Flow | 2024 | PG | Animated | directed by Gints Zilbalodis | 1 h 25m | 3 1/2 out of 5 |
A Real Pain | 2024 | rated R | starring Jessie Eisenberg, Kieren Culkin, Jennifer Grey | written & directed by Jesse Eisenberg | 4 out of 5 stars |
What is a movie for? To co-opt Anna Kendrick in this year’s misandrist thriller Woman of the Hour. No, seriously. Because if left up to the throngs of internet critics that have risen to influence in the charm void left by the deaths of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert and corrupted, pretentious, agenda-driven mainstream critics, you’d think that movies were about one thing and one thing only: Plot. It’s a storytelling medium. How solid is the plot? how much real-world sense does it make? how logical are the character actions? And most importantly are there any of the cinema kiss of death – plot holes? The yard stick that informs all of this cinema criticism – from woke critics, to anti-woke critics, to CinemaSins autists – is, of course, Star Wars. Because no movie in the first 77 years of cinema had any idea what it was doing until Star Wars came along and showed us story arcs, backstory creation and world building.
And yet too many of my favorite movies are either plotless hang-out films or dream-like experiences designed more around putting you in a place and getting you to feel an emotion than to move something through a plot. Lost in Translation, My Dinner with Andre, Dazed and Confused, heck, EuroTrip, all about hanging out with the characters and watching their relationships bounce off of each other. Or they are thinly plotted but atmosphere driven horror movies like Halloween, Duel or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. or none of it matters and it was all a dream to begin with, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Housemaid, The Wizard of Oz or more film noirs than I can shake a stick at. Importance of plot varies from movie to movie, I’m on here just as often saying that certain genre movies would have improved with a solid backbone of a 3-act structure, but today we’re going to acknowledge that doesn’t work for everything and logic and realism is fundamentally the opposite of what movies are supposed to be. Their dreams, nightmares and escapism and they have been from the very beginning.
Every year, plot-less movies pop up from the fertile mind of indie filmmakers to varied effect. Today we’re going to talk about two of my favorites from 2024. The first is Flow, a beautiful piece of animation from Latvia about a cat that bands together with other animals to survive a flood. Eschewing the Disney animation template, none of the animals in Flow talk, which leaves director Gints Zilbalodis the more difficult and satisfying task of creating characters out of their actions and interactions. We learn who are the leaders, the follows, the adventurers and the schemers by how they go on their journey and gather food, but the movie mostly plays out like a silent film. The animation is seemingly hand-drawn, colorful and spends the running time putting us in the headspace of a cat, not unlike last year’s sci-fi video game Stray. It’s also not the easiest thing to watch, even at under 90 minutes viewers will be fidgeting. It’s a lot harder to relate to animals than talking, emoting humans. Flow is ultimately less a movie that entertains and more like a painting that you hang on a wall and admire for the talent behind it, its daring and commitment. But that doesn’t put it as any less of a movie, in fact, it’s even more pure cinema than the latest superhero movie. Because at no point it tells us how to feel an audience will come away with different ways of connecting with it. For me, I didn’t connect with it wholly but it’s still art.
Next, we have A Real Pain. An equally plotless road trip movie about two cousins on a sightseeing vacation in Poland after the death of their grandmother and the debut writer/director effort from Jesse Eisenberg. I absolutely loved this movie. Teetering on a 4 1/2 score, A Real Pain is a note-perfect little gem, simple and small in scope, but with every piece crafted to near excellence. The performances from Eisenberg and Kieren Culkin are real and raw (even though Culkin is essentially playing Roman Roy from Succession again), their relationship has a perfect mixture of strain and love distant cousins might have and the movie immerses us in the experience of touring Poland as a character of Jewish heritage. The movie centers around uncoiling Culkin’s character Benji, a live wire that schemes and doesn’t care what people think one minute and then really cares what they think the next, often giving a hard time to the group’s poor tour guide (Will Sharpe, also excellent). The dynamic of the uptight Eisenberg and the life-living Culkin has been done a million times and almost never feels this authentic. The movie is full of moments funny and awkward and dramatic without slipping into manipulative melodrama – and even while it is essentially a sight-seeing tour where we ride shotgun as these two characters eat, see monuments, hang out on hotel roof-tops and tour the ruins of concentration camps.
Both Flow and A Real Pain is without plot, protagonists and antagonists or particularly high stakes – in the case of Real Pain, no stakes, ending right back where it started. Both effectively immerse you in its world, whether it’s one created out of animation or a real place halfway around the world that we get to experience from our seats. A Real Pain has an authenticity that can’t be created on a Hollywood soundstage, that you can feel coming through the film in a way that shouldn’t be perceptible but is. It works so beautifully because of how connected to the characters we are. Or at least, I was. I could have watched these two walk around Poland all day, while also admitting that 90 minutes is the perfect length for the film.
I’m not 100% sure how internet critics take plot-less movies like these. These movies don’t fit into their template, their checklist, of how to evaluate something. A template that asks characters to be both realistic and logical when real people regularly act outside of logic. The pent-up ball of emotion Benji here is a great example of that. It’s not Star Wars. We don’t get their backstories, the heroes’ journey or a villain archetype. Nobody saves the cat in Flow, the cat saves itself. And yet by the end we’ve been on a journey, we’ve felt something and we’ve come away entertained and satisfied.