. The illusion they create isn’t that they really are who they are playing, but rather that, whoever they are, we know them.The process of choosing — of gleaning, from the universe of performances, 10 or a dozen great ones — has felt to me more personal this year than it has before. Less governed by the intellectual procedures of criticism, more fully influenced by mysteries of taste and affection. This year’s Great Performers is devoted to 14 actors whose presence I couldn’t shake, who would not quit me.One thing they have in common — maybe the only thing, beyond their effect on me — is that they appear in stand-alone, feature-length narratives. In the olden days (which ended around 2017), it would have been clear that we were talking about movies rather than television, but thanks to streaming that distinction is now fully obsolete. “The Power of the Dog,” Jane Campion’s epic, wide-screen western, is a Netflix thing. So is the exquisitely silver-toned period psychodrama of Rebecca Hall’s “Passing.” So is Bo Burnham’s one-man stand-up-special-cum-video-diary, “Inside.” Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” with its light-and-shadow cinematography and expressionist set design — and with a haggard, volcanic Denzel Washington in the title role — will appear on Apple TV+.Denzel Washington in “The Tragedy of Macbeth.”Alison Cohen RosaThe flood of digital content comes from a single tap, which can make everything seem equivalent. An Instagram feed, a British baking show, old “30 Rock,” new “Insecure,” plumbing tips and porn — all that stuff might share your algorithms with past and present masterworks of cinema. The old taste hierarchies that would stack such offerings (and their fans) into pyramids of cultural status are a distant memory.Aesthetic distinctions still matter, though, and may reside precisely in the various kinds of connection that different forms offer. Episodic narratives, with their busy ensembles, are simulations of social and domestic life. They concern people in groups, inserting the viewer into the dynamics of collective behavior. From episode to episode, your allegiances and tolerances will shift in ways that are anticipated and manipulated by the creators. As you watch “Succession,” let’s say, you might get annoyed with Kendall and decide to hang out with Roman and Gerri. When that becomes too kinky, you seek refuge in Shiv’s cynicism or cousin Greg’s goofiness. And then Logan does something that makes you feel sorry for Kendall all over again. The whole time, of course, you keep reminding yourself that you don’t really like any of these people. (Even if you’ve never watched the show, you get what I’m talking about. The same thing happens with “White Lotus,” “Grey’s Anatomy” or “The Real Housewives.”) At the other end of the spectrum, the stars of TikTok offer beguiling glimpses and whispered confidences — a state of perpetual flirtation that teases and endlessly defers the promise of something more.A single story contained in a more-or-less two-hour vessel — what we used to just call a movie — offers a form of engagement that is less extensive than any serial and also more intense. Cinephiles worried about the disappearance of movie theaters lament the potential loss of ephemeral communities that assemble when an audience of strangers gathers in a big, dark room. I’d suggest that what defines cinema as an art form is another kind of communion, the brief flickering of a unique bond with the people onscreen.The movies that generated this collection of performers vary enormously with respect to genre, tone, scale and theme. What they share is close attention to a single person functioning either within a circumscribed, highly charged set of relationships or in a state of isolation. Bo Burnham in his studio. Macbeth in his madness. Kristen Stewart’s Diana (in “Spencer”) in the empty chambers and whispering corridors of Sandringham House. Emi (Katia Pascariu) on the streets of Bucharest in “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn.” Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), the widowed theater artist in “Drive My Car,” alone with his grief and guilt. Even the gregarious Richard Williams seems like a man apart, a stranger in the white, privileged world of competitive tennis, sometimes at odds with his own family.Hidetoshi Nishijima in “Drive My Car.”Bitters EndIt’s not surprising that loneliness is a recurrent feature — a subject, a mood, an artistic strategy — in Covid-shadowed cinema. (The pandemic itself, the subject and setting of “Inside,” also features explicitly in “Bad Luck Banging” and obliquely in “Drive My Car.” In the first, Pascariu wears a surgical mask almost the whole time; in the second, the masks show up in an epilogue that takes place some time after the main story.) It also strikes me that solitude is a source of these characters’ credibility, of the uncanny sense of recognition we (or I, at least) feel in their presence.The idea that movies run on empathy — a key insight of the great film critic Roger Ebert — is by now something of a truism. But empathy can be counterfeited, coerced and abused. Audiences can be tricked into caring about people who aren’t worthy of it. Or, even worse, we can restrict our caring only to people who obviously deserve it, who we have decided in advance merit our solidarity, pity or identification. A better standard might be curiosity — the feeling that we are in the company of someone worth knowing, however complicated that knowledge may turn out to be.One of the key words in the contemporary lexicon is “performative,” which functions in the more heavily polemicized zones of the internet as a fancy synonym for “insincere.” A wholly accusatory term — nothing you would ascribe to yourself or your allies — it implies that whoever you are accusing isn’t really mad, concerned or passionate about whatever the day’s news cycle has tossed in their path but is only pretending to be.Not to be that guy, but this usage is the opposite of what philosopher J.L. Austin meant by “performative,” a quasi-technical term he applied to a speech act that does what it says. Examples are scarce and specific: when you say “I swear” in a court of law or “I fold” at a poker table, you’re using performatives. You can fold your cards reluctantly or mistakenly, but not ironically. The words are the deed.These divergent definitions suggest an interesting tension within our understanding of what it is to perform, perhaps especially in a world where we presume everything is being done for show. A performance is, by definition, something false, put on, artificial, self-conscious. And also, by the opposing definition, something authentic, persuasive, organic, true.The illusion they create isn’t that they really are who they are playing, but rather that, whoever they are, we know them.In his book “The Method,” which will be published early next year, the critic and stage director Isaac Butler traces the history of this tension as it applies to acting. Starting in prerevolutionary Russia, a new approach to theater insisted on truth — as opposed to eloquence, bravura or technical skill — as the highest value in acting. Its guru was Konstantin Stanislavsky. The Russian word perezhivanie, usually rendered as “experience” and described by Butler as “a state of fusion between actor and character,” was the key to Stanislavsky’s system.The experience of the character is what the actor explores inwardly and communicates outwardly, in such a way that the spectator accepts what he or she knows is not the case. We don’t mistake Will Smith for Richard Williams, Kristen Stewart for Diana or Bo Burham for himself, but we nonetheless believe them.The arrival of Stanislavsky’s teaching in America — where it was preached as the Method by teachers like Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler and practiced by artists like Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando and Kim Stanley — coincided with a renewed commitment to realism in theater and film. For actors, the always elusive, you-know-it-when-you-see-it standard of realism was not faithful mimicry so much as psychological truth. There were differing ideas about how that could be achieved, but a basic tenet was that the feelings, memories and impulses of the performer were tools for mastering the character.The Method peaked in the 1950s and ’60s, but the mystique of authenticity remains. In popular culture, “method acting” now refers to an extreme commitment to erasing the boundary between character and self, a kind of total identification that is in many respects the opposite of what Stanislavsky and his American followers espoused. It means throwing yourself headlong into a character: speaking in dialect 24/7; gaining or losing a lot of weight; embracing outlandish behavior; neglecting personal hygiene. Not to find the sources of the character within yourself, but to make yourself, almost literally, into the character, to go so far into the performance that you are no longer performing.If you follow that logic far enough, it starts to loop back on itself. Didn’t we already establish that everyone is always performing? Doesn’t that make every performance a meta-performance? Isn’t authenticity another kind of artifice?That infinite regression — the abyss of self-consciousness that opens up whenever we open our mouths or turn on our cameras — is the explicit subject of “Inside.” Like Burnham’s previous stand-up specials, and like everyone else’s, it is addressed directly to an audience. The difference is that the audience is absent, and that Burnham’s performance is contained by a literal fourth wall. Alone in a room during lockdown, with a lighting rig, a keyboard and some other equipment but no other cast or crew, he plays with time — Does this last for 90 minutes? A year? Your whole life? — and with the conventions of online self-presentation. He undermines his privileged, white-male assumptions with self-awareness, and then undermines the assumption that self-awareness can accomplish anything. He mocks selfie and Instagram culture with the language of their own self-mockery. He fakes emotion so knowingly that when what looks like real emotion breaks out — when he weeps or raves or curls up in a ball — we have to be suspicious, even if we’re moved. He is either laying open his innermost self (one meaning of the title) or else showing off his specialized knowledge of how the manipulation of meaning works (another possible meaning of the title). Or both, because the point is that there isn’t a difference.Bo Burnham in “Inside.”NetflixUnless you really pay attention. Movies are often said to resemble dreams in the way they assemble fragmentary images and fugitive meanings into illusions of continuity. The internet, by contrast, replicates — and also, of course, consumes — waking consciousness, fragmenting experience into shards of distraction, dissociation and randomness. That’s the experience Burnham tries to capture in “Inside,” but you understand what he’s doing only if you keep watching, without checking your texts or your Twitter feed or using the screen-in-screen feature to keep track of the playoff game.That kind of exclusive engagement is something Burnham pointedly (and poignantly) begs for, even as he doubts it exists. His neediness turns a subtext of performance into text. Look at me! See me! Understand me! But like every other performer, he’s also saying the opposite: I’m not who you think I am. I’m not really here.What is it like to live inside that doubleness, to practice a self-presentation that it also self-erasure? The Diana in “Spencer” might have something to say about that. Kristen Stewart in “Spencer” absolutely does. The argument about how good an actress she is has long been settled. Her skill was never in dispute around here; this is her third Great Performers appearance. But her work in “Spencer” represents a new level of achievement, and not primarily because of the technical hurdles she clears. The accent is faultless, the posture impeccable, the mix of vulnerability and grit completely persuasive. But this isn’t Kristen Stewart disappearing into the role. It’s closer to the old Method ideal of an actor using her own experience to gain access to the inner life of the character. A big part of the experience that fuses Stewart to Diana is the experience of being a movie star, of living from a very young age in the glare of public scrutiny, of losing the boundary between your private and your performing self.I don’t mean that “Spencer” is shadow autobiography, or that Stewart identifies with Diana (though it’s easy enough to suppose that she sympathizes with some aspects of the princess’s plight). I’m more interested in the ways the film feeds our curiosity about both women, flattering and challenging our sense that we know them. We are taken into Diana’s confidence even as we are aware of invading her privacy, of witnessing her private agonies and anxieties. A terrible thing about her situation, among judgmental in-laws and all-seeing members of the royal staff, is the absence of anyone she can entirely trust. There turn out to be a few exceptions: her young sons; a kind dresser played by Sally Hawkins. Above all, there is the audience. Everyone else will betray her, but not us.Kristen Stewart in “Spencer.”NeonMaybe that’s too much. Maybe you recoil from that imposition. “Spencer” is like “Inside” in the way it risks alienating the viewer by demanding a kind and intensity of attention we may not be willing to confer. It also asks us to appreciate the way Diana learns to master the role of herself — to become more authentic not by rejecting the performance of princesshood but by taking control of it.Maybe that’s just what a great actor does. And maybe, right now, the truest performances — the great performances — are the ones that double that accomplishment, that require actors to play actors. The two women at the center of “Passing,” Ruth Negga’s Clare and Tessa Thompson’s Irene, are friends from childhood, both Black, who find themselves on opposite sides of the color line in 1920s New York. Not that it’s so simple as that. Clare, married to a racist white man, intentionally passes for white. Irene, who lives in Harlem and is active in the Negro Welfare League, is sometimes mistaken for white in other parts of the city. Which one is performing, and what role? Those questions generate a lot of suspense and also a sense of vertigo about what is real, who is telling the truth, and whether authenticity has any bearing at all in matters of race and sexuality.The beauty of the film lies in the contrast between the two central performances. Negga plays Irene as a risk-taker and an extrovert, delighting in her secret, in the danger of exposure, and in the ongoing, improvisatory imperatives of passing. Thompson’s Irene, repressed, serious and anxious, is driven to distraction, and ultimately to violence, less by Clare’s enactment of whiteness than by the lightness of spirit she brings to it. Clare knows how to act, so to speak, while Irene, forced into a performance of respectable, middle-class motherhood, feels trapped in a lie.Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson in “Passing.”NetflixEmi, in “Bad Luck Banging,” is ensnared in the consequences of a performance that found the wrong audience. A sex tape that she made with her husband finds its way onto the internet, causing a scandal at the school where Emi teaches. The first three minutes of the movie consist of that tape, which means that Pascariu, like Emi — Pascariu as Emi, though we don’t know that yet — is introduced in a state of maximum physical exposure. For the rest of the film, she is fully dressed and almost always masked, which removes some of the usual resources of screen performance. There are barely any close-ups, no visible smiles or grimacing, so we try to read her mood through her eyes and the crease between them. At the end, she confronts a hostile audience of parents who watch the naughty clip in her presence and then enact a theater of shaming and bad-faith argument, both for and against her. If the greatness of some of the other performances lies in their achievement of intimacy, Pascariu’s is great because she defends Emi’s privacy and preserves her dignity, reminding us how much we don’t know about her, even if we think we’ve seen everything.And so it is with Julie Harte, the young filmmaker played by Honor Swinton Byrne in Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir Part II.” In the first “Souvenir,” Julie fell in love with an eccentric fellow who turned out to be a compulsive liar and a heroin addict, and in the sequel she is making a film about their relationship and his death. This is an overtly autobiographical film, set in the 1980s, and Julie’s movie-within-the-movie, a student film, is a replica of Hogg’s own early work. The two “Souvenir” movies together seem to amount to an act of total cinematic exposure, but they also affirm just how mysterious even our own experience can be. And the key to the mystery — not the solution to it but the dark center of it — is Swinton Byrne’s quiet, reserved, at times almost affectless performance. We know her by not knowing her; her performance hides as much as it reveals.Honor Swinton Byrne in “The Souvenir Part II.”Joss Barratt/A24Which is just what people are like. And acting, finally, is a way of acquainting us with the strangeness of being human. One of the most perfect metaphors for this strangeness — and also one of the most perceptive considerations of acting I’ve seen onscreen — comes in “Drive My Car,” adapted by Ryusuke Hamaguchi from a Haruki Murakami short story. The main character, Yusuke, an actor and director, specializes in an unusual form of experimental theater, presenting classic plays with multinational casts, each actor speaking in their own native language. At a theater workshop in Hiroshima, he assembles a cast for Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” with dialogue in Japanese, Mandarin, Tagalog, Korean and Korean sign language. The actors prepare by mastering the timing of the lines, and by receiving the psychological meaning of words they don’t literally understand.The result, as presented onscreen and threaded through Yusuke’s own emotional turmoil, is almost shatteringly powerful. As Yusuke, Nishijima stands at a slight remove from the play-within-the-movie, since Yusuke hasn’t cast himself. Instead, he watches, as we watch, a kind of miracle unfold. The tenderness and melancholy of Chekhov’s play, its nuances of thwarted ambition, misdirected desire and piercing devotion, don’t emerge in spite of the linguistic cacophony, but by means of it. A more concentrated, almost spiritual form of understanding ripples among the actors — finally including Yusuke himself — and it seems to flow outward, from the stage to the theater audience and then from the screen to you. You don’t quite believe what you’ve seen, but you feel it. More than that: You know it. More

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      The Best Actors of 2021

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      HonorSwinton Byrne

      in ‘The Souvenir Part II’

      In both parts of Joanna Hogg’s autobiographical films, Honor Swinton Byrne faces a double challenge. As Julie Harte, she is portraying a version of the director, and frequently sharing the screen with her own mother, the formidable Tilda Swinton, who plays Julie’s genteel mother. “The Souvenir” is the two-part story of a young artist’s development, and Swinton Byrne’s confidence in her powers seems to grow alongside Julie’s.

      In both parts of Joanna Hogg’s autobiographical films, Honor Swinton Byrne faces a double challenge. As Julie Harte, she is portraying a version of the director, and frequently sharing the screen with her own mother, the formidable Tilda Swinton, who plays Julie’s genteel mother. “The Souvenir” is the two-part story of a young artist’s development, and Swinton Byrne’s confidence in her powers seems to grow alongside Julie’s. More

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      Hollywood Loves a Monstrous Mommy. Can It Do Her Justice?

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.I screened “The Lost Daughter,” Maggie Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same name, in my living room on a Sunday afternoon. I was on the couch with headphones, and my daughters, ages 6 and 4, were on the floor, fighting over Legos. At one point my younger daughter hit me on the head with a giant stuffed seal. “Watch me,” she yelled. She was going to make soup “out of blood.”It was a distracted form of watching and working, but it is one that after nearly two years of pandemic life feels, if not ideal, habitual. And it was the ideal state to receive a movie like “The Lost Daughter,” which captures with uncanny precision one version of the multitasking mother and arrives on the heels of a year that many women with children will remember as one of the hardest of their lives.The mother occupies a bewildering place in American society, simultaneously omnipresent and irrelevant. Harried moms are enshrined in paper-towel commercials, while our political institutions show a Teflon-like resistance to addressing their material needs. It would of course be impossible for any one work to show this condition, this cruelty, in all its richness and iterations, but American art about mothers is rarely made or received with the necessary asterisk, one that acknowledges the labor of caregiving, the five-alarm fires that are raging in our personal lives and political spheres.“The Lost Daughter” is one of a spate of recent films and television shows that attempt to make audible the scream rising in the throat. It tells the story of an English academic named Leda, played by Olivia Colman in the present and by Jessie Buckley in flashbacks to her life as a young mother, and opens with Colman on the seashore at night. Pain shadows her face and she has what looks like blood on her blouse; she sways and paces before collapsing by the lapping waves. The scene strikes an unsettling note that will thrum for the duration of the movie, which in the present follows Leda at age 47, on holiday on a Greek island. We watch her float in the sea, write and read while she sunbathes, eat ice cream, unfurl into an uneasy relaxation. When a chaotic group — among them a young woman and child — disturbs her idyll on the beach, Leda watches the pair with tenderness and pain on her face.We learn that the large group is a Greek American family from Queens, including the young woman Nina (Dakota Johnson) and her child Elena. Nina triggers overwhelming memories of Leda’s own early years of marriage and motherhood. In flashbacks, we see a young Leda radiating love and frustration as she cuddles her two daughters, plays lacklusterly, throws a doll out the window, withholds a kiss, strikes one of the girls, laughs with delight. In these flashbacks, the camera is close on the little girls, capturing both how cute and defenseless they are, and how exasperating they might be to a parent on the edge of patience and sanity. In one scene, young Leda’s husband, slender and shaggy-haired Jack Farthing, shakes Leda from her focused work under headphones while the girls’ wailing fills their flat. He gestures to his phone call. “It’s Sunday, you’re on,” she whispers furiously. “I’m working,” he says. “I’m suffocating,” she replies. They are both scholars, but his work seems to take precedence. There’s not much money, and he’s often away — an old story.In the present, the older Leda’s relationship with Nina’s family is close, mutually antagonistic and strange. Nina becomes a kind of double to Leda, turning to the older woman for support, though they appear to have little in common. Leda is aloof, independent; Nina is young, tied to a menacing husband, worn out by her daughter. “She won’t sleep unless I’m in the bed with her,” Nina tells Leda. “I’m really tired. I’m like scary tired.” And then Leda tells Nina, and us, her secret: She left her children for a period of time when they were small. A flashback reveals the inciting incident, a trip to a conference where she felt the erotic thrill of both professional and romantic attention, unencumbered by the girls. The note of menace continues unabated until a surprising moment of grace at the film’s very end.Dakota Johnson and Olivia Colman in “The Lost Daughter.”Yannis Drakoulidis/NetflixAs I watched, juggling my own domestic responsibilities with varying amounts of grace, I felt strangely honored by the way the film made space for Leda to make what is undeniably an ugly choice, allowed her to both enjoy her escape and suffer its consequences. Even in my distracted state, it swept in like a stinging breeze off the sea, a cogent, sensuous and provocative work of art that made me reflect on the paucity of realistic representations of motherhood, and the difficulties inherent in creating them.Cinema loves a monstrous mommy. Leda is often rude and unkind, but Colman’s and Buckley’s brilliant performances allow the viewer to inhabit her desperation, rendering judgment irrelevant. And the film’s timing is transcendent, arriving in a moment when the pandemic has disrupted school, shredded an already frayed child-care infrastructure and forced mothers to cobble together care, work with kids on their lap or drop out of the work force entirely. In this moment, there is something cathartic about a mother who says not only, “I prefer not to,” but, “I cannot,” momentarily leaving the relentless work of caregiving to someone else. It’s both a fantasy of walking away and a warning about its costs.The urge to flee is in the air. “Scenes From a Marriage,” Hagai Levi’s remake of Ingmar Bergman’s iconic mini-series, shows a mother and breadwinner, Mira, played by Jessica Chastain, as she takes a temporary assignment in Israel, along with a lover. She is the mother as philanderer and absentee. Mira tells her husband, Jonathan, played by Oscar Isaac, that she will fly in biweekly to see their young daughter, justifying her plan with a note of hysteria in her voice: “Men do it all the time and then, you know, it’s not really a big deal.” Unlike Gyllenhaal’s, Levi’s representation of caregiving is gestural, the child almost always in bed, a suspiciously good sleeper. And unlike Leda, Mira doesn’t make the clean break. What is interesting about the series, stylish and very sexy, is how Mira does manage to live a bit like a man, primarily because of her co-parent, a man who explicitly loves caregiving, and the fact that there’s enough money to ease the difficulty. It’s a fantasy of another kind.A mother leaves in Mike Mills’s new film, “C’mon C’mon,” because her family obligations require it. Mills’s film focuses on the other side of maternal absence: the child, and the person who cares for the child. Viv, played by Gaby Hoffmann, lives separately from her co-parent, who has bipolar disorder, but is obligated to help him through a psychiatric crisis. Joaquin Phoenix plays her brother Johnny, a “This American Life”-style radio host, who volunteers to watch her 9-year-old son, Jesse, while she is away. This is Uncle Johnny’s first rodeo, and he receives parenting instructions from Viv over the phone. The film shows us, mostly through these conversations, that Viv is an involved, present and very real mother (“I [expletive] hate it sometimes,” she tells Johnny, before telling him that he needs to feed Jesse some protein). Upon the movie’s release, I read male critics respectively describe Jesse as “a handful,” his mother as “indulgent.” And yet the movie shows behavior that is fairly standard in terms of child rearing. We see Jesse running away from his uncle in the drugstore and on the street, refusing sleep, rejecting his noodles in favor of ice cream. On the phone with his sister, Johnny laments his inability to control the little boy. “Welcome to my [expletive] life,” she tells him. “Nobody knows what they’re doing with these kids. You just have to keep doing it.”“C’mon C’mon,” black and white and a bit slow compared with the frenetic sensuality of “The Lost Daughter,” mirrors some of its portrayals: It is, in part, about how hard it is to take care of a small person. In contrast to Leda and Mira, Viv represents a perhaps more common version of the absent mother, one who is gone simply because she has to take care of something else. It’s not quite wish fulfillment — Viv has her hands full caring for Jesse’s dad, and she is still phone-coaching Johnny through his babysitting crises — but the day-to-day stuff is, for once, not her problem. I noted with interest Johnny’s recruitment of another colleague as an on-site babysitter, and Johnny’s female co-worker needling him about putting off work.Woody Norman and Gaby Hoffmann in “C’mon C’mon.”Tobin Yelland/A24 FilmsThe film gestures at the deeper systemic struggles of parenthood. Johnny’s adventures with Jesse are interwoven with his work interviewing (real, nonactor) children, whose circumstances are often difficult and remote from his own, including a child who feels responsible for his little sister while their father is incarcerated. The most perverse — and oblique — object lesson comes only in the final credits. The film is dedicated to Devante Bryant, one of the little boys interviewed. The viewer who searches for Bryant’s name learns that he was murdered by gunfire near his family’s house in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans, an area where the average household income is half that of the city’s as a whole. There are American babies much less likely to survive their childhood, American women less likely to survive their matrescence. There are also mothers whose difficult moments, moments like Leda’s or Mira’s or Viv’s, can lead to children being removed from their care. If class and race cannot inoculate women from the difficulties of motherhood, it insulates them from the worst depredations of a cruel country.The recent Netflix special “Maid,” an adaptation of Stephanie Land’s memoir, shows how absence can be forced both by economic conditions and by the state. The series follows Alex, a young white mother played by Margaret Qualley, as she escapes an abusive household with her daughter and navigates the circular logic of American welfare. As she fights her way to stability with paltry assistance programs and cleaning jobs, captions show her dwindling funds, an unusually explicit comment on the impossible economics of American life. In one scene, a social worker explains how Alex can qualify for assistance. “I need a job to prove that I need day care in order to get a job?” Alex asks, incredulous. “What kind of [expletive] is that?”Alex is likable: spunky, funny, scrupulous, beautiful, working on her writing in her rare free time. She is never impatient or unloving with her daughter, a preternaturally placid preschooler. I liked Alex and the show, but was struck by the paradox her character represents, particularly in contrast with Leda and Mira and Viv, who are given the space to be frustrated and miserable, a sort of double privilege of white and comparatively affluent mothers both in reality and onscreen. I imagined how “Maid” would be different if it showed Alex, run ragged from cruel bureaucracy and hard, underpaid jobs, losing her temper with her kid, looking ugly, looking mean. It’s a risk the show doesn’t take, underscoring the challenge of showing the systemic challenges of parenthood alongside the embodied, chaotic act of caregiving and the individual human frailty of mothers. At one point in “C’mon C’mon,” Johnny picks up Jacqueline Rose’s book-length essay “Mothers” from Viv’s desk. “Why on earth,” he reads in a thoughtful voice-over, “should it fall to them to paint things bright and innocent and safe?” Why indeed?Screen portrayals of motherhood that deal explicitly with class are also invariably tied to the raced logic of America. Compare the sunny Alex of “Maid” with Paula, the protagonist Chiron’s mother in the film “Moonlight” — a Black mother, poor and addicted to drugs, presented to the viewer as she appears to her child: untrustworthy, frightening, possessive and cruel. The director Barry Jenkins has spoken of his concern that her character, taken from the autobiographical play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” by Tarell Alvin McCraney, be presented in her full humanity, and she is carefully and empathetically played by Naomie Harris. Yet in the overall context of onscreen representations of Black motherhood, she still falls within what the scholar Nicole Rousseau identifies as a filmic tradition of “survival,” a motif which “illustrates a child attempting to survive a ‘bad’ Black mother.” “Moonlight” is the child’s story, not the mother’s. What might Paula’s movie look like? The love and terror and difficulty and grief of mothering without a safety net, the vagaries of temperament, chance and opportunity.“Maid” is a show with peculiar racial politics: In an effort to subvert tropes, perhaps, Alex’s first gig as a house cleaner is in the palatial home of a Black woman named Regina (played by a compelling Anika Noni Rose), who imperiously asks Alex if she can read. She and Alex eventually become friends, and fearful Regina, about to become a mother herself, asks Alex if she likes being a mom. “I live for my daughter,” Alex tells her. “You can go,” Regina says coolly, and I laughed out loud, annoyed that Alex didn’t use the moment to paint a fuller picture of the experience. She is a writer, after all.Rylea Nevaeh Whittet and Margaret Qualley in “Maid.”Ricardo Hubbs/NetflixWhile Alex is struggling in temporary housing, a court orders her to temporarily surrender her daughter to her boyfriend’s custody. To demonstrate her fitness, she attends a parenting class where a condescending man teaches nutrition to a roomful of mothers deemed lacking by the state. The implication of these scenes is that this is an injustice — Alex knows how to mother (it is her own mother, given space by the show to fall apart, who never learned). Poor women and women of color in America who are good parents are indeed uniquely vulnerable to having their children taken. And yet, the scenes made me think of the online parenting class I am currently taking through my H.M.O., one I tried for months to get into when the pandemic revealed I needed help — an opportunity born of privilege. Mothers around America eagerly scroll digestible TikToks and Instagram memes about how to be better parents. In “C’mon C’mon,” Johnny reads a script for “doing a repair” that his sister tells him to look up online after yelling at his nephew. Everyone benefits from an acknowledgment that raising children is hard work that does not always come naturally.When I watched “The Lost Daughter,” I felt seen by its portrayal of the condition of living simultaneously in joy and desperation, nostalgia and impatience. But I also know that Leda is a mother who looks a bit like me, with work a bit like mine — the kind of work you can do on the couch, lucky work, fulfilling work. Mothering is work, too — lucky and fulfilling, but work nonetheless, made harder at every juncture by a country whose institutions are built around white patriarchy, a country with rampant inequality, no paid leave, no universal child care or health care, no crisis plan beside “figure it out.” We can’t ask any one movie or show to encompass the entirety of a particular human experience. But we can point out what they show and what they obscure about our culture at a moment when the values and requirements of caregivers are argued in the corridors of power. We need more: more help, but also more art — art that is expansive, challenging, fair.Lydia Kiesling is the author of “The Golden State,” a novel. She lives in Portland, Ore. More

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      John Wilson Is Making the Least Predictable Show on TV

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.You might think that there’d be something uncanny about walking around New York with the filmmaker John Wilson, insofar as that’s what much of his HBO series, “How To With John Wilson,” consists of: We see footage he’s magpie’d from around the city while he muses, in his thoughtful-Muppet voice, along baggy themes. A morning stroll near his building, in Ridgewood, Queens, did not offer up anything with the kind of Wilsonian surreality the show specializes in — but our destination, a dollar store Wilson described as one of his favorites, did. He told me that he spends a lot of time in dollar stores when he has writer’s block. Nearby he pointed out a display of tools from Trisonic, a budget brand he investigated in a 2016 short film, before collecting the things he’d come for: sink strainers, a miniature folding chair, a toilet seat with a fluffy white Pomeranian printed on its lid. On the way to the checkout, he marveled at a product he said he’d already purchased from a different dollar store: a clock radio with a built-in fish tank far too tiny for a fish, a “cool dollar-store-only object.” The entire place suddenly felt like a tidy analogue of Wilson’s show: filled with things too mundane, too accidentally strange, too tacky or sad or flawed or lacking in panache, to actively star in anyone else’s account of the world.“How To,” now in its second season, is (nominally) a tutorial, offering advice on subjects like wine appreciation and parking, and (formally) a documentary, following its themes to a bowling-​ball factory or to interview a teenage real estate agent — and (ultimately) a form of memoir, a personal essay on video. But Wilson does magic with his staggering archive of street footage, all full of details that, if you encountered them yourself, you’d ponder for days: peculiar behaviors, dreamlike coincidences, strange omens and general “glitches in the Matrix,” as he puts it. Two workers mop a sidewalk in balletic unison; a man in a parked car idly sucks a woman’s toes; a woman places a live pigeon in a Duane Reade bag like a salad she’ll finish later. “Sharing your most intimate thoughts can be a disturbing and messy experience,” Wilson observes, as we watch a police officer pluck a sweater from a pool of blood on a subway floor. It would take a lot of footage to craft a timeline of romance from images of people publicly flirting, groping, proposing, marrying and bickering, and even more to end it with paramedics removing a corpse from an apartment building. Imagine the volume you’d need to be able to end it, as Wilson does, with paramedics dropping that body.There are highbrow precedents for Wilson’s close attention to the strange-and-ordinary, but what “How To” often resembles is the stuff you’d see posted to Twitter or TikTok in 20-second chunks, with glib captions about urban living or relatable moods. Wilson, who is 35, says that he loves seeing that kind of stuff online — “but I find it so tragic that it just kind of disappears.” He’d always felt compelled to build something larger from that material, lest it vanish into a “formless blob of content” or rot on an old hard drive. “The impulse to make the work like this to begin with,” he says, “was about giving a shape to all the stuff I was afraid of losing.”People talk about television’s capacity for novelistic depth, but surely the medium has more in common with pop music: We expect it to obey certain rhythms, resolve its motion in certain ways, pulse appealingly in the background even when our attention is divided. Part of what’s bewitching about “How To” is the extent to which it manages to replace those conventions with its own. “I get so bored watching something when I begin to realize the pattern,” Wilson tells me. Each of his episodes contains at least one moment in which you can scarcely believe the turn things have taken. The very first — “How To Make Small Talk,” which aired in October 2020 — leads Wilson from collecting a sweater from an ex to a vacation in Cancún, where he discovers MTV filming spring-break content; there he meets Chris, a weary-eyed party bro who eventually reveals that he came here in the wake of a friend’s suicide and is processing his grief in the least reflective environment imaginable. It’s one of a few remarkable turns in the episode. What’s more astonishing is that you might, watching it, have one of those rare TV experiences when you realize all the typical rhythms have fallen away, and what you’re watching has become unpredictable and alive — and somehow you’re not sure whether you’ve been watching it for 15 minutes or 45.Illustration by Nicolás Romero EscaladaWilson presents as having lived the life of a middle-class tristate Everyman, only marbled with an obsessiveness that pulls him in deeply weird directions. He was born in Queens, to city natives who soon moved the family to Long Island. One of the first things he told me was that he was grateful for his parents’ support, in part because he’d been “a bit of a tyrant — I was just very focused on making my little movies, growing up. Sometimes I would miss family vacations just to finish these pathetic little projects.” At one point, he says in the show, he made a movie every day. In a first-season episode he reveals a pile of notebooks in which he’s tracked everything he’s done each day for more than a decade, a grid of bullet points memorializing the four strips of bacon he ate or a train he took to Union Square.When he was young, he says in the second season’s “How To Remember Your Dreams,” his friends wouldn’t let him play Dungeons & Dragons with them, “because they said I wouldn’t take it seriously.” In response, he says, “I completely rejected fantasy from there on out. I started to only read books about real stuff and became obsessed with the authenticity of documentary filmmaking.” He struggled to fully enjoy fictional TV and was especially annoyed by things like dream sequences. (We see a shot of a barbershop named the Sopranos.) “While everyone else was going to Comic Con,” he says (as a man dressed like a wizard exits Washington Square Park), “I started going on court-TV shows to fill the void” (a 16-year-old Wilson appears, beaming, at the plaintiff’s table on an episode of “The People’s Court”).John Wilson in Season 2 of “How To With John Wilson,” a documentary series on HBO.Thomas Wilson/HBOHe studied film at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he made a documentary about balloon fetishists. Afterward, in the city, he worked a series of video-related jobs, each disillusioning in its own way: advertising, shooting infomercials, combing through a private investigator’s surveillance footage or serving as a production assistant for a reality show called “American Gypsy,” which offered “one of the first moments when I was like, this is all fake.”The impulse to hoard funny chunks of reality is reflected in Wilson’s apartment, the same rooms where he films his cat vomiting or his ruined risotto getting flushed down the toilet. (The toilet, he says, is a “very underrepresented image” on TV; he didn’t think it was weird to flush food down one until his show aired and people commented.) As he was showing me title cards from the series, which he paints on bits of newsprint, I realized that he was surrounded by stuff from the show: a chart of the “Mandela Effect” explored in the first season; a painting of a relatable amputee from the new “How To Throw Out Your Batteries”; some vintage Ray-O-Vacs from the same episode; he was even wearing a T-shirt from the parking convention in “How To Find a Spot.” A nearby shelf was stocked with those “books about real stuff,” including Studs Terkel with his interviews of ordinary Americans. Another of Wilson’s favorites is Susan Orlean’s “Saturday Night,” portraits of how various Americans spend the evening, from 1990. While hiring for his second season, Wilson kept mentioning wanting someone like Susan Orlean, until an HBO executive pointed out that they could probably just ask Susan Orlean, who came on board as a writer.Wilson’s show: filled with things too mundane, too accidentally strange, too tacky or sad or flawed or lacking in panache, to actively star in anyone else’s account of the world.Wilson told me about his love for the Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl’s “In the Basement” — “just a bunch of very slow portraits of people in their basements,” each space devoted to some unique purpose. He showed me a clip from one of his favorite artists, George Kuchar: “He made this series called ‘The Weather Diaries,’ where he would go to this motel in the Midwest every year and try to document extreme weather but then just get really distracted.” He’s an admirer of Louis Theroux’s BBC documentaries, of “Heavy Metal Parking Lot,” of the many hits of close documentary attention to how bizarre ordinary life can be.“Everything is such a performance these days,” he said. It’s not as if Wilson is above using shtick to shape his show — his voice-over is a beautiful one, deploying sinus noises and uncomfortable trailings-off to keen effect. But he does seem to have a fear of his reality being distorted. While constructing the show’s first season, he says, “I would break down and cry in the edit, just because I felt all these hands trying to shape this thing that was so intensely personal to me.” Working in advertising, he’d seen how you could degrade and commercialize someone’s work. His show’s format, he hoped, was protection from that — at the very least, he joked, he wasn’t about to be recast with Ryan Seacrest.If you want to see an Edenic, before-the-fall depiction of American adults, look for clips of Groucho Marx’s “You Bet Your Life” television broadcasts. They began in 1950, when you could find guests who hadn’t yet absorbed the norms of televisual behavior, and would present themselves the same way they might have addressed a new neighbor or an Elks lodge. They seem touchingly pure, while Marx, waggling his brows in the midcentury equivalent of “that’s what she said” jokes, might as well be from the ’90s.The people Wilson features on his show occasionally remind me of those guests. It’s not that they don’t understand proper TV behavior; these days we learn that before addition and subtraction. But even successful efforts to replicate it tend to be helped along by editing; Wilson likes to say that on reality TV, if you kept any shot rolling just a few seconds longer, the illusion would be shattered. “How To” is constantly finding people who crackle to life in those extra seconds. It’s important, Wilson says, to see these unpolished portraits, “because a lot of the stuff we consume makes us feel like we’re not enough, sometimes. Because we’re not cheery enough or sharp enough.” He uses the word “representation” here — the representation of ordinary American ungainliness.The people he focuses on do trend toward those typically neglected by television. They’re middle-aged with brusque local accents or wealthy but not in a worldly way; they have some kind of sales patter or nutty theory you’d normally tune out; they’re nerdy or goony or oversharers. Sometimes they aren’t trying to meet the expectations of televisibility; sometimes they’re trying too hard, and the effort is coming out lopsided. Sometimes they’re absurdly televisable, as with one Vivian Koenig, a no-nonsense older woman seen giving her husband a theatrical “can’t you see I’m busy” gesture that puts America’s top comics to shame. If TV works like pop music, seeing these humans on it is as recklessly thrilling as seeing Harry Styles pluck a random dad from an arena crowd and hand him a microphone.It must be exciting, I told Wilson, when amid the countless conversations he records, he realizes he’s stumbled across a real live one.“Do you not feel that,” he asked, “when you talk to someone that is slowly revealing a cascading story to you, or they don’t always realize how interesting it is?”Most of us, I said, are busy, and cautious, and when a stranger starts opening up about, say, their anti-circumcision concept album, we politely vanish.“I do that, too, sometimes,” Wilson said, “when I don’t have the time or the camera.” But when he’s seeking this stuff out, “you can tell immediately if someone wants to be recorded or not. And in that moment, when they give you an inch and you continue talking to them, and you raise the camera a little higher, a little higher, you begin to realize that oh, my God, so many people have a story.” Often, he told me, he would film someone for an entire day before they even asked what it was for; they just wanted to be recorded.Holding the camera himself, he says, “changes the energy of the room.” Part of Wilson’s charm is that he almost never lets this energy provoke a cringe, except at his own expense. That reversal is the point of astonishment in “How To Cover Furniture,” a rumination on how we try to protect things from harm. At its climax, an interior designer answers Wilson’s questions with a friendly evisceration of his whole vibe: His camera, she says, is a protective mechanism, which he uses to connect with people from behind a barrier. She looks into its lens and offers advice that feels both kind and situationally hostile: “I would love for you, sometimes in your life, in your head, to be like, ‘I should put the camera down in this situation. I should just be John.’”From “How To Cover Furniture.”HBOIn his 2017 short “The Road to Magnasanti,” Wilson observes that Brooklyn’s new condos “will often decorate their halls with murals of the street, and photos of a New York they’re trying to replace — which may actually end up coming in handy, because soon enough that city will only exist in pictures.” Preserving the texture of that city is one of Wilson’s fixations. He chooses wider shots that can “basically also act as a photograph, if people need to go back and reference what one corner looked like.” His prepandemic footage, he says, is very likely “one of the most comprehensive archives of what New York looked like right before it changed forever.”And yet one of the main impressions you get, watching his show, is that New York could hypergentrify itself into one continuous A.T.M. vestibule, or sink under rising oceans, and somehow you’d still go outside and find its residents, over by the deposit envelopes or oyster beds, doing their casually deranged thing.Television offers us both a chance to learn about the world around us and a chance to imagine other worlds entirely, but an unsettling amount of programming somehow combines the worst of these possibilities. It takes us to exotic worlds but insists on filling them with familiar narratives; or else it purports to show us reality but makes that reality offensively artificial. Wilson’s quirks and anxieties — the vexed relationship with fiction, the terror of impermanence, the hunger to observe — seem to have channeled him toward a lovely alternative. He wanted to be able to make his own entertainment, he told me, because so much around him felt straitjacketed, “trying to make different versions of the same thing.” He seemed sincerely baffled by all the repetition. “I don’t know why everyone feels like they need to chase these archetypes a lot of the time,” he said. “I don’t know why people are so afraid of just, like, doing something new.”Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine. He has previously written for the magazine about the film “The Irishman,” devil’s advocates, “grifters” and the musician Richard Dawson. More