We’d say Happy New Year, but it’s Cate’s firm believe that that particular greeting should be expired after a week, because we’re all adults here. Onward to glory.
This week we’ve got Cate on Eva Victor’s touching directorial debut Sorry, Baby. Then, getting back to her TV roots, Zosha expounds on the specific corner of the Taylor Sheridan Extended Universe that is Paramount+’s Landman. Let’s get to it then!
Cate on Sorry, Baby
A24
Sorry, Baby is easily one of the best and most moving films I’ve seen in a long time. Quiet and unassuming, Eva Victor’s exquisite debut feature is a clever dark comedy that barrels head first into the aftermath of a sexual assault by their professor. Set on the campus of a small town college, grad student Agnes (Eva Victor) faces the long tail of trauma as their personal and professional lives change and move forward, even when they can’t always find the motivation to do so themself.
A crucial aspect of the film is that the assault itself is almost immaterial. This is not the dramatic hysteria of an episode of Law & Order: SVU. It’s a very mundane encounter, both unambiguously non-consensual, and yet blurred by power dynamics and unintentional miscommunication.
In fact, we never see “the bad thing” that happens to Agnes. In fact, I’m not even sure if said bad thing is ever explicitly named. But we do get a beat for beat look at its immediate aftermath. Victor really proves their mettle as an actor in the scene. Naturalistic and raw, their performance has the intimacy of live theatre. Every chin quiver is visible and every thought darts cleanly behind their eyes. The camera holds tight on Agnes’s face as they detail what happened to Lydie (Naomi Ackie), their friend and roommate. And it’s clear they’re in shock. But it’s also clear as day that their mind is whirring, buzzing, searching for a way to frame this awful experience in a way that doesn’t require them to accept that this near-mythic, gendered harm has found its way to their doorstep. But it has. When Agnes, sitting in the bathtub, finishes relaying the events of the evening, Lydie responds simply with, “That sounds like…that. That is… that’s the thing.”
Naomi Ackie may well be the film’s true cheat code. Her incandescent performance is no surprise to those who’ve been following her work over the last few years. Her turn in last year’s Mickey 17 shares DNA with Lydie’s near-explosive joy, and fiery insistence on bending the world to her whim. Truly, Ackie can do no wrong, and it’s her gentle tenderness that makes space for Victor’s delicate, tentative cries for help to cautiously take root. She never judges or negates. Instead, she validates and reassures, “yes/and”-ing Agnes into possibilities that feel safer and less daunting. When Agnes returns to their home one day, stray cat in hand, Lydie’s response is no more than an easy, “whatever you need.” Because there’s a soft neediness to all Agnes’s interactions with Lydie. Agnes’s words reassure, but their eyes betray the pleading of someone who knows they’re still drowning, just a little bit. And it’s Lydie who becomes — and remains — their safe place to land.
But as heavy as the film’s themes are, it's also incredibly funny. Victor’s dry wit bleeds freely from their pen. Agnes’s interactions with both the doctor they visit after the assault and the university administrators tasked with dealing with their report against their professor the following day are so cartoonishly absurd that there’s nothing to do but laugh. And that’s to say nothing of their jealous and frequently inappropriate colleague Natasha (Kelly McCormack), who finds every opportunity to grind casual conversations to a halt. Victor even finds time to poke fun at gender (we love a gender journey) while highlighting the absurdity of its limits. It’s an entirely secondary project they complete as successfully as the first.
What works so well about the film is that Victor cobbles together a story made up of the small indignities of presumptive womanhood, and fashions them into a larger narrative that illuminates just how heavy the psychic toll can be when all of them pile up. Early in the film, Agnes’s face falls when Lydie suggests that the offending professor wants to fuck them, not because they resent that he might find them attractive, but because it means they now have to question how much of his praise of their work is sincere. His mentorship matters, and to have it tainted by the reality of the things men do is like trying to soothe the incessant itch after a mosquito bite.
Sorry, Baby is less a film where things happen, so much as it is one where we follow Agnes at the different points in their life when they pause — or are forced to pause — to contemplate the bare, boring reality of what has happened to them. Whether it’s filling out a form at jury duty or sharing a sandwich with a stranger, the profundity is in the quiet moments. The real time grappling with what this assault means for how their life moves forward is an ongoing and unending conversation with both themself and the audience.
A big part of what makes Sorry, Baby sing is that the movie isn’t really about the assault at all. It’s about what being “a person who was assaulted” does to the psyche. It’s about the innumerable calculations one does in the aftermath, in an effort to protect your mental and emotional well-being. It’s about the ways you get stuck, and have to climb out of the holes you’ve inadvertently fallen into. It’s about the fact that the world doesn’t stop when you’ve been harmed, and that the harm you’ve suffered becomes a vestigial limb you have to account for whenever someone knowingly or unknowingly pokes at it.
It’s about the fact that trouble don’t last always, but it does last.
Zosha on Landman
Paramount+
I was raised in a house where the radio was left to NPR; where The West Wing was the first grown-up show I was allowed to stay up for; where I didn’t understand why another girl in college said she wanted to talk to me for a school project because “you identify as a feminist, right?” I need you to know all this so you can understand that I’m just as surprised by anyone I’m eagerly awaiting the Landman finale this weekend.
This is not really to indulge the “political” “divide” that creator and showrunner Taylor Sheridan is believed to inspire, and maybe also it is to get in front of the assumptions you have about all this. Because yes: Landman is all you’ve heard to be. And, I’d argue, more! It’s the umpteenth (seventh) show Sheridan has created; it follows Billy Bob Thornton’s Landman (real name Tommy Norris, but not in these walls) working for an oil company in Texas.
Despite what Sheridan says about his style it’s a lot of people saying exposition out loud to each other, either in the more basic establishment of things that need to happen in an episode, or else filling in information the audience needs to know about how the oil industry works. Its reputation may precede itself, but it’s also maybe not surprising that most of the “clueless” sides of these scenes are given to women. I write this on the heels of Landman’s most misguided and misogynist plotline yet (Ainsley, Landman’s daughter, has gone to cheerleading camp which leads to an uproar of women’s emotions and also transphobic pronoun talk that I can, at best, say is transparently badly written to set up for a mea culpa in the season finale; reach out if you need me to report back).
But to me, Landman is a show that demonstrates how deeply Taylor Sheridan studied at Aaron Sorkin University, and how impossible to capture Sorkin’s rhythms and balance truly are. (Just ask Sorkin, who’s been trying to get that lightning back in a bottle for decades.) Still, at its best, Landman is also a show that lets you feel how well a character can be built in a plot barge’s wake.
As such, here is a short list of some of my favorite Landman sideplots; the things that I finish watching and go tell my partner about, or even make me laugh out loud as I take it in. Against the odds, these moments make it through to the finished show, and put some finish on this otherwise slickly oiled product.
Landman has two roommates who also work for the oil company, at different levels. At first they are exasperated with his daughter moving in, and later his wife moving in, and then with the family dinners she forces upon them. But there’s a great runner about Angela making complicated meals and Dale (James Jordan) being game. Once he learns that “Bolognese” is just a fancy name for spaghetti he’s gleefully shoveling it into his mouth.
No dinner in Landman’s house can go quite right, because inevitably his wife Angela (Ali Larter) goes all out, he comes home and is sardonic about it, sometimes outright cruel, and they clash. Usually he insinuates or even outright asks if she’s on her period, and typically she responds by leaving the table or throwing plates. You must know this context to know that somehow I am still charmed by the concept of Angela’s efforts to get everyone together for a family dinner. She almost always has ulterior motives, or at least things she wants from a situation that she can’t finesse. But as someone who loves goofy themes and costumes and found family tropes, I’m impressed by the ease with which Angela’s commitment to dinners brings all the characters of the house together.
Unsurprisingly as part of “loving Angela’s resilience” I love that her main plot line involves ending up as a volunteer at an old folk’s home, where she routinely pulls up with liquor, trips to casinos, and an 11 a.m. strip club sojourn. It has no bearing on anything else going on in the show, and it’s delightful.
Rebecca (Kayla Wallace), a lady lawyer who’s often written just so people can explain things to her, has a one-night stand that turns into something more. She’s first convinced there’s maybe a future there when she sees the scruffy man she went home with has a truly impressive skin care collection. It is honestly the most sensible she is on the show, and the most I’ve ever liked anything they write for her. This is Landman’s curse; these women are so underbaked that just being given a romance is an improvement.
When Landman’s dad TL (Sam Elliot) sees Angela at a funeral he marvels how she hasn’t aged. When he sees his granddaughter he compares her to looking at a sunflower. When he sees Landman’s roomates he deadpans: “TKTKT”
Also at the funeral TL is offered an opportunity to share some thoughts; he simply says “not to you.” The preacher clarifies it would be sharing it to god and TL goes “God already knows it.”
Jerry Jones (who Footballman fans might recognize from “The Dallas Cowboys”) does a surprisingly steady job giving a speech to Jon Hamm about why he needs to prioritize his family.
(This is a copout but newsletters take up space, even digitally, so I feel like I gotta cut myself off somewhere) Virtually any side conversation or offhanded action: Landman tugging on his dad’s mustache to wake him up. Ainsley saying a community officer tripped while “arresting” Angela because “I guess she didn’t see my foot,” and Landman deadpanning, “Baby, you say it just like that in court.”
Landman is full of dumb stuff; some that is there to maybe be bait, and some that’s there just so the show can explain to you that it’s dumb—I don’t really think Ainsley would be marching around in bikinis just ‘cause, just like I don’t really think oil workers aren’t willing to throw on a hazmat suit when they encounter toxic fumes just because a helicopter is on the way. It all kind of bleeds together, like a melting icee. Ultimately the charm of Landman is that I can not like how a show treats a character generally, at the same time that I have fun with what that character exists as outside of the pigeon hole. God help me, I’m just looking forward to the next family dinner.
Assorted Internet Detritus
Life under surveillance in Gaza. People aren’t leaving LA in the way you think. Hardcore History; that’s the tweet. “Taylor’s performance doesn’t ask you to root for Perfidia so much as be galvanized by her.” I’ve been catching up on You Must Remember This’s Erotic ‘90s series which is fun.
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Zosha + Cate <3