"Driveways"

 ☆☆☆☆½ 

Two months ago, Driveways would have seemed like a sweet and touching film, a movie so tender and gentle that if you aren't also very quiet might surprise you by flying away. Yet, here it is now, in the middle of May 2020, and it seems almost profound – a portrait of the way we lived then, back when the great Brian Dennehy was alive in a world untouched by sadness and trouble.

Driveways is a beautiful film under any circumstances, but even more because Dennehy is gone now, and because it wants to show us how hard it is to connect with people, and how that can be both rewarding and painful. No one is a threat in Driveways, no one is to be feared, and life is to be celebrated, even its pains and heartaches, its incalculable losses and unending regrets.

Directed by Andrew Ahn from a screenplay by Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, Driveways is easy to mistake for a film in which not much happens; watching it is like driving by the nondescript little house on the nondescript little street where most of it takes place – you'd never know at first glance how much love and loss and joy and pain are contained within it.

Hong Chau plays Kathy, whose sister April has died and left behind a mess, physically and emotionally. It falls to Kathy to clean up April's house, and April was a tortured, hoarding soul. Kathy brings her son Cody (Lucas Jaye) with her, and it isn't long before the boy has met the next-door neighbor, a Vietnam veteran named Del (Dennehy). They befriend each other. And that is the movie.

Driveways has little straightforward plot, but is suffused with love for its characters and their humanity. It is about the way we suffer through our losses, our tiny ones and our biggest ones, and still get by – fine the way we are, maybe, but better with each other. It is graceful, emotionally resonant and in its own very quiet way, if it strikes you in just the right mood and at the right moment, staggeringly great.

NOTE:

This is one of a series of new-release films that cannot be seen in theaters due to ongoing closures. Through "virtual cinema," it can be rented and watched at home, with a portion of each "virtual ticket" going directly to the cinema you choose. https://drivewaysfilm.vhx.tv

Viewed May 9, 2020 – Virtual Cinema

"Spaceship Earth"

 ☆☆☆☆½ 

If you remember Biosphere 2 at all, it's probably because you recall it being a vaguely wacky, questionably scientific science experiment in the Arizona desert in the early 1990s ... or maybe because you saw Bio-Dome starring Pauly Shore way back when. Though it was heralded with a media blitz, Biosphere 2 became an oddity.

Its science was questioned, its motives and ideals became suspect, and eventually – well, there's no way I'd ruin the plot twist that comes more than two-thirds of the way through this marvelous, stirring  new documentary.

Biosphere 2 had the vague air of absurdity about it because it was, in fact, absurd. Filmmaker Matt Wolf doesn't try to pretend otherwise. As Spaceship Earth makes entirely clear, it was a radical, liberal, hippy concept created by a radical, liberal, hippy theater troupe led by a charismatic, mercurial man named John Allen. What place does a communal theater troupe have exploring questions of science, humanity and the ways mankind might live in space?

Wolf's film asks that question seriously, and explores the drama, the media frenzy, the personalities and an eleventh-hour plot twist so surprising it made my jaw drop and so ultimately disheartening it makes the film resonate with unexpected power.

As to what place a visionary artist has in dreaming up a possible future, Spaceship Earth does drop a reference to Walt Disney's EPCOT Center – and tantalizes with a wistful truth that it's the crackpot dreamers who have shaped our history ... and who too often, and with devastating consequences, are undone.

NOTE: Spaceship Earth is available on Hulu and other streaming services, but may also be watched by purchasing a "virtual cinema" ticket from many local, independent movie theaters. About half of the cost of the ticket will go directly toward the movie theater.


Viewed May 8, 2020 – Hulu