Skip to main content

REVIEW: The Photograph




"I wish I had put as much courage into love as I put in my work."

This sentence becomes the recurring theme of Stella Meghe's film The Photograph featuring Issa Rae, LaKeith Stanfield, Chante Adams, and Y'lan Noel. This film highlights the interaction between history and agency within the context of love. By giving more attention to the humanity of its characters than to the tropes of the genre, The Photograph crafts a quiet yet solid picture of choosing love over its easier alternative, regret.


The film follows museum curator Mae Morton following the death of her mother, Christina, a talented photographer who kept her distance from Mae in life. Mae is approached by a journalist, Michael Block, who is chasing after a story about her mother and the romance she once had with a man named Isaac. Through Christina's letters and Isaac's retelling of the story, Mae comes to better understand her mother and her struggles, and the parallels she notices in her own life compel her to be proactive in her life, especially in the love blossoming between her and Michael.

The film alternates between the two love stories, giving priority to Mae and Michael. This works to its advantage and detriment. The present-day love story feels the more compelling, though I have the sneaking suspicion that this is largely owing to Christina and Isaac's courtship not being sufficiently developed. Christina's fatal departure might have had more sting for the audience had we been allowed to see more of their honeymoon phase.

The plot goes about where you expect it to go. The third-act twist is even one of the more obvious twists they could have gone for, though it plays organically into the thematic questions of agency in love and how our histories shape who we are. Christina and Isaac's relationship naturally echoes in Mae and Micheal's, though the connections are neither obvious nor cheap. Mae finds herself redeeming both Isaac and her mother for how they wish they had acted.

Rae and Stanfield bring humanity to their characters and help the audience to feel they are watching people not tropes. The film is lacking for big names in the cast (though Jasmine Cephas Jones of Hamilton fame does feature as a supporting character, and you might recognize Rob Morgan from Stranger Things). Allowing the actors to work with a mostly blank slate lets them leave their own marks on these characters.

The film isn't remarkably indulgent. There aren't a lot of bitter lovers' quarrels or running into each other's arms as the music swells. (I don't think the music ever swells, actually?) The film carries a certain dignity in that way and asserts that learning to live and love is still interesting without leaning on exaggerated drama.

The film's pacing is similarly unconcerned with artificially heightening its stakes or demanding to be seen, creating a sort of slow bake rather than an intense burn. Though the movie is only about an hour and forty minutes long, you lose yourself in it, not quite knowing or caring how long you've been in the auditorium or how long until the credits start rolling. This I predict will be the movie's hardest sell. Not everyone will get behind such an approach, though I attest the rewards are worth the investment.

Indeed, this isn't a movie designed for escapism. It very much wants the viewer to confront their own reality, to see their own life playing out on the big screen, and most importantly, to ask what fears may be hindering their own experience with love.

This is a movie concerned with that uncomfortable yet pivotal space after love hits a speed-bump, when we let feelings die out in a whimper because it's easy. This is a movie interested in giving shape and voice to love without coddling it. We're a little late for this to be a Valentine's Day excursion, but don't discount this thoughtful meditation on love just yet.
                                                                                         -The Professor






Comments

Popular posts from this blog

REVIEW: Jurassic World - Rebirth

     I had a mixed reaction to  Jurassic World: Rebirth,  but it did make for one of the most enjoyable theater experiences I've had in recent memory.      I have to imagine that a part of this is because my most common theater appointments are matinee screenings, but I had the opportunity to see this one at a fairly well-attended midnight screening. And there's nary a film more tailored for surround-sound roaring and screens wide enough to contain these de-extinct creatures. ("Objects on the screen feel closer than they appear.") It was natural for me to cap the experience by applauding as the credits stared to roll, even if, as usual, I was the only one in the auditorium to do so.     Yes, I am that kind of moviegoer; yes, I enjoyed the experience that much, and I imagine I will revisit it across time.      That's not to imagine the movie is beyond reproach, but for I suppose it bears mentioning that, generally , th...

REVIEW: Superman

      I feel like it's essential that I establish early on in this review that this marks my first time seeing a Superman movie in theaters.      The Zack Snyder saga was actually in swing while I was in high school and college--back when I was in what most would consider in the target audience for these films--but that kind of passed by me without my attention.      And I'll be clear that I take no specific pride in this. I wasn't really avoiding the films by any means. My buddies all just went to see them without me while I was at a church youth-camp, and I just didn't bother catching up until much, much later.  I'm disclosing all this to lay down that I don't really have any nostalgic partiality to the Superman story. Most of my context for the mythology comes from its echoes on larger pop culture.     I know, for example, that Clark Kent was raised in a smalltown farm community with his adopted parents, and it was them who...

REVIEW: ELIO

    Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth.      There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true.      The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space?      But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

Resurrecting Treasure Planet

   Wherever any given cinephile falls on the totem pole, they are certainly familiar with the idea of the film canon, this idea of an elect selection of films that signal the height of the artform's cultural value, touchstones for all who consider themselves good and true lovers of cinema. Films that belong to "the canon" are secure in continued cultural relevance even decades after their premiere.    Any person's chosen reference for the canon will certainly vary between which list they believe carries the most authority (AFI Top 100, IMDb Top 250, The Academy Awards), or just as likely will synthesize a number of sources, but however any one person defines it, the canon is real, and it demands to be recognized.            It will surprise some, baffle others, and offend others still, to think that  Walt Disney Animation has its own film canon of sorts. Belonging to this selective society come with some very specific be...

REVIEW: SCREAM VI

       Ever since Sidney Prescott asked audiences nearly 30 years ago "how do you gut someone?" with such disgust, the "Scream" franchise has forced a stab-hungry audience to question how they could ever entertain a ritual so violating as the gruesome act taking someone else's life.  Last year, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett delivered arguably the franchise's strongest offering yet. Strong because the film played its game very well. These guys also know that subversion in film is fun, certainly, but also that films which sell themselves on their subversion tend to be very hollow. You need a strong thematic lifeblood and a cast of characters to root for. If your audience is more excited about the cut-up bodies than the victors, you have a problem. This is where the newer films, including this most outing, have found their strength. Scream VI sees the survivors of the last installment making a fresh break in New York City. Sam, Tara, Mindy, and Chad a...

REVIEW: The Legend of Ochi

    This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET ," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence.      But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi , does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else.  Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism.     On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of ...

The Many Fathers of Harry Potter

     Despite being a Harry Potter fan for most of my life, I didn’t make it to "Harry Potter Land" at Universal until November of 2019.      Some relatives invited me on a SoCal theme park tour, a trip which also saw my last visit to Disneyland before the shutdown. And when you and a bunch of other twenty-somethings are walking through a recreation of Hogwarts for the first time, you inevitably start playing this game where you call out every artifact on display and try to trace it back to whatever movie or even specific moment the mise en scene is trying to invoke:           There’s the greenhouse from "Chamber of Secrets." Now they’re playing the “Secrets of the Castle” track from "Prisoner of Azkaban." Here we are loading in the Room of Requirement from "Order of the Phoenix." From start to finish, the attraction, like the franchise from which it spawned, is just one giant nostalgia parade.     See, t he Wiza...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

          Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it.       Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate.    So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

Hating Disney Princesses Has Never Been Feminist pt. 2

    As we discussed in the last section , Disney Princesses are often held accountable for things that did not actually happen in their films--things they did not do. I feel like a part of this is the means by which said scrutiny typically takes place.       There is, after all, a sort of stigma around watching "cartoons" as an adult, especially "princess cartoons," let alone watching them intently. And so I feel like a lot of the conclusions people come to about Disney Princesses comes either entirely from second-hand sources, like the memes, or from having it on in the background while babysitting as they scroll through their phone.      I'll use an anecdote from my own history as an example: my very first week of film school, the professor drifted to the topic of female representation in the media. This professor dropped a sort of humble-brag that he had actually never seen Disney's Pocahontas , but that he didn't consider this a terrible ...

Wicked vs Maleficent

  “Witch” has historically been used as a pejorative for a non-conformist woman, someone who does not obey the expectations of her culture. It’s little wonder, then, that a society with more progressive mores would commandeer the witch archetype into a warrior for social justice, or that the most famous witch of them all would spearhead this retyping.      Yes, I am thinking of a certain Broadway musical and a fiery, green-skinned, justice-bent rebel-rouser.  Wicked is a stage musical that follows the infamous Wicked Witch of the West as featured in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz . By shedding light on what happened before Dorothy dropped into Oz, Wicked recasts the witch as not a villain, but a misunderstood heroine. The show has been defying gravity on Broadway for coming on twenty years now, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down.   When Disney’s Maleficen t came along a little over ten years later, the shorthand description of the film was basic...