The megalomaniacs of Oscar season and the man who would be king.
3 days ago (jeremyhelligar.medium.com)
There’s an early episode of the TV sitcom Will & Grace where one of the characters (it had to be Grace, but it was actually Will) makes an interesting analogy between relationships and gardening. The gist of it: In any successful relationship, he suggests, there’s the flower and there’s the gardener. The former — the above-the-title star of the romance — must be nurtured, tended to, and catered to by the latter, aka, the costar.
Two gardeners may have a solid shot at “happily ever after the end.” For them, love is a peaceful, easy, low-impact activity where they can feed off each other. However, when two flowers like Will and Grace cross-pollinate, love — and life — becomes a series of stalemates. It will almost always end in dehydration.
Love in the garden isn’t as simple, though, as Will & Grace made it sound. Look how it turned out for Adam and Eve. You can only stay on your knees for so long. Even if you apply the flower-gardener analogy to friendships and working relationships as well as to romance, a flower and a gardener might co-exist for decades (or for six seasons and two movies of Sex and the City), but love, like, tolerance, and devotion don’t necessarily bloom forever and for always.
But then, sometimes it does. How many people have gone down in service of Donald Trump? I don’t know what it is about our 45th president that turns his followers into totally submissive sheep, willing to suspend their common sense indefinitely and lose their freedom for him.
We’ve seen the videos of the January 5 attack on the U.S. Capitol. We’ve watched his gardeners go to prison. Domino dancing/watch them all fall down. Meanwhile, the twice-impeached, four-times-indicted Trump continues to run free, still standing, still blooming, and, inexplicably, still inspiring an insane level of devotion among his flock.
He’s probably more likely to return to the White House in 2025 than he is to ever be fitted for an orange jumpsuit to match his spray tan, all because his gardeners refuse to let him shrivel up and die. Are they getting anything of beauty in return? Since Trump burst onto the political scene a little under a decade ago, and especially since he lost the 2020 election, what has he really done for anyone other than himself and his kids?
The other day while I was watching Maestro, the new biopic of the legendary conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein directed by Bradley Cooper and starring Cooper as the titular master, I had a déjà vu feeling. I haven’t even made a dent in my Oscar-season screeners, and already I’m sensing a pattern: The Trump Effect is in full effect in Hollywood. Megalomaniacs have taken over the movies.
A number of the films I’ve screened in recent weeks — Maestro, Nyad, Passages, Priscilla, Eileen and others — feature an overlapping dynamic: someone losing themself in someone else. One character at the center of each film is narcissistic and self-centered, like the star of their very own Trump Show — er, Truman Show. They’re the flowers, and in order for them to bloom, their gardeners must get lost in their talent, their skill, and their charisma until the garderners eventually disappear.
Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) in Passages is enmeshed in a love triangle with a gay married couple, and she goes to extreme lengths to avoid that gardener fate. The object of her affection is Tomas (Franz Rogowski), a film director who needs constant watering by everyone who enters his orbit, much to the frustration and exhaustion of his husband Martin (Ben Whishaw). By the time Agathe makes a fateful decision that sets the destiny of the three central characters in motion, she’s already all but vanished.
Joe, a thirtysomething father of two, pulls a semi-disappearing act in May December, the dark comedy inspired by the true-crime story of Mary Kay Letourneau. The handsome man-child (perfectly played by Riverdale’s Charles Melton) gives his youth and, to some degree, his entire identity, to his significantly older wife Gracie (Julianne Moore) on a silver platter.
Meanwhile, in Eileen, Anne Hathaway’s killer kiss and Bette Davis eyes lead the title character (Thomasin Mackenzie) down a dark, twisted path not unlike the January 6 mob in service of Trump — which is also sort of what happens with Oxford University student Oliver (Barry Keoghan) in Saltburn the moment he catches a glimpse of Jacob Elordi as Felix, a beautiful and charming aristocrat.
In Maestro, Felicia Montealegre, the long-suffering wife of Leonard Bernstein, doesn’t go quite so far in her enthrallment. But in real life, Montealegre did stay married to the West Side Story composer for 27 years, ’til her death did they part, despite his string of flagrant affairs with various men and women. (Priscilla Presley knows when to cut Elvis loose in Priscilla, but has real-life Priscilla ever really let him go?)
Early in Maestro, Montealegre asks Bernstein to tell her a secret about himself, and he reveals that as a boy, he used to fantasize about killing his father. In hindsight, one might reinterpret the scene as presaging her own slow, decades-long “death” by vanishing at the hands of Bernstein’s ego and his voracious sexual appetite.
Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright, in Oscar-caliber mode), the writer at the center of American Fiction, doesn’t inspire that kind of devotion from anyone during the movie’s 117-minute running time. But although we never meet his ex-wife, nor are we told exactly why their marriage ended, it’s not hard to imagine that their marriage couldn’t contain his ego, which he would probably mistake for creative genius.
The flower and the gardener even make an appearance in Barbie, the year’s biggest film, which takes an old-fashioned binary view of the battle of the sexes. In one pivotal scene, Ken tells Barbie that he only exists because she does. In the Mattel universe, he’s not wrong, but since Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie, who play Ken and Barbie respectively, are human beings and not dolls, the moment of vulnerability teeters on the cusp of heartbreaking.
Ken: “I don’t know who I am without you!”
Barbie: “You’re Ken.”
Ken: “But it’s Barbie and Ken. There is no just Ken. That’s why I was created. I only exist within the warmth of your gaze. Without it, I’m just another blonde guy who can’t do flips.”
Of all the flowers and gardeners I’ve seen in Oscar-season movies so far, only Bonnie Stoll, Jodie Foster’s supporting and supportive character in Nyad, emerges from her devotion fully in tact. She puts her life on hold — and remortgages her house — in order to help Diana Nyad (Annette Bening), her maddeningly self-involved bestie of 30 years, achieve her dream of being the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida.
After three failed attempts, Bonnie, fed up with the swimmer’s extreme narcissism, temporarily takes her leave, and for Diana, ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone. In a satisfying and fully earned character arc, Diana evolves without completely ditching the megalomaniac she is at her core. She remains an imperfect storm of stunning skill, massive ego, and incredible insecurity, but she also comes to realize there’s no “I” in “we.”
Diana’s journey becomes Bonnie’s, too. Could the 64-year-old have swum 110 miles from Cuba to Florida without Bonnie as her coach and wing-woman (fin-woman?)? As I watched Team Nyad’s MVP (that would be Bonnie) encouraging Diana to take those final few steps out of the water and onto the coast of Key West, I had my doubts.
In the end, I was just as impressed by Bonnie’s accomplishment as I was by Diana’s. She’s the constant gardener throughout Nyad, on dry land and on water, but at the finish line, she’s equally and fully in bloom.
Written by Jeremy Helligar
Brother Son Husband Friend Loner Minimalist World Traveler. Author of “Is It True What They Say About Black Men?” and “Storms in Africa” https://rb.gy/3mthoj