Streamer Dreamers,
Hope you all are safe & sound. For whatever it’s worth, while I don’t foresee a tidy, peaceful resolution to the horror in Ukraine, I’d bet Putin’s aggression will end there. In the long run, he has no endgame. His war isn’t just cruel: it’s also expensive. You can’t conquer a continent if your economy was failing before it was sanctioned. So… What the hell is he doing? Is he a bellicose jerk, flexing for sport but constrained by something like rationality, or is he an utter madman? To what extent is this about big forces of history v.s. one guy having a hard time in quar and acting out?!?
Over the past year, I’ve mentioned docs about dictators and heroic dissenters — including Navalny & Revolution of Our Times — but fictional movies & series could rise to the occasion too. Sci-fi has helped the world begin to think through climate change. Hollywood should be equally imaginative & helpful with the new authoritarianism.
One of us — a loyal parser of Hollywood Forever & less importantly my BFF — has a movie out. I had planned to mention it, like in a P.S., pro-forma style, because he'd hunt me down otherwise. I'm just keeping it 100.
But then I went to the Laemmle Pasadena and saw that shit... and it was overwhelmingly beautiful. I should've known based on the reviews, but I wasn't prepared for him to knock me out. So I'm devoting a whole email to telling you to see So Late So Soon, out now from Oscilloscope on Prime etc., the debut film from 40 under 40 yuge bitch Daniel Hymanson.
A few decades ago, there was an academic debate about whether it was possible to make art that existed outside "the whale of late capitalism," or whether art had already been swallowed whole.
So Late So Soon dodged the whale.
This is a movie that was going to get made no matter what, about two people who made art for decades and decades in a way that seems as matter-of-fact as any bodily function. The subjects, Jackie & Don Seiden, are a married couple of artist-teachers in their twilight years. Maybe they could be described as outsider artists, but that term implies a naivete that doesn't feel right for them. These people know what they're doing.
They live in this house at the northern tip of Chicago. They wake up everyday and make stuff -- sculptures, drawings, montages, otherworldly found object assemblages -- that reflects their demons & urges. They talk about whether the projects are working & what they're trying to say through them. I haven't encountered many adults who can express themselves like they can, as artists & as people.
The thing is, Don & Jackie are old. They can't keep up the house. And they are anything but dreamy about the end. They talk about their circumstance with a disarming clarity that, again, may only be possible if you've dedicated your life to better expressing how you feel: they tell you they are going to die, that they haven't resolved their early traumas or even their doubts about each other, that they are scared shitless of falling.
But in the middle of one marital spat -- and there are a few -- Don declares: "We've made a life. And we've made a life that's really unusual. And it's only a life that you and I could have made."
Daniel made the movie over a decade, during which he worked with the venerable Department of Motion Pictures, the little company behind Beasts of the Southern Wild, and the Ross Brothers. So Late So Soon only bears the marks of those influences in its sheer passion, but it wasn’t always so. I saw early cuts with footage Daniel shot while working for those guys that included fictional elements, like a dramatization of one of Jackie’s fanciful stories with a kid actor. For Daniel, it may have been an attempt to recapture his earliest experience of meeting Jackie, but in retrospect, it felt less like the fingerprint of the person I know and more like a Sundance movie I had already seen. Daniel scrapped all of it. That was at least five years in. In retrospect, he was right, but I cannot emphasize how nuts he seemed.
The final cut is its own thing. It's gentle and shattering, patient and cinematic, with pastel colors, heavy shadows, long takes, big soundscapes, & decisive cuts that remind you that nothing is forever. All this craft is sort of astonishing to me given that Daniel operated as a one-Jew crew during production and had essentially zero technical experience beforehand. But he worked alone, presumably because doing so protected an intimacy that feels familial.
Daniel met Jackie as a little tyke, when he was a pre-schooler in her class, and he has held on to her through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. He has a wonderful real-mom; and in Jackie, he also has an art-mom. He has exhausted the shit out of me talking about her & the movie. I once went to stay with him in Chicago in an apartment around the corner from Jackie & Don's house that had zero furniture. All he did was shoot. We slept on the floor. He didn't let me go in the house.
You can learn a lot about your friends by watching their movies. It was only after seeing the final product that I felt like I understood his obsessiveness in the process & some other stuff about him too. He wasn't just being perfectionist or careerist, though he's both of those. Daniel making this movie, especially as his debut, is his way of telling us what he values & how he'd like to live. In Jackie & Don, he saw an example: He just really, really wants to do his own thing, protecting his time so that he can listen to his subjects & his instincts.
On the other hand, I suspect he may not want to continue going it alone. For a bachelor, he made a movie that's awfully attuned to the rhythms, compromises, & comforts of a marriage. Jackie & Don do talk openly about what has never worked in their relationship, but there’s no questioning just how much they matter to each other — especially so in this season of their lives. This movie’s proximity to death manifests not just in sadness but in a bracing momentum that I didn’t expect and haven’t really felt before.
So while the world has a way of sanding down our ambitions, I suspect that Daniel's life & work, like Jackie & Don’s, will continue to be unusual & fervently alive.
Hollywood Forever Y’all,
Max