Sad Sack Cinema

or: I saw the holdovers twice in one week and all I got was this melancholy ache

When I was back home for Thanksgiving, I went to the movies at Film at Lincoln Center and then walked back to the apartment I’m staying at, almost forty-five blocks. It was raining and I took my headphones off so I could hear people talking and cars driving and the sounds that I always miss even though they are very regular, and I go to school in a city anyhow.

This is the time of year when I engage in a very special activity (which in fact often entails walking forty-five blocks in the rain for no reason) that I like to call Listening To Sad Music On Purpose. The way I see it, I have what is basically the opposite of seasonal depression: when the weather drops to 30 degrees and the sun starts setting at 4:30 in the afternoon, my mood improves greatly, and I take great pleasure in a long walk with some somber folk music in my ear. That’s just me!

In addition to my music taste changing with the seasons, I have been reading The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, a book that contains maybe one of the saddest characters even put to print in Ronald Lisbon. As I near the end of the book I realize that he is one of the reasons I find this story so compelling, and that—not to be reductive or blunt, though what I am about to say is the crux of this post (essay? I never know what to call these things)— sad sacks like him are pretty much crucial to all of my favorite books and movies. Mostly movies. That’s what this darn piece (sure) is about!

This whole phenomenon took shape in my mind after I saw The Holdovers in theaters, a movie I loved so much and so fast that I immediately made plans to see it again at a different theater because they were playing it on 35mm (fancy! cozy!). here is a movie that feels straight out of another era in how simple and straightforward it feels — it helps, I guess, that Angus Tully is maybe the most “literally me” character I will ever encounter in my life, save for basically all but one detail of his life (although we would all love for tate donovan to be our stepdad, wouldn’t we?). Still, I was immediately sort of hit in the chest by how deeply and unexpectedly I connected to this movie; the pace of it, the look of it, the mood of it. In addition to connecting with it so personally, I realized The Holdovers was a prime example of a Sad Sack movie. The Holdovers is pretty pointedly about Three Sad Sacks Alone On Christmas learning to be not that way (by the end of the movie they are less sad and alone and it is not Christmas anymore), which is why I loved it so much: Christmas is my favorite holiday, so a Sad Sack movie set on Christmas is pretty much guaranteed to win me over¹

Anyway: here is a rundown of some essential Sad Sack Cinema, a.k.a some Quintessential Francis Movies. enjoy freaks!!

To start, here are some picks exclusively from this year.

John Wick: Chapter 4

The culmination of a series of movies about a guy who doesn’t want to be around² and hates his job. Keanu Reeves has always been really good at playing a particular kind of despondency, and here he’s playing a character who’s basically ready to die from minute one, who starts the series “pissed his wife and dog died” and ends up here in a sort of nebulous, near silent zen state somewhere close to “I’m more tired than I’ve ever been in my life.”³ The most compelling thing about this movie is how it pulls back the curtain on an idea that the whole series has been building toward, that anyone in this line of work worth their salt spends an eternity cheating death in a hail of bullets and sort of solemnly waiting for the fatal blow. Who among us hasn’t spent the better part of a year just trying to hang out and vibe but our crippling debt and haters keep getting in the way?

Asteroid City

Augie Steenbeck is probably one of the saddest guys of the year; a guy grieving his dead boyfriend playing a guy grieving his dead wife, both men only able to capture and process these feelings through fleeting artistic expression, fully aware that it won’t ever feel right, both knowing that despite their own grief they have to put their shit aside to help the people around them. In my opinion, Anderson has always been sharpest when reckoning with dysfunctional family dynamics, usually headed up by men who can’t quite seem to square who they’re supposed to be with who they are at their core, calling into question the delicate balance of what it means to be responsible to themselves, to their loved ones, to their work, their passions, and what choosing between any and all of those paths can do. Then there’s the rest: Midge Campbell, Conrad Earp, Schubert Green, even Clifford the “Do you dare me?” kid! Sublime sad-sacks all around.

Showing Up

Kelly Reichardt is one of my favorite directors, so I will always look forward to any new work from her, so much so that I took myself to see this at like 1:00 PM on a Monday with all the oldies after spending weeks obsessively checking if and when it was playing at my local theater. I admit that this one is less about a Sad Sack and more about a Grouch, but there’s a fine line between the two. A lot of Reichardt’s movies are about very sad and lonely people (more on that later), but this one is more about one lady who’s really stuck and how everyone around her is like “girl chill” and her brother is like “I wanna watch the twilight zone on cable” and by the end of the movie she learns that she kind of just has to be like “everything’s fine” even though she’s never gonna be as cool as Hong Chau (which, like, I understand). I think this movie in part is about how the best art is often created when the process is the focus of the work as opposed to how it will be received, which is an idea that I really vibe with! It’s a really moving, humane, funny movie about how the act of creating something can make you feel truly stupid and crazy and untalented and — wait for it — sad. Kind of like having no hot water and having to call the coolest girl in school to fix it but alas, she is too cool. Great flutes and smocks!

Afire

Also more grouch-core cinema, but ultimately a very soft, romantic, movie, then very very heartbreaking for a stretch, then somewhere in the middle. This movie is also kind of about how the act of really trying to create something makes you feel truly stupid and cloying and upset all the time— except the Sad Sack at the center of this movie is sort of fundamentally like that all of the time, and in addition blames his whole emotional deal on everyone else around him instead of owning his own shit. I watched this movie right after I finished reading Brandon Taylor’s novel The Late Americans, and both of those stories are about guys who think they’re better than everyone else when really they’re just so deeply miserable at their core and angry at themselves because they can’t get out of their own way. One of the secret ingredients that makes this movie really work is that you hear that this guy is writing a novel called Club Sandwich and you’re like “yeah I probably wouldn’t read that book.”

Master Gardener

If not for how carefully constructed Norvil Roth was, on Schrader’s part as well as Edgerton’s (this is probably my favorite performance of his that I’ve seen), this could potentially be a Guys Who Suck movie, more in the vein of Taxi Driver than Light Sleeper. But it’s so rife with remorse and the ritual of forgiveness — for others and inward towards oneself — that it settles far away from those moods, embodying an almost saccharine quality, exemplified by that final needle drop. I understand that that assessment is a little insane given that this is literally a movie about a former neo-N*zi and a black nonbinary teen falling in love (even crazier that by the end of it all I was like “yeah this works”). If nothing else this is an interesting late-career statement piece from a guy who’s known for crafting some really hardened stories about the depth of American (read: masculine) depravity and aggression. It’s a surprisingly tender piece of work, and ultimately, against all odds, pretty sweet and romantic. Esai Morales plays a cop who wears a “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” t-shirt, what’s not to love?

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Briefly, a clarification: There’s certainly a Venn diagram to be made between Sad Sack Cinema and so-called Guys Who Suck cinema. In a lot of Guys Who Suck cinema, the guy in question is also a Sad Sack (Mikey and Nicky, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) but sometimes, guys just suck (The Heartbreak Kid, Le Bonheur (a great double feature in its own right)) and are not really sad, often psychotically content, even happy. I also must pause to acknowledge another one of my favorite genres, which crosses over quite nicely into Sad Sack Territory: The Breakup Movie. This does not have to entail a romantic relationship — in fact, some of the best Breakup Movies are about friendships falling apart, as evidenced by some of my picks here. In essence, almost every Breakup Movie is about a Sad Sack in one way or another (except something like, for example, The Worst Person in The World. Sure, that movie is kind of about Breaking Up With People and Things, but she’s having a pretty good time). And now for some Sad-Sack All-Timers!

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Broadcast News

My favorite assessment of this movie comes from this Letterboxd review and the way I see this movie is pretty similar: here is a story about three people who are so fundamentally good at what they do that it basically ruins their lives. William Hurt is, for my money, one of the most compelling actors of his generation, so good at playing that gentle giant quality, and he excels here at basically constantly saying and doing the wrong thing in the most charming way possible. This is maybe the original Sad Sack movie for me in that I got the Criterion DVD for Christmas and was thrilled to see that it opens with Holly Hunter crying and the only scene before that is like “These kids were doomed from the start.” Even before I ever saw this movie my mom showed me the running with the tapes scene when I was probably like ten and I loved it (School of Rock had endeared me to Joan Cusack from a young age). Here is a movie that will always be funny, here is a movie that will always put an ache in my gut! Not to be gross but the line “I wish you were two people so I could call up the one who’s my friend and tell her about the one I like so much.” will live inside my heart forever and ever amen.

Old Joy

A great example of the earlier phenomenon I laid out: here we have a Breakup Movie about two sad sacks. This is maybe the shining example of Kelly Reichardt’s command of silence — there are stretches here that last two, three minutes at a time of just walking, driving, or sitting — what better way to watch a friendship, decades strong, fall apart in the most natural way. It’s so sad! That feeling of knowing that a person won’t fit into the new phase of your life that’s about to begin, and worse yet knowing that you’re comfortable with that. As one friend barrels toward fatherhood, the other ambles aimlessly toward, well, nothing much. And all they can do to say goodbye to each other is shoot fucking cans. Cuz they’re just guys! What a waste! So fucking sad! I watched this movie twice in five days and then again in theaters exactly four months later (this was the summer I discovered MoMa film screenings a.k.a Leslie’s MoMa membership discount), and I’m getting emotional now just thinking about it. Still, it provides great comfort as all great movies with great dogs do!

Mikey and Nicky

Like a much dirtier, more violent example of just what Old Joy does so well, this movie knows that sometimes you just have to cut a crazy bitch out of your life! Echoes Old Joy also in that a lot of the heartache comes from Mikey basically knowing from the start that this is all doomed and pointless, while Nicky is blissfully unaware, perhaps blinded by his undying faith in his friend, how he depends on Mikey to fix everything, a faith he exploits in order to chronically debase himself. These two buddies just do not work together, at least not like they used to, and so they just kind of run around embarrassing themselves and trying to make the best of a bad situation. A movie about what it feels like to go on a Last Date with someone, bracing yourself for hours, and worse still, to feel responsible for it. This is also kind of a Guys Who Suck movie, but their friendship is so convincing (not surprising given how close Falk and Cassavetes really were) that you kind of just end up feeling sorry for them as opposed to rooting for their downfall. When they play the hand game on the bus!! Oh my god!! AHHHHH!!

Somewhere

Sort of a proto-Aftersun in that it’s a movie about a depressed guy with a cast on his arm whose life is briefly brightened by his lively young daughter. This is my favorite Sofia Coppola movie, and not just because I saw it on 35mm with Leslie (MoMa again) while we crossed our fingers we would catch a glimpse of Richard Brody (we didn’t :( ). The best scene in this movie is one of the most uniquely affecting scenes of Coppola’s career: two twin strippers doing a synchronized poll dance to “My Hero” by The Foo Fighters. Strange for how intimate it is and mildly uncomfortable for how slowly paced and desperate it feels. Johnny could have just gone to a strip club, but he ordered two strippers for his hotel room and then fell asleep. Fucked up shit! And then there’s all the stuff with Cleo. Ordering ingredients from room service to make macaroni and cheese for her dad, drawing with markers on the Guitar Hero guitar, him fighting the urge to go on his phone while watching her figure skating. There’s something oddly hopeful but also sort of creeping and dirty about the ending — I can’t stop thinking about this review, which sort of posits that Johnny Marco will just turn into Bill Murray’s deadbeat dad Felix from On The Rocks (not literally, but, you know). You sort of can’t help but feel like he’s not really ever gonna change what’s in his nature. “I’m sorry I wasn’t around more.” :(

All That Jazz

One of the most infamously self-destructive men in all of show business makes a movie about how he’s a depressed, solipsistic, chronically promiscuous jackass drinking, smoking, and pill-popping himself to death — and it’s a musical! I think this movie has some of the best editing I’ve ever seen — dizzying, dazzling, mesmerizing. Makes you feel like throwing up and dancing at the same time. Seeing this in theaters made me feel insane in the best way. It’s crazy that Fosse was like “I will only get what I want out of life when I die because in heaven everyone will forgive me and I get as many takes as I want and I finally get to be Fred Astaire” and then he died of a fucking heart attack less than a decade later. I would probably watch this movie once a month if not for how much certain small moments have started to really break my heart: right now, it’s Michelle singing “You better stop screwing around, Daddy!” like she’s about to cry, but it’s not the real Michelle so she delivers the line like she’s performing it, a choreographed plea falling on deaf ears. Will never not be funny to imagine Richard Dreyfuss playing this part (he was the first choice and got fired because he was so bad at dancing). Wild to imagine Fosse watched Jaws and was like “alright, which one of these fellas can tap dance and chain-smoke at the same time?”

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So there you have it.⁴ Whether or not you are a fan of Sad Sack pictures, I hope you spend your holiday season with those you love, watching and listening to the kind of things that make you feel cozy and nice, even if everyone else is like “huh.” I sure will!

Until next month,

- FMR

1. there are a lot of Christmas movies that don’t qualify as Sad Sack movies but make me feel the same way — the third acts of both A Christmas Story and Klaus in particular hit me in the gut the way few movies do.

2. a la Karl Havoc

3. a la Carber Reputation Vacuum salesman (when you think about it John Wick also just had a really bad day and can’t talk about it without crying)

4. Honorable mentions for this list include The Irishman, Lost In Translation, Aftersun, Beau Travail, and The Last Picture Show — all Sad Sack movies I love dearly (I have a feeling I’ll end up going long on The Last Picture Show in particular one of these days).