I’m happy to announce that my short story, “Mating Behaviors of Urban White Males in the Southern United States,” has been accepted at BLUESTEM. As usual, I’ll let you know when it drops. Thanks to God, Kalene, my family and fur-family, my readers, and the editors who believe in me.
I’m happy to report that my short story, “Salvation Is a Joke with no Punchline,” has been accepted at Solstice Literary Magazine, conditional upon some minor revisions I have no problem making. I’m glad to be back at Solstice and am happy this story found a home. I’ll holler at ya when it’s published.
“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?”
― Stephen King, The Body
As a kid, I lived in a rural neighborhood a few miles outside of our town proper. I spent most of my childhood there—first with my grandparents after most schooldays while my parents worked, and then when my parents, my brother, and I moved into a house down the street from my grandparents’ old one. Over all those years, I made the best bunch of friends I’ve ever had.
Like most groups of young friends, our relationships ran the full gamut, from genuine romantic love and deep loyalty to fistfights, breakups, gossip, and pretty much any other assholish behavior you can imagine. And yet, no matter what petty crap splintered us on any given day, we always gravitated back to each other. In one of my ongoing projects, I’m writing a series of essays about us. One has been published. A couple of others are in progress; more currently idle in the “here’s an idea to write about” gear, their engines thrumming with the energy of the untold. To get a sense of our closeness and our escapades, you might want to check out this piece. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
If you’re still with me, I should confess that, when I write nonfiction about people I know, I usually change their names. These people have families that might not want to read about their parents’ misspent youth. The girls in the above essay, who have been women now for a long time, figure prominently in today’s piece. Though every member of our neighborhood gang always seemed equally valued, excepting those melodramatic moments when we fought or argued, many of my most vivid memories from that time involve Kelly, Heather, and a couple of guys simply because we lived really close to each other. We never had to seek each other out. Walk outside of my house, and there stood Kelly. Amble down to my friend Gene’s place, and you might find Heather and Kelly in his yard.
I have revealed in other writings that I have long felt at odds with the world, out of place, without a tribe. My point here is to tell you that if I’ve ever truly felt like I belonged with a decent-sized group, it was with the kids of Rolling Acres outside Crossett, Arkansas. Now long removed from any romantic entanglements with any of them, I don’t feel the least bit weird in telling you that I still consider them all family. Even the ones who grew up and devoted themselves to the Far Right. Even the Second-Amendment-torturing gun-lovers. I would do just about anything for those people. And I know—know—that at least some of them would still do just about anything for me, including overlooking my unapologetically loud Left-wing mouth.
But still.
Ever since I moved out of that neighborhood when I got married the first time (that would be the summer before my senior year) and gradually began to lose touch with my friends, I have never felt at home in the world. I don’t belong among artists, because I feel like nobody reads/shares/likes my work, and when I go to AWP, I often have to search far and wide for someone who cares enough to say hi. No one offers a recommendation to their editor or agent. No one tells me how much they loved my piece in Journal X and how they’d like me to submit something to their publication. I don’t say this in a self-pitying way, though I know that’s how it sounds. I say it as an observation I’ve made about my own life. Despite my publications and online presence, most writers/editors/agents/readers don’t think about me.
I don’t feel at home among my extended family. My positionality as a pansexual, non-traditional Christian Leftist means I have little in common with most of them. I also don’t hunt or fish, and my college football loyalty lies with LSU, not the Arkansas Razorbacks, given that I actually went to and graduated from LSU. These are only a few reasons I am an outlier from my family—whom, I should clarify, I still love very much and who still love me.
I don’t feel at home among large groups of academics, as I have little patience for the politics of the academy, or its bureaucracy, or how some members always believe they are one hundred percent right all the time. I greatly value my academic friends, but I have no desire to attend MLA or write an article that will be trashed by a peacocking, territorial assclown.
Plus, I’m an introvert, meaning, in part, that I value my alone time. That may mean that I am literally alone, writing in my office, or that I’m home with my wife and kids and pets, or that I’m at an intimate gathering of a very few friends. It may mean I’m an anonymous part of an enormous crowd, doing wild shit that I probably shouldn’t do anymore. I am perfectly at home in big cities, in downtown Las Vegas, on the Strip, in the French Quarter at one AM on a Saturday night. I would be perfectly at home in Times Square, alone or in a small group. Just don’t stick me at a cocktail party and ask me to chit-chat. I don’t know how.
In short, except with my immediate family and a handful of friends, I feel alone, isolated, marginalized most of the time. Even when it’s just a matter of my depression and anxiety causing my perceptions to misfire, it still feels real. And so I look back fondly at that time of my life when I was one of a couple dozen kids who are close enough to feel like family after thirty-plus years apart.
My depression and anxiety whisper in my ear a lot, even when I’m asleep. Sometimes they tell me that my second family, the one I chose all those years ago, doesn’t want me, either. Hence the dream.
It happened around a week from the time of this writing, bleeding out of another dream I don’t remember and into another I would also later forget. But this one—it stuck with me. It hurt. It still does, even though it was only a dream.
In it, I traveled back to Crossett for some kind of reunion. My wife, Kalene, came with me, as did my son, Brendan, and my younger daughter, Maya. We rode into town with my Mom and Dad, the latter of whom was driving, even though we rode in a muscle car I had rented at the airport—a Winchesters-worthy Impala, an old Challenger, something like that. It was black, with black interior. It should not have been large enough to seat six people comfortably and hold all our luggage, but such is the logic of dreams.
After we piled our bags onto the ground, I shut the trunk.
“Where are the keys?” my Dad asked.
I patted myself down. “I don’t have them. Didn’t you take them out of the ignition?”
“Yeah, but I handed them to you.”
We turned to the car. Somehow—the logic of dreams—we could see into the shut trunk, and there lay the keys.
My father turned to me and scowled. “Great.”
“But I didn’t do it.”
“You never take responsibility for anything.”
That stung. I take pride in my responsibility. I am not, by nature, responsible. I have had to work at it, for my wife’s and kids’ sake, for self-preservation. Same with discipline, not rebelling against every kind of authority all the time, keeping my temper. It was like he said one of the most hurtful, untrue things he could imagine, this dream version of my Dad.
He called a locksmith. Apparently, he had fastened his housekey onto the rental’s ring, and so we were doubly locked out.
“I guess I’m sorry,” I said, still hurt.
He hung up. “They’re on their way. It’s going to cost seven hundred dollars.”
“What? Why that much?”
“Because that’s what it costs. You don’t get to decide everything.”
“Look, I’ll just put it on my credit card, okay? You don’t have to pay a cent.”
“That fixes everything, right?”
I didn’t know what he meant. Dad and Mom stalked off, leaving our bags beside the car.
The neighborhood we returned to was not the one I grew up in—or, rather, it was, but a dream version, where our square-shaped rural geography had morphed into an inside-town geometric grid of streets and cross-streets, much smaller squares and rectangles, houses with yards governed by HOAs.
My parents, our bags, Kalene, and Maya disappeared from the dream. My son had wandered off somewhere when the reunion party started at a nearby restaurant with a large outdoor space, round tables and straightback chairs and porch swings hanging from the building’s outcropped roof. I recognized almost no one.
Whose reunion is this? I wondered. Why am I here? Who invited me?
And then I saw Kelly.
If you followed the link above, you know that she was my sometime-girlfriend, the first human being I felt a kind of romantic love for. Maybe the first person I ever truly loved, period. In real life, she is now married, and when I saw her in my dream, the joy swelling in my heart had nothing to do with two kids’ past relationship. It was just seeing her, my old friend. For the first time since arriving, I felt at home.
I had been drinking. I don’t know what, or where it came from, just that I always had a highball glass in my hand. Knowing me, it was Jack Daniels and Coke or straight Jameson. Ice cube clinked against each other. I can still feel the glass’s cold roundness in my waking hand.
Kelly was drunk, too. Some kind of music played at high volume, and people danced, and when Kelly stumbled, four guys caught her so that she lay in their arms as if in a human hammock. It seemed choreographed. She saw me as the men began to spin, twirling her. She smiled.
I walked to them and held out my hand. As she spun by me, she held out hers, and our fingers brushed each other. Over the music, the crowd said, “Awwwwww.”
Then I was sitting in one of the swings, next to Heather, who patted me on the knee and said, “Good to see you.” Then, drink in hand, she turned to someone standing near the swing and started a conversation. I sat there for a long time, only inches from my good friend of thirty-something years, but we never spoke again. Soon, she was gone.
So was everyone else. It was daylight, and the street was empty. No one worked in their yard. A party might never have occurred, or else someone had cleaned the area until it was unnaturally pristine. I could only see one person—my son, who sat at one of the restaurant’s tables, eating a sandwich and looking at the still houses. The sun shone on him, bathing him in sparkling light, as if God had put a finger on his shoulder. Love and loneliness swelled within me in equal measure, my chest nearly bursting under their pressure, as when you hold your breath too long.
I got up and went to Brendan’s table. I sat across from him and watched him eat. Nothing around us made a sound.
Finally, he said, “So. How was the reunion?”
I gestured, taking in the empty restaurant, the uniform yards, the still houses.
“These are my friends,” I said. “This is my family.”
“Huh,” he said.
And then I woke up.
Email me: officialbrettriley@gmail.com
Twitter and Instagram: @brettwrites
Tumblr: brettrileywrites.tumblr.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BrettRileyAuthor/
From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, I was as avid a comic-book reader as you could find. In grade school, I begged my parents and grandparents to buy me comics every time we went to any store that carried them. I was mostly a Marvel fan, though I followed the biggest names in the DC pantheon—the Justice League, Flash, Batman, Green Lantern, and to a lesser extent, Superman and Wonder Woman. In those days, I lacked the funds or the influence to purchase every issue of every title, but I tried my best. Once I was old enough to earn an allowance, I spent most of it on comics. As a teenager, I would take the money I got weekly—some earned, some provided by my doting grandmother—and buy my comics first, worrying about concerns like how much I could spend on dates later. Somehow, this did not impede my social life. I guess I was lucky.
From my late teens to mid-20s, I bought dozens of titles a month—nearly everything Marvel produced, the Batman and Justice League family of titles, the various Green Lantern-related books, the one-shots and annuals and crossover specials and multiple-cover cash-grabs, the mature titles from DC like Sandman, Hellblazer, Shade the Changing Man, and more. I hoped that writing comics would one day be part of my professional life.
But then, something changed.
First came the crossovers—at first occasional multiple-title events that felt special and universe-shaking, then like annual and cynical attempts to boost company-wide sales, storytelling be damned. Then came the cover variants. Again, this aspect of comics publishing started out as a cool way to grab a very special issue and quickly devolved into a rush to snag every variant of 3-D foil-stamped die-cut foldout art you could imagine. Then it seemed that every popular character had to have at least three titles dedicated to their monthly adventures. Then both major companies started killing off or replacing their major characters—the death of Superman! Batman broken by Bane! Captain America disenfranchised! Thor banished! And on and on. Then came the constant parade of deaths and resurrections, many of which were trumpeted on the comic’s (variant, unusually expensive) cover—“This issue—someone DIES!!!!!!” Of course, later resurrections completely undermined the impacts of the deaths, rendering the whole exercise as the storytelling equivalent of running laps in gym class—tiring, repetitive, even boring.
For me, the final straw came when Marvel replaced Peter Parker with Ben Reilly. See, way back when, a mad professor cloned Peter Parker, and a big to-do ensued. Allegedly, the clone died, and Spider-Man disposed of the body in a smokestack, but not before wondering if he was, in fact, the real deal, or if he might be the clone who only believed he was the real deal. The storyline was a very effective head-scratcher. The mid-90s storyline, though, posited that the “dead” clone was very much alive and not the clone at all. The Spider-Man we had been reading about for twenty years was now supposed to be the clone, and, understandably freaking out, he stepped back from the superhero world. In effect, Marvel was telling us that the past twenty years had been a lie, that we had invested in the wrong character.
I quit. I resigned. I walked away. Oh, I stuck with the Vertigo titles for as long as I could, especially Sandman, but I had come to realize that, in the world of superhero comics, nothing mattered. There were never any stakes. What one writer created, another scribe erased in twenty years, or even just a few months. No one ever died; they just took vacations of varying lengths. No story was ever canon; nothing was sacred. Bucky? Still alive. Norman Osbourne? Still alive. If a story touched you, you had best forget it, because the companies sure would.
Now we’re in the era of constant universe-wide resets. In my comics-buying life, we experienced exactly one universe reset—Crisis on Infinite Earths, a story whose purpose was to simplify what had become, over fifty years or so, a labyrinthine continuity of parallel universes and character histories and retcons that often made little sense. Okay, fine, fair enough—a reset after fifty years, one that did not ignore or erase past continuity but streamlined and simplified it, seemed understandable, even effective. Since then, though, the Big Two companies have continued their interminable retcons, meaningless deaths, resurrections, and resets, reducing the shelf life of any universe by as much as four-fifths.
Why do I want to read stories today that will be meaningless tomorrow? Why do I want to read about characters who might be replaced, killed for a few months, resurrected, killed again, changed beyond recognition only to be changed back again, ad infinitum, ad nauseum?
Still, the major comics companies control a ton of characters that meant a lot to me. I have therefore been thinking of how I would run a comics universe, partially because I would like to start my own (if only I knew artists!) and partially because I hope someone at these companies will somehow stumble across these ideas and think about them in the future.
Serial stories in comics are supposed to invite readers into a longstanding community with its own history and its own internal logic. These are some of the ways I would maintain that history and logic without alienating the readers who have invested in the stories we have already told. I quit reading comics in the mid-90s because I felt my trust had been betrayed, my intelligence insulted. I would not want my own readers to experience that. Neither should Marvel or DC. Audience is an artist’s lifeblood. Let’s not cut our own throats.
Email me: officialbrettriley@gmail.com
Twitter and Instagram: @brettwrites
Tumblr: brettrileywrites.tumblr.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BrettRileyAuthor/
My short story, “Everyone Here Comes from Somewhere Else,” is now live at THE COURTSHIP OF WINDS. Please check it out. And if you don’t like me enough to read it, at least click on it and give the journal a hit, mmmmkay?
Recently, I finally got around to watching Revolutionary Road, in which Michael Shannon plays a small but key role as a recently released mental patient who disrupts the marital façade of a suburban couple. Over the last several years, Shannon has proven himself an invaluable and versatile actor, in both film and on the television series Boardwalk Empire. His General Zod notwithstanding—a loud, overbearing performance that I blame more on the writers’ and director Zack Snyder’s fundamental misunderstanding of their source material—Shannon has done excellent work. He seems most at home playing edgy, borderline-insane authority figures. In Guillermo del Toro’s masterful, moving magical realist film, The Shape of Water, Shannon’s Richard Strickland is, in some respects, the straw that stirs the drink, so much so that I recently told my wife it might well be my worst nightmare to awake and find Shannon standing over me, watching me sleep with those bug eyes of his.
Except for the visually muddled destruction-porn mediocrity that was Pacific Rim—a movie that could have been Snyder’s work, except that it had some semblance of character development and a more-or-less coherent plot—I love del Toro’s work. Were I to rank his films, always a dicey and subjective and ultimately useless proposition, I would put The Shape of Water ahead of everything but Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone. It’s a strongly directed, well-edited movie with super makeup, beautiful retro set design, and a script that is equal parts Creature of the Black Lagoon monster-adventure and suspense-romance.
The plot: Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins), a mute cleaning woman at a research facility that looks like a dank VA hospital, lives a life of strict routine, right down to the perpetual tardiness that bemuses her best friend, Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer, who—in a situation that will likely please Academy voters even as it annoys cultural critics—plays a similar black-domestic role as her Oscar-winning turn in The Help). Each night, Elisa goes home to a small apartment located next to the near-identical residence of her other best friend, gay painter Giles (Richard Jenkins, who will also likely be recognized this award season).
Elisa’s dull life is disrupted with the arrival of Strickland and a mysterious research subject encased in a water tank. None of this affects Elisa much until, one day, an injured Strickland stumbles out of the lab, having gotten too close to whatever he brought into the facility. As the cleaning crew are left alone in the lab, Elisa discovers exactly what it is—a creature the film’s credits call Amphibian Man. He will look very familiar to fans of the old Warner Brothers Creature series. Played here by Doug Jones, who has made a career of embodying strange and/or homicidal humanoid creatures in del Toro films (see the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth), the Amphibian immediately bonds with Elisa and demonstrates a human capacity to learn and communicate.
Many viewers’ experience with this film may hinge on how deeply they buy into the romance between Elisa and Amphibian Man, which includes not only an underwater sex scene but a later explanation of exactly how this kind of interspecies coupling is even possible, given the Ken-doll appearance of the Man’s bathing-suit area. Perhaps Elisa’s enchantment comes too easily. Perhaps we might wonder why and how the Man reciprocates her fascination, given the physical and communicative barriers between them. One answer is that Elisa finds ways to communicate sensually without a voice, through food and music. Another is that we are probably supposed to understand that these characters, voiceless and lonely as they are, thrive on empathy. A third reason is, perhaps, revealed in the (imagined?) final underwater scene, and while you may see the revelation coming, it still feels impactful.
The eccentricities of this love story should come as no surprise to del Toro devotees, nor should the excellent performances he coaxes from his cast. Hawkins’s expressive face and the timing and tenderness of her gestures could serve as an acting class in portraying emotion without words. Shannon, all self-righteous glower and rage, conveys the personal and the universal threat of a xenophobic government; it feels all too timely.
Spencer’s quiet strength radiates in her every scene; she makes Zelda’s roles as Elisa’s fierce protector, as wife of a no-account man, and as background player in a government facility oozing masculinity and classism, more than the sidekick-of-color comedy relief she might otherwise have been. The script helps, giving Zelda key roles in facilitating Elisa’s opportunities for romance and in the ultimate rebellion against Richard Strickland’s angry-white-male tyranny. Though this is primarily still a story about white characters, the occasional nod to the period’s racial injustices at least assure that those problems are not erased.
As Giles, Richard Jenkins, always a strong addition to any cast, delivers an award-worthy performance dripping with the loneliness of the outsider. A painter, a gay man who lives alone and wants desperately to find love, best friends with his mute neighbor and—using symbolism that is becoming more common—owner of a couple of cats (one of which is quite unfortunate), Giles steps out of his melancholy but entrenched life to help Elisa on her great adventure, and Jenkins makes Giles’s every moment, every decision, every out-of-character act both funny and uplifting.
Whether the film earns our understanding of Elisa and Amphibian Man’s romantic connection is a key question for viewers and critics, and my main quibble with the film is that it spends key screen time on a couple of scenes that seem to add little to the narrative or characterizations—Strickland at home, for instance. This time could have been used to deepen and broaden the connective tissue between Elisa and Amphibian Man. I was also a bit surprised at how Strickland’s story ends. Given what we learn about the nature and powers of Amphibian Man and how the movie generally rejects aggression as problem-solving, I expected something else. Still, as a writer, I know you have to tell the story inside you, and not every reader/viewer will applaud every narrative decision. Even so, my disagreements are relatively minor.
Overall, The Shape of Water deserves the critical love it has gotten since its release and makes a powerful addition to del Toro’s canon. I look forward to buying my copy.
B+
In the first act of Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, a woman marches into the local advertising office and pays five thousand dollars to rent three derelict billboards located on a seldom-traveled rural road. That woman is Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), and from the first words she speaks, from her hard facial expression, from her indomitable body language, the viewer—and the poor ad agent—understand that you mess with Mildred at your peril.
These billboards, set at perhaps fifty-yard intervals, catalyze a communal crisis that involves Mildred, her son, her friends, the local police, the advertisers, and one dentist who picks exactly the wrong time to take a political side. Mildred has the billboards painted red and sequentially messaged:
Raped While Dying
And Still No Arrests
How Come, Chief Willoughby?
These messages represent Mildred’s shot across the bow of the local constabulary, led by William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson). We soon learn that Mildred’s daughter was raped and murdered, her body set afire, months before. The police have no leads. And Mildred has waited long enough.
Though you might think a small conservative town would rally behind the victim’s family, much of their loyalty to their fellow citizen ends where their adoration for Chief Willoughby begins. Mildred learns this almost immediately when Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell, who, like most actors in this film, disappears into his role so well you forget whom you’re watching) spots the billboards and reports them to Willoughby (yet another excellent Harrelson character). This leads to a talk between Willoughby and Mildred, in which the complicated nature of the film is epitomized:
Willoughby: I’d do anything to catch the guy who did it, Mrs. Hayes, but when the DNA don’t match no one who’s ever been arrested, and when the DNA don’t match any other crime nationwide, and there wasn’t a single eyewitness from the time she left your house to the time we found her, well… right now there ain’t too much more we could do.
Mildred: You could pull blood from every man and boy in this town over the age of 8.
Willoughby: There’s civil rights laws prevents that, Mrs. Hayes, and what if he was just passing through town?
Mildred: Pull blood from every man in the country.
Willoughby: And what if he was just passing through the country?
Mildred: If it was me, I’d start up a database, every male baby was born, stick ’em on it, and as soon as he done something wrong, cross reference it, make 100% certain it was a correct match, then kill him.
Willoughby: Yeah well, there’s definitely civil rights laws that prevents that. (This quote courtesy of IMDB.com)
From this exchange, we can see that Willoughby is less a bad man than a flawed human being. We can never forget those flaws, but we can acknowledge his empathy and the real problems law enforcement faces in cases without leads. From the same scene:
Willoughby: I don’t think them billboards is very fair.
Mildred: The time it took you to get out here whining like a bitch, Willoughby, some other poor girl’s probably out there being butchered.
The brutal rape, murder, and desecration of Mildred’s daughter has hardened her past the point of empathy with Willoughby’s problems, including his slow and agonizing death from pancreatic cancer—though there is a later scene in the police station that suggests that isn’t quite true, either. In short, from the opening moments of the film, we realize that we have entered a complicated world, where those who deserve our sympathy don’t always get it and no one is clearly and purely good or bad.
Chief Willoughby, whom, we might assume, is the antagonist—and who is capable of saying things like, “If you fired every cop who was just a little bit racist, you’d have, like, three cops. And they’d hate the fags”; who is capable of strong-arming the mother of a rape/murder victim; who continues to employ Dixon in spite of rumors about his torturing black suspects—is also a self-sacrificing man who can see the smallest, dimmest spark of humanity in a goon like Dixon and the likely outcomes of his disease for his loved ones. A series of letters he writes to the other characters reveals further depths in this man, who, against your better judgment, you may come to love a little.
Mildred, so strong and so broken, backtracks and shows honest concern over Willoughby’s health just before she commits an act of protest that may well shock you. In many ways—hence this review’s title—she is like her own character from Joel and Ethan Coen’s first film, Blood Simple, moved to a new town and sick of men’s bullshit. If McDormand is not nominated for Best Actress, I shall cry foul.
Dixon, at first a cartoonish buffoon who embodies the worst characteristics of southern white men and police officers, reveals layers of compassion and dedication underneath those borderline-inhuman traits.
In short, the film never lets us settle comfortably into rooting for any one character, and it forces us to see all sides of a complex, maddening, tragic situation. There is nothing wrong with a good guys vs. bad guys tale, but Three Billboards’ story is one we could imagine occurring in a thousand small towns anywhere in America. That universality and the depth of the movie’s character development make this story impossible to forget.
Plus, for a narrative that hinges on racism, sexism, rape, murder, Missouri citizens versus the police, terminal illness, suicides, severe injuries, and familial strife, Three Billboards is often surprisingly and refreshingly funny. At times, you may laugh and cry after one scene.
Supporting characters, played by always-welcome film and television veterans like Zeljko Ivanek and Clarke Peters, play key roles. Caleb Landry Jones’s advertising man is the hinge on which key plot points turn. Peters, playing a black officer who sweeps in and takes over a station with a history of racial problems, brings his typical no-nonsense gravitas to a minor character, as well as a few key lines that remind us of the stakes: looking about at the all-white force in the station, he says, “Ain’t y’all cracker motherfuckers got work to do?”
Some viewers might not appreciate the film’s non-resolution resolution, but for this writer, it perfectly encapsulates the world of Ebbing, Missouri, which, in its turn, perfectly encapsulates so much of American life in the 21st Century—questions without clear answers, strife on intersectional levels without clear solutions, individual pain rippling through a community and vice versa.
Underrated director Martin McDonagh and his stellar cast and crew have crafted one of 2017’s best films. If you missed it in theaters, rent it as soon as you can.
A-
I have never seen any of Pixar’s Cars movies. Something about the concept never really appealed to me. I’m not sure why. Old dude who flies his house across continents using helium balloons without losing so much as a shingle? No problem. A rat who wants to be a chef? Sure, I’ll watch that. A family of superheroes, sentient toys, a robot that can love? I’m there. A film about talking cars, co-starring Larry the Cable Guy? I just couldn’t.
What all this means is that I will follow Pixar almost anywhere. Moreover, I usually love the trip. They tell stories that work well for the typical target audience of Disney animation—little kids—and the people who buy the tickets.
I saw Coco with my wife, my son, and my youngest daughter, who is eighteen. Our theater, while not packed, was well-attended. Families with up to half a dozen kids piled in, popcorn and sodas and hot dogs in hand, ready to experience the latest Pixar magic.
We had heard that a twenty-minute short film preceded the feature, a point of contention among some local and vocal viewers we had encountered, but our showing got right to the main event. I’m not sure why. I was disappointed in that part of the experience, because I usually dig Pixar shorts, but that’s not Coco’s fault.
To the movie—Coco tells the story of Miguel Rivera, a pre-teen would-be musician born into a family that hates music. Why? Miguel’s great-great-grandfather abandoned his family—including his daughter, the wheelchair-bound and so-old-she’s-barely-aware titular character—for a music career. Formerly a passionate singer, Miguel’s great-great-grandmother, Mama Imelda, forswore music, banning it from her house and passing the edict down in the family ethos all the way to Miguel’s day. If his parents—or, worse, his fiery grandmother, known only as Abuelita—so much as catch him near a Mariachi, woe be unto that poor musician.
The film is set on Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. As Miguel tries to sneak away to practice his musicianship—the film never reveals how he procures a cheap guitar or builds a hideaway complete with a television or learns to play his instrument so well—Abuelita and the rest of the family try to teach Miguel the importance of building an altar to their dead ancestors, displaying pictures of the departed and leaving offerings, like food.
Convinced that his great-great-grandfather was the famous singer/actor Ernesto de la Cruz (voiced with plenty of self-satisfied ooze by Benjamin Bratt), and infuriated with his closed-minded family after Abuelita destroys his guitar, Miguel runs away and attempts to steal de la Cruz’s guitar from the mausoleum. This is, of course, a problem, because the cemetery is full of families cleaning and decorating tombstones. Stuck within the tomb, Miguel strums the guitar while standing on top of a carpet of flower petals and, through the magic of Dia de los Muertos, is transported to the light-filled, celebratory, walking-and-talking-skeleton-populated Land of the Dead.
The catch? Miguel is a live boy, but he can only stay that way if he returns to the Land of the Living before the holiday ends. To do so, he must get the blessing of his dead family—who will only grant it if he forswears music forever. Rejecting this condition, Miguel sets off on a quest to reach de la Cruz, whose celebrity status makes a visit nearly impossible. Aided by a mysterious figure named Hector, who desperately needs to reach the Land of the Living, and chased by Mama Imelda’s griffin-like spirit animal, the ever-more-skeletal Miguel races against time and the ways that the deepest, darkest truths of his family tie him ever tighter to the Dead.
If it seems like it took me a while to reach the film’s central conflicts, like this review leans heavily toward multiple points of exposition, that’s because the movie does, too. Along with some unanswered questions, like those mentioned above, the initial plot threads—Miguel’s love of music vs. his family’s unwavering rejection of it! Miguel’s need for an instrument and an audience! The identity of his great-great-grandfather! Mama Imelda’s ultimatum! The chase through the Dead’s city! The question of just who this Hector dude is! Why the film is named after a secondary character who barely moves or talks! The purpose of a lovable but doofy stray dog!—fly in many different directions, making for a haphazard and overly busy first act. When compared with the emotionally devastating yet economical storytelling of Up, for instance, Coco feels muddled.
Once Miguel runs from his dead family, just as he ran from his living one, and the race to find his musical ancestor coalesces with his race against time, the film gels, and its twin arcs—Miguel’s fate as a musician and his understanding the true importance of family history—interweave beautifully. From that point on, the already visually stunning movie churns at a quick pace, hitting key emotional beats at just the right time.
Pixar has gone dark before—Ellie’s death in Up, the third act of The Incredibles, the torture of toys in Toy Story and the attempted murder of our fave characters in Toy Story 3, the end of the world in Wall-E, et cetera. Somehow, though, parts of Coco feel even darker. There are long-kept family secrets, a devastating betrayal, a murder (!!!), questions of what happens in life after the afterlife, issues of legacy, Miguel’s increasingly skeletal body, and more. While some parents might find these elements a tad too dark for the film’s youngest viewers, they add gravitas and high stakes to the narrative, making Miguel’s journey feel urgent and intensely personal.
Yet the movie, rightly lauded for its commitment to diversity, also feels universal. Voiced by an entirely Latinx cast and exploring Mexican cultural traditions in a time when American leaders talk of bad hombres and border walls and travel bans, Coco, with its emphasis on family ties and the extraordinary power of art, feels necessary and timely in a way it might not have before November 2016. In fact, though the timeline of Pixar filmmaking almost guarantees that this is coincidental and not an intentional decision, Ernesto de la Cruz—vain, concerned above all else with his legacy and image, loyal only to his sycophants, greedy, myopic—bears, in terms of personality and values, more than a passing resemblance to certain Muppet-headed American leaders of today.
For all that, though, the story is, at one level, about one boy’s acceptance of and into his family—finding his place in the world. The scene between Miguel and Grandma Coco, praised in Entertainment Weekly as one of the top ten movie scenes of the year, may well break your heart, even as it makes you smile.
With excellent voice acting, Pixar’s high standards of astonishing visuals, cultural significance, timeliness, and poignant humanity, Coco overcomes its haphazard first act and proves itself a worthy entry into the Pixar canon.
B+