My mother is a fan of timeshare films, whose long and storied history contains such uncut gems as Sharing Time by Abbas Kiarostami, Time Share by Sebastián Hofmann, and Why Time Shares Are Complete Scams by Dave Ramsey (note, the last one is not one of my mother’s favorites, despite its significance to the subgenre).
Little did she or I expect the next entry in this pearl of a cinematic niche to come from the director of ‘elevated horror films’ Hereditary and Midsommar, Ari Aster. I’ve never been much of a fan of Aster’s work, but given my mother’s excitement from all the trailers that were playing on her Powerball channel, I figured it was worth a family viewing at our local cineplex. And I found something unexpected.
Unexpectedly AWFUL, that is.
Following the unequivocal financial success of his previous film, the surrealist black comedy/horror picture Beau Is Afraid, Aster has given us a film that doesn’t blur the lines of reality and the surreal but instead eschews reality altogether. Trading it for something feathery. And downright manipulative.
Molting opens with an unnamed middle manager of a Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen knockoff (played by Christian Slater—as the manager, not the restaurant) taking a road trip to run quality assurance on the restaurant’s various storefronts in the southeastern United States.
After a few awkwardly blocked scenes at these storefronts, the manager is attacked in one parking lot by a particularly long-taloned avian, who is part of a film shoot one parking lot down and has escaped from the handler’s cage.
Rather than return the bird, however, the wide-eyed and much-bescratched Slater’s character decides instead to utter this somewhat confounding line directly at the camera, which I scribbled into my notebook immediately to ensure that it could be reproduced verbatim:
“My name is Christian Slater, and in this movie by Ari Aster and featuring Sean Penn, I will be buying a timeshare with you, Sam the Eagle, for reasons that are unknown to me, to my character, who is also called Christian Slater, and perhaps even to the writers who penned this line six months and thirteen days ago at the behest of Wyndham Destinations and the Disney Vacation Club. Fly with me, little eagle, whom I somehow know is named Sam, and travel with me to the land of promise. Chicken holds no glory for me anymore.”
Of course, this got quite a laugh from the expectedly geriatric audience, but that laugh was quickly stymied by the sight of Christian Slater growing wings in the chicken-house parking lot.
Having seen enough Aster films to expect such an unnecessary change of tone, I was unphased as Slater became a well-winged Icarus and ascended above the asphalt hellscape of the chicken restaurant’s milieu, all the while listening as Sam the Eagle recited what seemed to be membership pledge of the U.S. Libertarian Party in perfect Navajo.
My mother, though, was enraptured. I had to cease my notetaking to wipe her tears with the buttery remnants of the single napkin we’d been sharing to enjoy our special edition Molting tub of popcorn (the tub’s unique design requires sticking your hands through bona fide bald eagle feathers to get to the popcorn—I still have it in my pantry, as I quite like the sensation. Transgressive.).
Seeing my mother’s reaction, I was hopeful that the following scenes would do something to bring me the same impact. Little did I expect to spend the next two and a half hours or so watching the sparsely feathered (and otherwise completely naked) Slater as he and Sam the Eagle embark on a timeshare purchasing spree on the gulf coast of the Florida panhandle.
Now, a road-trip buddy Aster film featuring Slater and the Eagle in the Florida panhandle actually sounds like my cup of tea. One would expect to see the obvious themes of transhuman connection, climate change, and distinct and extreme body dysmorphia.
That’s not what we got.
Instead, we received far too many details about each timeshare’s various costs, potential financial benefit, and how a hypothetical viewer of Sam and Slater’s scenario simply had to text an on-screen number in order to purchase their own.
After the fifth repetition of the farce, I began counting the number of timeshare opportunities offered, logging a whopping 116 over the course of 95 scenes (some scenes included multiple timeshare offerings).
If one were to do the math (as I quickly did on my Blackberry’s calculator after the film), they’d find that of its 3 hour and 16 minute total run time, over 2 hours and 45 minutes of this are time share scenes.
That’s most of the movie.
And these scenes were not even that good, though my mother thought the contrary. She enjoyed that Sean Penn played the timeshare salesman at every office, doing little to hide his characteristic hard-boiled cop scowl (which I loved seeing in Milk, but must say did not belong here). Scene number #46 was the one exception to this rule, featuring instead a giant, groaning phallus in the role of salesman—much to the audience’s chagrin, but to my distinct pleasure.
After Slater purchases his final timeshare, the film explodes into a rousing Navajo-language musical number (Aster does love these shifts in tone), crafted by the much-advertised Lin Manuel Miranda, whose songwriting style and performative charm meshed admittedly well with the guttural intonations of Colin Stetson’s saxophone and the surprisingly sweet alto of Emma Thompson, playing the role of a swimming pool at one of the Wyndham resorts (I do give props to production for quite believable practical effects on that one, not sure how they made her look so believably large).
But such a finale, despite its admirable execution, was not enough to redeem this shlock. Selling 116 different timeshare opportunities to an elderly audience seems like a crass use of the cinematic art form, if not an unethical one, and I feel firmly resolved in my lack of appreciation for Mr. Aster and his ‘surrealist sensibilities.’
In one of the film’s final bombastic chorales, swimming pool Thompson sings: "Shimá éí Diyin God yił ííshją́ą́ áyiilaa’ígíí bił beehózin nt’ę́ę́’sha’shin."
Meaning, “My mother must have understood that principle of revelation.”
Not being a Navajo literary historian, I’m unsure of this phrase’s exact meaning, but it does call to mind how my mother could have seen through the film’s auteur cladding to the scam that was beneath. She did not.
Now, she is $13,790.25 in debt to the various Sean Penns (and grotesque phallus) who sold timeshares to her over the course of the positively hideous Molting.
For that, I am sorry for Shimá. And of Molting, I can only say: doo yáʼátʼéeh da.
Walking out of the theater last Thursday, I stepped on an empty McDonald’s fry bag, small size, that had been soaking up rain water in a neglected pothole for some time.
The sound of its muffled, sewage-laden crunch contained within it all the mourning of the city’s night, all the texture of her streets.
And in the shimmering, grease-infused wetness of its plasticine surface, I saw my own reflected visage, silhouetted by the banner-like marquee that still boasted the name of the fine film I had just seen: Alvin & The Chipmunks 5: Chipmunks Furever.
Even in the obvious sadness—the melancholia—embodied by the crumpled bag beneath my feet, something about the sight of that title behind me—a reminder of what I’d just witnessed—filled me with such reverence and delight that I could only smile. In fact, so full was I of rich optimism for the future of cinema and our world, I had no recourse but to shed a single tear, to watch it fall from the tip of my nose and onto the bag beneath my wingtip shoe, my lip quivering as I followed its journey down the surface of the bag and into the puddled wastewater smearing and soaking its papery skin.
I could only cry. For the film was divine.
To place this sequel, the latest in a long line of superb entries (barring the brazen misstep that was 2011’s Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, Mike Mitchell’s insulting and completely misguided entry into the much-beloved series) along such titles as Paddington, Paddington 2, Skinamarink and Kung Fu Pandas 1 and 3 as some of the best children and family films available today may seem like a step too far—but I dare say that the latest furry romp is more than deserving of such praise, if it does not, indeed, exceed it.
The film begins with an admittedly lackluster opening featuring the dulcet tones of Post Malone, who I am not quite a fan of given his propensity toward face tattoos, bright cars, and that abomination known to the American culinary zeitgeist as the ‘chicken wing’. But soon after, we are thrust into the fury (furry!) of a rampaging houseparty at the house of Dave Seville, played in perfect tune, as always, by the indomitable Jason Lee.
It is at this party, however, that we become aware of the movie’s departure from some of the timeless (if not somewhat derivative) themes of the series’ previous entries: friendship, found family, converging and conflicting identity, coming of age, etc.. For in this film, the chipmunks have come of age—many years have passed since their latest misadventures on the road in Road Chip, and their interests and intrigues lie well beyond the world of the puerile. These chipmunks have become, to put it succinctly, chipmen.
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things…
So it is that, at this houseparty, Alvin is in the bedroom with two of Simon’s lovers—one former, one present—doubtlessly providing them with the sort of satisfaction only a chipmunk of his stature could provide, when suddenly he and his nymphai are rudely interrupted by the presence, not of Simon, but of Theodore.
After a heated and earnest confrontation between the two (voiced impeccably by Janice Karman as Theodore and, somewhat unusually, archival audio of R. Lee Ermy as Alvin, who replaced the much-beloved Justin Long for this production due to the latter’s latest motorcycle injury), Alvin and Theodore enter a heated, bare-knuckle brawl on the floor of the bedroom, which is soon scandalously voyeured by the many bums, pop-intelligentsia, and LA-party dilettantes one could only expect to find at a bona fide Alvin and the Chipmunks house party.
After the brawl is done with, Alvin successfully coerces Theodore (with the intimidating tenor R. Lee Ermy is so well known for) to keep his momentary lapse in judgment a secret from their younger brother, Simon—who is currently away at culinary school—under threat of death.
What happens next, you may wonder? Does Alvin engage in further debauchery, forced only by the revelation of his original sin to reckon with the error of his ways? Far from it.
As the film’s second act begins, we enter not the tried-and-true territory of a reconciliation film, but instead, the wanderings of a dejected Theodore, who is so racked with grief for his brother’s loss of innocence—if not his own—that he must venture back to the wilds of the pacific forest whence he came, searching for meaning, searching for peace…
The second act of the movie is entirely silent—a directorial choice justified to its fullest extent by the tempered, steady cuts of editor Jennifer Lame (of Oppenheimer fame)—containing within it prismatic and ethereal imagery that calls to mind the inspired terroir of Kurosawa, the enrapturing dreamscape of Jodorowsky, and most profoundly, the tender, existential purgatory of Tarkovsky.
In this stretch, the film reaches not only the pantheon of family films occupied by other heartfelt stalwarts (such as Paddington and its sequel) but also finds itself nose-to-nose with greats of auteur cinema. Much of this could be credited to writer/director Derek Cianfrance, of course, but, as is the critical fulcrum of all discussions regarding the question of the ‘auteur’, it is a dishonor to refer to this work as the product of a single, inspired man.
It is, in fact, a work of collective inspiration. And it is truly inspired.
If you are unconvinced that this film achieves such kismet, though, I can only direct you to the film’s last act for recourse, in which Theodore returns from his wandering to the city (a shell of his former self) to seek out his brothers and make actualized the dream-poems which he reveled in through the months of his pine-strewn pilgrimage.
What follows is a harrowing sequence of events that put even the heartstopping climaxes of Taxi Driver and Come and See—dare I say—to shame. But, as we must acknowledge, such violence is necessitated. Inevitable. Demanded by the desolate reality in which these chipmunks—in which all of us chipmen—furever find ourselves.
-DG