CineWomen: Nia DaCosta works in classic Hollywood genres with ‘Candyman,’ ‘Little Woods’
Plus ‘Respect’ by Liesl Tommy and ‘CODA’ by Sian Heder
My, how time has been a strange beast these past eighteen months or so. It seems like it’s still March 2020, doesn’t it, as we continue to navigate this neverending pandemic, and the professional and personal changes it has wrought? The idea for CineWomen still feels like that — an idea. And yet, here I am, filing my twelfth monthly column, coming up on a year of watching and writing about films by women.
Inspired by the #52FilmsByWomen and #FemaleFilmmakerFriday pledges/hashtags, I’d hoped that by this time this project would have produced a list of fifty-two films by women — one for each Friday of the year. In fact, as the index pinned to the top of the blog shows, CineWomen has exceeded that with fifty-five films — plus oodles more when you count individual short films in the Alice Guy-Blaché and Akosua Adoma Owusu collections — by forty-five filmmakers.
Some of these women — Sofia Coppola, Patty Jenkins, of late Chloé Zhao — are household names. Others — Chantal Akerman, Julie Dash, Mira Nair — icons of cinema. Still others — Guy-Blaché, Lucrecia Martel, the aforementioned Owusu — wonderful new discoveries. And I’ve yet to write about work from some of the giants — Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Campion, Agnès Varda.
What I’ve found, in fact, are some very difficult decisions each month as I pick and choose what movies to cover. Where I’d worried I’d struggle to find two new films directed by women each month, what I’ve found instead — perhaps due to a glut of releases as movie theaters reopen during the pandemic — are dozens to choose from, in all genres. To wit, this month we have a horror movie, a Western, a music biopic and a coming-of-age Sundance darling — three of them new.
Thanks so much for reading. Now, let me know what you’re watching. I’m on Twitter at @annleee.
‘Candyman’
Four times now, filmmakers have looked into their cameras to evoke the legend of Candyman — one shudders to think what will happen with a fifth. In the meantime, Nia DaCosta’s direct sequel to the 1992 original, itself based on a Clive Barker story, is plenty scary with horrors imagined and real.
Nearly three decades after the events of the first film — ignoring the two that came after — Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green public housing project has been demolished to make way for luxury apartments and condos. The site can’t escape its legacy as a source of Black trauma both historical and contemporary. Black men throughout the ages have been wrongfully accused, tortured, and killed in this place, fomenting a persistent urban legend involving art, razor-laced candy, a hook for a hand, bees, and fire.
Artist Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is struggling to find inspiration when he first hears the scary story and decides to make it the subject of his next piece. Of course, his incredulous critics can’t help but accept the challenge to look into a mirror and say Candyman’s name five times, and the long-dormant terror is unleashed.
Meanwhile, a nasty bee sting has infected Anthony’s hand and spread, effecting a transformation that’s physical, artistic, and supernatural, muddying whether our protagonist — who in the previous three films has been played by white women — is victim or villain.
As portrayed by Abdul-Matten (HBO’s Watchmen), Anthony is handsome, charming, and immediately sympathetic, even as a little smile escapes at the mention of his name in a news report about the gruesome murders that took place in front of his artwork. Even as his erratic behavior frightens his gallerist partner Brianna (Teyonah Parris). Even as he comes to symbolize (more than he realizes) the very monster he fears.
From the very outset of the film, which opens with flipped title cards and a disorienting upside-down tracking shot through the streets of Chicago, DaCosta plays with reflective surfaces to explore this idea of a mirror underworld where Candyman tentatively resides. It’s frightening when you can’t see in the real world what’s reflected in a mirror; it’s downright terrifying when what’s reflected isn’t a reflection at all.
Meanwhile, the script written by Da Costa with producers Jordan Peele (the writer-director of Get Out and Us) and Win Rosenfeld uses myth to probe gentrification, including the artistic class that instigates it; police brutality; and cathartic vengeance in a scary movie that challenges viewers aesthetically and thematically after the last frame.
Candyman (2021), directed by Nia DaCosta (theaters)
‘Little Woods’
Nia DaCosta, who will follow up her horror flick Candyman with the superhero movie The Marvels next year, has operated throughout her career within classic (and male-dominated, but then I guess they all are) Hollywood genres, with a debut feature film that plays with the conventions of the Western. In Little Woods, our hero is a Black woman, not a white man, who drives a pickup truck, not a horse, against the backdrop of drug smuggling, not a loot or land grab. But the landscape — the rugged North Dakota frontier that’s being plumbed for riches and the fringe town where the haves and have-nots uneasily reside — vaults the Old West genre into the twenty-first century.
Tessa Thompson stars as Ollie, a North Dakota woman on probation for running prescription meds across the Canadian border. With just ten days left on her sentence, she’s determined to keep her head down, doing laundry and delivering meals to local oil workers. But with her sister Deb (Lily James), already a struggling single mom, dealing with an unwanted pregnancy, and their recently dead mother’s house facing foreclosure, desperation drives Ollie back into the life she’s worked so hard to leave behind.
DaCosta and cinematographer Matt Mitchell deploy handheld camerawork — another modern departure from the genre in which they’re working — to bring intimacy to these two women’s stories, whose personal collisions with addiction, abortion, the housing crisis, and the broken promise of the American dream are writ large.
Little Woods (2018), directed by Nia DaCosta (Hulu)
‘Respect’
How to sum up the life and career of Aretha Franklin, a woman whose career spanned nearly two-thirds of a decade. A singer-songwriter with 112 charted singles, eighteen Grammys, and more than 75 million records sold. The first female performer inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, winner of a Pulitzer Prize, and awardee of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. A mother of four who first became pregnant when she was twelve(!), endured an abusive marriage, and struggled with alcoholism. A style icon, civil rights activist, and above all a woman of faith.
It’s too much for one biopic, and director Liesl Tommy doesn’t try, focusing instead on a formative twenty-year period in which the Queen of Soul finds her voice. Because for a long time, “Re,” played by Jennifer Hudson (handpicked by Franklin herself), may have the greatest voice in the world, but it’s at the mercy of her domineering preacher father (Forest Whitaker), physically and emotionally violent manager/husband, and her own personal demons.
Draping the film in a nostalgic haze, Tommy suggests a lack of clarity during these early years as Aretha stumbles toward freedom, driven by a stirring soundtrack of hit after hit, and powered by a performance from Hudson that glimpses at Franklin’s musical genius, personal conviction, and that incredible voice.
(p.s. Can’t get enough of Aretha Franklin? The concert film of her live Amazing Grace gospel album was released after decades of delays in 2018 and is available on Hulu and Kanopy.)
Respect (2021), directed by Liesl Tommy (theaters)
‘CODA’
CODA, directed by Sian Heder (Tallulah) is also about a singer finding her voice, though on a less iconic, perhaps more intimate scale.
As the hearing child of deaf adults (thus the title CODA), Ruby (Emilia Jones) is her family’s conduit to the world, helping her father Frank (Troy Kotsur) and older brother Leo (Daniel Durant) on their struggling fishing boat each morning before school and interpreting for them and her mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin) with vendors, the community and anyone else who doesn’t sign — a doctor explaining both parents’ jock itch, for example, in a scene that captures the raucous humor of this particular clan.
What Ruby really wants to do, though, is to sing — an impulse that not only can her family not appreciate but threatens to steal her away from her tight-knit kin.
Outside the Rossi family, Heder’s characters are cliché (Ruby’s flamboyant choir teacher played by Eugenio Derbez) and boring (her drippy love interest played by Ferdia Walsh-Peelo). Inside, however, they’re funny and annoying and self-reliant and insular and in conflict with each other about the future of the family business and how they relate to the rest of the world — authentic, in other words, to family life in general and Deaf culture specifically.
CODA has all the hallmarks of a Sundance darling — winning the Grandy Jury and Audience Awards as well as best director and best ensemble and then selling to Apple for a record-breaking $25 million. The thing is, it’s a formula that works, here yielding an entertaining, moving story that illuminates a community underrepresented onscreen.
CODA (2021), directed by Sian Heder (Apple TV+)
