Andrew Scott, left, and Paul Mescal in a scene from All of Us Strangers.Parisa Taghizadeh/The Associated Press
Authentic is Merriam Webster’s word of 2023, and it was the word of the year in movies, too. Many of the best films focus on characters who are trying to break out of the box in which they’re trapped and become their true selves.
Obviously, there’s that trendsetter Barbie, the film that snagged the most Golden Globe nominations, written and directed by Greta Gerwig. In cinema lobbies, patrons eagerly lined up to pose, doll-like, inside life-sized packaging. But on screen, once Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) has her consciousness raised by a hard-working mom (America Ferrera), she can no longer be a symbol of sexism and inequality. When her Mattel overlords literally bark, “Get back in the box!” Barbie runs instead, opting for the messy imperfections of the real world and eventually, her authentic, gynecologist-going self.
Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie in a scene from Barbie.Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures/The Associated Press
For 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, being wooed by the world’s hottest star, Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi), seems like the ticket out of her boxed-in adolescent life – military father, Air Force base. But Graceland proves to be just a fancier, shag-carpeted box. Elvis toys with her clothes and hairstyles like she’s his Barbie doll; he feeds her diet and sleeping pills to keep her thin and docile. She spends her life blankly staring out boxy windows until he plays with her again. She can’t even sit on the lawn (itself fenced in) without someone forcing her back inside.
Coppola understands the paradox of celebrity: The more famous you get, the tighter the walls around you constrict. Elvis’s fame reduces Priscilla’s world to the same five friends inside the same four walls, with the occasional hustle from mansion to limo to hotel room. But Coppola also makes a subtle case that Priscilla is every American woman from 1959 to 1972, trapped in the conventional wife/mother/homemaker box. She finally escapes, barrelling through the driveway gates in that symbol of freedom, the convertible. On the move, in the open air, she can finally breathe.
Every man in Poor Things wants to box in Bella Baxter (Emma Stone, headed for another Oscar): the husband who trapped her former incarnation in misery; the mad scientist (Willem Dafoe) who created her new one; the fiancé who tries to freeze her in innocence; the lover who wants to possess her (Mark Ruffalo); and the johns who purchase her time. But Bella craves experience – in fact, she insists on it. She never stops evolving and escaping; she unlocks bedroom windows, shinnies down from rooftops, flees her ship cabin and the ship itself. We leave her in a world of her making, surrounded by hybridized creatures never before seen, which are never just one thing.
Ramy Youssef and Emma Stone in Poor Things.Yorgos Lanthimos/Supplied
Speaking of being just one thing: In the opening minutes of Maestro, Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper, who also wrote and directed) tells us plainly that he can’t bear that idea – he wants classical music and Broadway tunes, family and freedom, male and female lovers. Cooper shows us the acute pain of being closeted, as well as the pain that those who smash norms can inflict on others.
All of Us Strangers, written and directed by Andrew Haigh (it opens in Canada in early January; it’s already won shelves of prizes) is set years after Maestro, in the late 1980s, but not enough has changed. Though Adam (Andrew Scott, brilliant) isn’t closeted, he’s living in a near-empty tower block – a literal box in the sky – and inside the most diabolical box of all: the prison of his own unprocessed grief and shame. Only 12 when his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) died, he was old enough to sense they preferred not to know his true nature. Watching Adam crack open his shell – tentatively, delicately – to move toward love with Harry (Paul Mescal), and toward reconciliation with his parents, I never stopped weeping.
There are plenty more: In The Holdovers, the prep school teacher no one likes (Paul Giamatti) relaxes his stuffy defences over a snowy Christmas break. In American Fiction, writer/director Cord Jefferson (he won the People’s Choice award at TIFF 2023) and star Jeffrey Wright make hay of a pop culture that lauds Black authors, but only if they fit into a specific box: oppressed survivor of the mean streets.
Ava DuVernay’s Origin examines the imprisonments of caste. And in Wim Wenders’s luminous Perfect Days (also opening here in Jan.), it initially appears that Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) lives in boxes – his cell-like apartment; the public toilets he cleans in his Tokyo district. But gradually, we come to understand that he is living absolutely authentically, and that we’ve never seen anyone freer.
Conversely, a few films show us the perils of wanting to fit into other people’s boxes. In Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Mollie (Lily Gladstone) allows her husband Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) to dehumanize her until she almost dies of it; Ernest, meanwhile, obeys his uncle (Robert De Niro) though it makes him miserable.
Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott in All of Us Strangers.Chris Harris/Searchlight Pictures
In Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, Sandra (Sandra Huller) refuses to be boxed into the role of docile wife, even if it lands her in a jury box. (The film itself resists the courtroom drama box of “did she or didn’t she.”) In Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a Nazi commandant (Christian Friedel), whose bourgeoise home shares a wall with the Auschwitz death camp, ignores the screams, dog barks, shots and smoke that drift over and spends his days staring at boxy specs for high-efficiency crematoriums. But even he can’t wall himself off from the future.
And in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, Oliver (Barry Keoghan) craves desperately to be let into the closed society ruled by the gorgeous, charismatic, ultraposh Felix (Elordi again). Oliver is forever standing in darkness, peering at Felix through glass partitions in pubs, or into his lighted rooms at Oxford. Once Oliver gets his foot in the door of Felix’s titular manor home – its own kind of prison, and Felix its prisoner – well, he’ll just kill to stay there.
No list of escaped boxes would be complete without mentioning Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. Not only did the concert film break the usual Hollywood distribution model and shatter box office records, its star is the role model for young women celebrating the multitudes they contain. It, along with all the films above, give me hope that perhaps Hollywood can step out of the superhero-films-only box it made for itself and invest in original work again.
Movies are the preoccupations of their makers. Since many of the filmmakers above are women, queer or racialized, it’s easy to understand why stories about barriers crashing down and walls crumbling would grab them. As the beloved Canadian writer/director/producer Charles Officer, whom we lost this month, way too soon, once said, “I’m not here to check boxes, I’m here to smash them.” He was always ahead of the curve.
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Johanna Schneller