With COVID-19 cutting a swathe through just about everything worldwide, it’s no surprise that cinema is being as affected as anything else.
In just one day, one of my favourite cinema chains temporarily closed, the Sydney Film Festival was cancelled, the French Film Festival was postponed and my other favourite cinema group went to daily session releases, pending some kind of eventual closure. That was on top of the release dates of many films such as A Time to Die, Lovebirds and A Quiet Place II being pushed back until much later in the year.
So, given that new movies are very thin on the ground, out in the big wide world at least, I’ve decided to raid my DVD and Blu-Ray shelves, pull out the films I’d always meant to watch but never quite managed to and finally give them their moment in the reviewing sun.
As you self-isolate and quarantine and stay snug and safe indoors, I hope you’ll enjoy my very own COVID-19 retro movie festival!
REVIEW
Love is all kinds of things if you listen to the Hallmark/romantic comedy/Mills and Boon saturated culture around us – bright, boisterous, life-changing, thrilling, exciting, completing, cute, funny, wonderful.
One element of romance that no one ever really likes to admit to, and which is usually only played for broad meet-cute laughs when it is brought out from the almost-unmentionable shadows, is the awkwardness that often accompanies it.
Oh, we dream of looking dashing and self-confident, the very best of ourselves writ large in the very best, rose-tinted version of our lives, but truth be told, all too often we trip and fall our own love-eager feet, uncertain of what to say or do next, trying hard to romantically fake it until we make it and failing miserably in the process.
Taika Waititi’s 2007 lo-fi romantic comedy Eagle vs Shark, an unalloyed gem of Cupid-ian truthfulness, dares to embrace all this awkwardness and uncertainty, and the rather salient fact that we don’t simply cease to be our unadorned less-than-perfect when love, or at least the possibility of love, comes calling.
In fact, as Lily (Loren Horsley) tries desperately to attract the attention of hunky nerdy regular customer Jarrod (Jemaine Clement) at the burger joint where she rather lacklustrely works, you could well argue that the very flawed parts of both characters come out to play, initially at least.
Lily, battered down by a life which has taken her parents from her at a young age and offered little in the way of compensation bar a close and supportive relationship with her brother Damon (Joel Tobeck), is as complaint and socially ill at ease as they come, estranged from her vapid, catty workmates and barely able to move beyond the slightest of facial movements or emotional swings.
She’s a lovely person but she seems to be singularly ill-equipped to handle life in any kind of meaningful fashion and seems destined to be alone (save for her brother) in a world not that enamoured with timidity and reticence.
That is until a party invite from Jarrod, intended for one of her co-workers ends up in her hands she finds herself at a “favourite animals” party dressed as a shark and playing an old style combat video game with Jarrod who seems wholly consumed by his own greatness, or the enunciated version thereof, anyway.
Jarrod, for all his braggadocio, is a man profoundly uncomfortable with life.
Bullied at school, dealing with a family tragedy that he has never fully addressed or processed and manifestly unsure of himself – this is never articulated but such is the understated power of Clements’ performance that this iceberg-below-the-water lack of self-confidence is manifestly obvious – Jarrod talks a big game because it is pretty much all he has left.
Somehow, Lily sees through all this bluster and bravado, well at least sufficiently well that she manages to snag him as her boyfriend, but it’s not until a visit back to his family in rural New Zealand that she comes to see him for who he is and their relationship, all the glorious, up-and-down awkward magnificence of it all, starts to make some kind of sweetly endearing sense.
What makes Eagle vs Shark such an affecting quirky delight is that for all its visual and verbal idiosyncratic storytelling – the scenes are often broken by touching apple-centric stop-start animation that carries considerably more emotional heft than you might expect – it bases its narrative on a fairly weighty emotional bedrock.
Key to this is Waititi’s script which, while a little light on at times and prone to some strange tonal shifts, is manifestly grounded in some very real humanity.
If Eagle vs Shark had simply coasted along solely on its quirky hilarity, it could still have been an entertaining though all too easily forgotten and dismissed film; but the investment that Waititi makes us in his characters, giving them real, relatable substance beyond the comedically-inspired awkwardness, pays off, grounding the film in a way that delivers powerfully if humorously by the end of the film.
MVP in bringing the comically affecting delights of the film to such vibrant life is Horsley who gives Lily a resonance that extends far beyond the often monosyllabic, facially inert and quietly acquiescent responses she gives to almost every situation in which she finds herself.
You could easily view her, if you weren’t paying attention to her evocatively nuanced performance, as some kind of doormat walkover, a person that life has defeated so profoundly that she is willing to take whatever is dished out to her.
But that is not Lily at all, and as Eagle vs Shark progresses and both Lily and Jarrod grow as people and deal with the respective hilariously moving skeletons in their closets, we come to see quite strength, emotional intelligence and self-awareness in a person who wants a great deal from life and is not going to sit back and let the world merrily walk all over her.
As romantic comedies go, Eagle vs Shark is a breath of fresh air, a film that acknowledges we don’t always get romance and love right and that the very things that might make us fall in love with someone, are the same things that, handled or reacted to poorly, can also doom the relationship to dying on the vine before it has really had a chance to flourish.
The great joy of Waititi’s debut feature film effort is that while it plays Lily and Jarrod’s seemingly irrevocably flawed relationship for laughs, it never lets us forget that they are real people who want romance, a sense of belonging and to be valued as someone who matters.
It also recognises that for all the noble intentions we carry in us that we also get it wrong more often than we don’t, watching the very thing that we value slip through our clumsy fingers, often never to be seen again.
It is obvious, for instance, that Jarrod does like Lily and that he wants her by his side; his heart for its brokenness and false outward arrogance is genuinely in the right place and yet when it comes to actually loving Lily he makes a mess of things at almost every step.
Lily too, though a kinder, more self-effacing and better person than Jarrod in many ways, seems unable, initially at least, to make good on the lofty dreams she has for her life and for Jarrod’s starry-eyed role in it.
But as she grows and develops during an hilarious but moving week away with his family, she comes to understand more about who she is, who Jarrod is and how the two of them might work together.
If they can work together, which begins to look quite doubtful as the story quirkily rolls on.
Eagle vs Shark is a romantic comedy gem that holds tight to the idea that love is the very thing that makes the world again while also acknowledging to everyone’s great (and highly-amused) relief that we are all fallible, all too human and that getting to the start of the rest of your life may be way more challenging that donning a shark costume and hoping for the best.