Post by Dracula on Dec 12, 2020 19:24:44 GMT -5
The Nest(11/18/2020)
When theaters first (probably irresponsibly) re-opened late in the summer around the time of the ill-fated Tenet release I exerted my willpower and mostly stayed away. This wasn’t too hard as the theaters were mostly filled with stuff like New Mutants, but there were a couple good things outside of Tenet that tempted me a little and one of those was Sean Durkin’s Sundance hit The Nest. Under normal circumstances this is the kind of movie I’d try and get to as soon as it hit arthouses and try to be ahead of the game on. That’s certainly what I did with Durkin’s first film Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene, which was a chilling movie about a cult’s hold on a woman who fled from it. I had to wait about two weeks for that movie to arrive in my local area theaters and at the time that seemed like an incredibly annoyingly long wait to see the movie all the critics were talking about after its New York/Los Angeles review. But now here I am willingly waiting two months to see his follow-up, not because I was less interested but simply because I knew deep down that running out to the theater when it hit was a dumb choice to make both for myself and for society. At the time I had no real way of knowing how I’d eventually be able to see the film. There was a VOD release lined up for later, but at the time mid-November seemed like a lifetime away and it wasn’t clear to me if that VOD release would be at a reasonable price that I was actually willing to pay for a streaming rental. Fortunately the eventual at home release did arrive, the wait didn’t drive me too crazy, and the VOD rental fee was a reasonable $5.99 so I decided to finally give the movie a watch.
The film is set sometime in the 1980s and focuses on a family in New York consisting of an Englishman named Rory O'Hara (Jude Law), his American wife Allison O’Hara (Carrie Coons), their teenage daughter Samantha (Oona Roche), and younger son Benjamin (Charlie Shotwell). Rory is something of a self-styled hustler with some sort of faintly defined career in finance but feels he’s at something of a dead end in his current New York position and convinces his wife to move the family to London to chase an opportunity there that’s gotten him excited. They arrive and rent a large dusty manor in the countryside, enroll the kids in expensive schools, and by a horse that Allison can practice her equestrian skills with. Things in England to not go very smoothly for the family though, not so much because there’s anything wrong with the country but more because Rory’s plans to build a new life there proved to be rather half-baked. It soon becomes apparent that this is something of a pattern of conduct from in and the movie then begins to depict how this series of bad decisions starts to tear apart his marriage and how this by extension begins to tear apart the whole family.
The Nest is a tricky movie to talk about because it doesn’t really have a central hook or high concept that you can lean on when describing it. I think it’s probably at its best when you look at it as a character study of the Jude Law character and his sort of mania to be this Gatsby-like rags to riches success when he frankly doesn’t really have the level of success to back it up, but the film is also interested in the wife and to a lesser extent the kids as well. A bit like the Ang Lee film The Ice Storm, the film focuses in on the family’s upper class ennui, but unlike that film which was pretty clearly focused in on their reaction to the sexual revolution this one is more about the fallout of Reagan era hyper-capitalism. There is a bit of a hurdle to getting to invested in the plight of this family given that, while perhaps not quite as rich as they’d like to be they are plainly still more privileged than vast swaths of society and there is a bit of a “first world problems” taint to a lot of this, but I don’t think the film is unaware of this and is in many ways intentionally exploring this grass is always greener rich person mentality.
The film’s director, Sean Durkin, is plainly an emerging talent in cinema though I’m not sure I’ve quite cracked what makes his work distinctive quite yet. This is only his second feature and he’s had a pretty long break since his debut Martha Marcy May Marlene in which he did some work on a British miniseries called Southcliffe. If Wikipedia is to be believed he was born in Canada, raised in England to the age of twelve, but then moved to New York during his teen years. That’s kind of the reverse of the trans-Atlantic journey the family in The Nest takes. I have no idea if his own story resembles the life depicted here beyond that but I don’t think it’s a wild leap to wonder if there is at least an element of autobiography on display here. So you have something of a personal movie here and it has some things to say about ambition and “the American dream,” though at times it maybe spells these ideas out a little too directly in certain conversations, but it lacks a particularly marketable hook like Martha Marcy May Marlene had to really get people interested. So this might be a bit of a tough sell, but if you’re in the mood for a new character based indie this might have what you’re looking for.
***1/2 out of Five
When theaters first (probably irresponsibly) re-opened late in the summer around the time of the ill-fated Tenet release I exerted my willpower and mostly stayed away. This wasn’t too hard as the theaters were mostly filled with stuff like New Mutants, but there were a couple good things outside of Tenet that tempted me a little and one of those was Sean Durkin’s Sundance hit The Nest. Under normal circumstances this is the kind of movie I’d try and get to as soon as it hit arthouses and try to be ahead of the game on. That’s certainly what I did with Durkin’s first film Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene, which was a chilling movie about a cult’s hold on a woman who fled from it. I had to wait about two weeks for that movie to arrive in my local area theaters and at the time that seemed like an incredibly annoyingly long wait to see the movie all the critics were talking about after its New York/Los Angeles review. But now here I am willingly waiting two months to see his follow-up, not because I was less interested but simply because I knew deep down that running out to the theater when it hit was a dumb choice to make both for myself and for society. At the time I had no real way of knowing how I’d eventually be able to see the film. There was a VOD release lined up for later, but at the time mid-November seemed like a lifetime away and it wasn’t clear to me if that VOD release would be at a reasonable price that I was actually willing to pay for a streaming rental. Fortunately the eventual at home release did arrive, the wait didn’t drive me too crazy, and the VOD rental fee was a reasonable $5.99 so I decided to finally give the movie a watch.
The film is set sometime in the 1980s and focuses on a family in New York consisting of an Englishman named Rory O'Hara (Jude Law), his American wife Allison O’Hara (Carrie Coons), their teenage daughter Samantha (Oona Roche), and younger son Benjamin (Charlie Shotwell). Rory is something of a self-styled hustler with some sort of faintly defined career in finance but feels he’s at something of a dead end in his current New York position and convinces his wife to move the family to London to chase an opportunity there that’s gotten him excited. They arrive and rent a large dusty manor in the countryside, enroll the kids in expensive schools, and by a horse that Allison can practice her equestrian skills with. Things in England to not go very smoothly for the family though, not so much because there’s anything wrong with the country but more because Rory’s plans to build a new life there proved to be rather half-baked. It soon becomes apparent that this is something of a pattern of conduct from in and the movie then begins to depict how this series of bad decisions starts to tear apart his marriage and how this by extension begins to tear apart the whole family.
The Nest is a tricky movie to talk about because it doesn’t really have a central hook or high concept that you can lean on when describing it. I think it’s probably at its best when you look at it as a character study of the Jude Law character and his sort of mania to be this Gatsby-like rags to riches success when he frankly doesn’t really have the level of success to back it up, but the film is also interested in the wife and to a lesser extent the kids as well. A bit like the Ang Lee film The Ice Storm, the film focuses in on the family’s upper class ennui, but unlike that film which was pretty clearly focused in on their reaction to the sexual revolution this one is more about the fallout of Reagan era hyper-capitalism. There is a bit of a hurdle to getting to invested in the plight of this family given that, while perhaps not quite as rich as they’d like to be they are plainly still more privileged than vast swaths of society and there is a bit of a “first world problems” taint to a lot of this, but I don’t think the film is unaware of this and is in many ways intentionally exploring this grass is always greener rich person mentality.
The film’s director, Sean Durkin, is plainly an emerging talent in cinema though I’m not sure I’ve quite cracked what makes his work distinctive quite yet. This is only his second feature and he’s had a pretty long break since his debut Martha Marcy May Marlene in which he did some work on a British miniseries called Southcliffe. If Wikipedia is to be believed he was born in Canada, raised in England to the age of twelve, but then moved to New York during his teen years. That’s kind of the reverse of the trans-Atlantic journey the family in The Nest takes. I have no idea if his own story resembles the life depicted here beyond that but I don’t think it’s a wild leap to wonder if there is at least an element of autobiography on display here. So you have something of a personal movie here and it has some things to say about ambition and “the American dream,” though at times it maybe spells these ideas out a little too directly in certain conversations, but it lacks a particularly marketable hook like Martha Marcy May Marlene had to really get people interested. So this might be a bit of a tough sell, but if you’re in the mood for a new character based indie this might have what you’re looking for.
***1/2 out of Five
