Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 21

Toni Erdmann Is a Comedy Experience Unlike Any Other

Toni Erdmann is a tough film to explain. It aims to confound, to discombobulate, to make you laugh and wonder what exactly you think is so amusing—to re-evaluate things, in short. That’s the goal of both the film and the title character, a parody persona adopted by an eccentric divorced dad to both repel, and earn the love of, his disapproving daughter. Maren Ade’s comedy sounds actively repellent on paper—it’s from Germany (not a country that produces a lot of crossover comedies), it’s nearly three hours long, and it centers in part on the westernization of Europe’s eastern bloc by insidious, but bland, capitalist consultants. So why is it so unbelievably funny and heartwarming?

It’s because Toni Erdmann is legitimately unlike any comedy I had ever seen before, as hyperbolic as that may sound. Describe it in passing, and it might sound like many a fuzzy Hollywood affair, a tale of a prankster father and straight-laced daughter learning to reconnect (in fact, its rumored American remake may well end up in that lane). But Toni Erdmann draws so much of its humor from refusing to cut away from a scene that might seem irrelevant or boring, or to land on an easy punchline. It’s some new, evolved form of awkward comedy that doesn’t strive to make the audience wince, but rather lives in every joyously strange, unsettling moment.

To summarize the plot of Toni Erdmann would be to spoil some of its juicy surprises. It would also take a while, since Ade’s film is not only very long, but also steeped in tiny details, taking stock of two people’s day-to-day lives with occasional flourishes of absurdity. It follows Winfried Conradi (Peter Simonischek), a divorced music teacher living in Germany with a penchant for old-fashioned pranks, often involving a set of ridiculous fake teeth and other wild costumes.

Winfried is semi-estranged from his daughter Ines (Sandra Hüller), a high-powered business consultant currently posted in Bucharest, Romania, where she’s assisting in the creeping privatization of the country’s oil industry. He decides to visit her and be his usual annoying self, confusing her co-workers and clients with his pranks and generally serving as a bother. After a while (this is a long movie, so it really is a while), he leaves, and rather than follow him back to Germany, the film lingers with Ines, steeping the audience in the particulars of her job and her inter-office politics for another 20 minutes or so.

It’s so mundane that it feels bewildering—Ade skillfully gets the audience to actually pay attention to what Ines is up to, to begin to understand the tedious, sophistic details of her work, and her strengths and defects in the workplace. You’re glued to the action precisely because you cannot figure out what is going on—when the next twist is coming, what happened to Winfried, and whether or not this film is going to return to the strained father-daughter relationship it seemed to be using as a plot foundation.

The movie is subversive to the last, finding laughs by taking life as it is.

It does eventually do that, but as with every story turn in this film, the manner in which it happens is hilariously disorienting. As already mentioned, Winfried has another personality he occasionally inhabits, a man named Toni Erdmann who serves as some parody of an eccentric tycoon, and Toni begins to spend an uncomfortable amount of time in Bucharest. If Ines and her company represent the grinding gears of westernization in a country still defined by the collectivization of its Soviet past, Toni Erdmann is some funhouse-mirror vision of the future Ines is helping to build. He’s an uncouth, shambling character, but he’s one that always commands the attention of every room he’s in, simply because of his bizarre, assured confidence.

This is not to say Toni Erdmann is explicitly political. The moments spent looking at the minutiae of Ines’s work life are fascinating precisely because they’re so granular; Ade is happy to let viewers pore over whatever interests them most and set aside the rest. It’s a film about how a powerful woman navigates the workplace, but one that doesn’t pass judgment about how she does it. The movie takes an almost sick pleasure in the absurdities of modern life, even when they border on the tragic.

Toni Erdmann builds to an incredible finale—a set piece that pulls together all these disparate themes into a outrageous piece of high comedy, a hilarious shattering of bourgeois norms that feels like something out of a Luis Buñuel film. Then it keeps on going for another 15 puzzling minutes, rather than capitalizing on its transcendent climax. The movie is subversive to the last, finding laughs by taking life as it is, from slapstick hijinks to dull boardroom meetings—making it a truly original comic experience.

Why More Writers Should Talk About Money

Money makes people anxious—perhaps even more so with writers. The relationship between commerce and writing is commonly sketched out in caricatures: the starving artist, the hapless student, the privileged few who “make it.” More often, it’s not addressed at all.

In the past few years, some writers have begun to more openly approach questions of class. The internet has seen a profusion of such pieces: A writer who is “sponsored” by her husband calls on other writers to be more transparent about where their money comes from. Another outlines the clear advantages that being born rich, connected, and able to attend expensive schools furnish to becoming a successful writer. In another case, a woman who wrote a well-received debut novel details how she went broke after a single advance.

A new book of essays and interviews with writers on the topic of money, released earlier this month, aims to dig even deeper. Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, edited by Manjula Martin, includes hard truths and thoughtful meditations on class and capitalism while also functioning as a survival guide. In one essay, Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist, Difficult Women) speaks frankly about her student debt, annual income, and past day jobs. In another, Martin herself explains the kind of code-switching by which writers conceal their class background in talking about their careers.

By turns comforting, depressing, and illuminating, Scratch paints a fuller, more personal picture of what it’s like to make a living from—or while—writing. I spoke with Martin about the intersection of writing, money, and class, as well as the process of making Scratch. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Joseph Frankel : Some of the writers you spoke with for Scratch were very frank about their finances and their class backgrounds. Others were a little more reluctant. What accounts for these different levels of openness?

Manjula Martin: In my experience working with writers on this topic, it’s often the people who have more money who don’t want to talk about money. Transparency is a really scary thing for a lot of people in any profession, and I think there are good reasons for that. But people who are excited to talk about the topic, even if they’re nervous, inherently understand ... that it takes transparency to change stuff. It’s the old saw of “knowledge is power,” and I think that extends to writers and money.

There are a lot of barriers to access for people who come from low-income backgrounds, or maybe less traditional educational backgrounds, or who have had to deal with other types of prejudices in their life. If we want that to change, we need to start being honest about how this business actually works.

Frankel: Essays in the collection call attention to the creative value of day jobs and, in the case of Leslie Jamison (The Empathy Exams), their impact on writers’ output. Others, particularly the piece by Alexander Chee (The Queen of the Night, Edinburgh), think that the discussion of day jobs helps to romanticize unfair pay for writers. How do you think about the relationship between other kinds of work and writing?  

Martin: I think that some of the stuff Chee says in his essay is particularly valuable for younger writers who maybe haven’t been around in an era where folks were ever really compensated well. I’ve certainly written for free. I’d bet Chee has done it too, and I think he talks about that in his essay. But if you’re hiring me to do work, you need to pay me, is sort of his stance. And I agree with that 100 percent.  

You mentioned romanticizing that relationship between work and craft. I think it’s very tricky because there is a lot of dangerous romanticization, and that can set writers up, particularly in the beginnings of their careers, to blunder in a business they know nothing about.

Chee has a great quote in his essay where he talks about how any education in writing should include an education in how to make a living as a writer. There is a place for the romantic in the writer’s life, but there’s a difference between romance and being ignorant. Gay says that really nicely in her interview where she’s just like, “I don’t want to kill the dream of my students by being like, ‘it’s really hard to make a living!’” But it’s also the responsibility of older generations of writers to let folks know really what it’s like.

It drives me equally crazy to read advice to writers on the internet that’s like, “Here’s how to write a bestseller in 7 steps” or “You are guaranteed to get a book deal.” I think that’s the flipside of the same coin.

It’s crucial for writers who are talking about their struggles with money to be rigorous in examining their own narratives.

Frankel: Going back to Chee, he recalls looking at the lives of his writing mentors—tenured academics and literary magazine writers—as models for his career. These models, he writes, have now become less attainable. How do you think the financial prospects of writing have changed over time, or affected the voices that get to be heard?

Martin: I think anyone who is alive and of working age in even the 1990s has experienced in their lifetimes—and I’m including myself in this—a decline in the ability to make a living as a writer, whether you’re writing books or working as a journalist. Chee and I are around the same age, and I also worked in magazines in New York in the 1990s, and that part of his essay rang very true to me. There were people who were definitely making $2 or $3 a word to write profiles in GQ. And you can still write profiles for GQ, but it’s been 20 years and that rate has not gone up. If anything, it’s gone down. Particularly when it comes to journalism, that is a measurable truth.

In the book industry, it’s a little harder to measure because the industry is so wacky about advances. But I do think that as it becomes more difficult to make a living as a writer, a narrower selection of voices are being heard. And that means a more limited pool of stories are being told. As we’re moving into an era where the freedom of press is going to be severely restricted if not entirely threatened, I think that question becomes even more urgent.

Frankel: In your essay on your own writing and working life, you say, “It’s presumed my story is authentic when I speak about work and art and say I was once a seamstress.” You then introduce the idea of “writerly code-switching”—a way writers with a degree of class privilege reshape their stories about their own “day job struggles.” What shapes the way writers talk about their “struggles,” or relative lack thereof?

Martin: Everybody has a story they tell about themselves to themselves, and then everyone has a version of that story they tell to the world. I don’t think writers are all that different—I think everybody does this. Maybe people don’t articulate it as well if they’re not people whose work it is to articulate things.

What I was doing in that essay was to really call bullshit on my own story. I have this narrative of myself as a scrappy college dropout who made it, when in reality, my parents work in a university and have my whole childhood. I was middle-class growing up.

I was definitely very poor for many years, but that was a poverty of choice. Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things, Wild) talks about this in her interview: She is a very educated person, and so she has chosen to go into debt in order to do her art and make her work. But she grew up very, very poor, as in like goes-hungry-sometimes poor, and so she’s very attuned to that difference.

I think it’s crucial for writers who are talking about their struggles with money to be rigorous in examining their own narratives, and making sure that their narratives reflect reality. The legend of the “starving artist,” I think, on one hand can be very true, because we have always lived in a society and an economy that doesn’t value the arts monetarily in the same way that it values other things. On the other hand, let’s dig a little deeper than that, and if you’re not actually starving let’s talk about that.

While it can be scary to confront so-called “real talk” about money, it’s essential.

Frankel: Jamison argues that all art is shaped by outside forces, including money and the institutions that have it. How do you think the influence of these forces like universities and publishing houses plays out in the kinds of writing that see an audience?

Martin: I think [those forces] entirely shape what gets seen. These multiple influences that Jamison talks so brilliantly about—money, institutions, the influence of other artists, your community or your cohort—are huge. It’s interesting because I think Jamison is arguing that rather than institutions destroying the integrity of work, they are actually what makes up the work, and I think that’s true to a certain extent.

Frankel: Daniel José Older (Shadowshaper, the Bone Street Rumba series) writes that the language of economics—what “The Market” demands—is used to obscure barriers that are in place for writers of color in publishing. Are there other ways the language of economics covers up the obstacles writers face?

Martin: The language of “quality” and “merit” also gets used to obscure things. There’s an idea by publishers and editors that “we only choose the ‘best’ stories to publish. That’s our only rubric. We’re looking at stories in a ‘pure’ way. And only judge them on their value.” That’s just not how humans work, and if you’re a person whose job it is to edit or publish, you have tastes and feelings and opinions, and that goes into what you’re choosing. Otherwise it would be boring.

But I think that relying on the language of merit doesn’t acknowledge the types of barriers—the racism, the sexism, the economic privilege—that are inherent in our culture and our society and, obviously, also in publishing. And in fact there are studies that publishing is some crazy percentage white, right? (Editor: A study from January 2016 found that the publishing industry as a whole was 79 percent white.) That doesn’t happen because only white people write good books.

Frankel: A lot of writers in this collection, including Jamison and Strayed, seem to be making a call for financial transparency from individual writers. How do you think that greater openness can shape the way people perceive writing as a career?

Martin: The only people who benefit from nobody in an industry knowing what each other makes are the people at the very top, the people signing the paychecks. The people getting the paychecks never benefit from that. It’s my hope that this kind of open conversation can have an empowering effect both on writers and people who want to be writers. While it can be scary to confront so-called “real talk” about money, it’s essential. And it could hopefully allow writers to have greater control of the economics of our business.

The whole thing with Scratch is writers are a part of the world, which means that we are part of the economy. And this project is the product of my belief that we can be better at our jobs, and also better at our lives and have better jobs and have better lives if we acknowledge that we live in the world like everyone else.

Frankel: What should younger or aspiring writers take away from Scratch?

Martin: If this book can help people understand what it is actually like to be a working writer, it’s done its job. There’s so much speculation, vagueness, and mystery around that, that just that existing on paper is important.

When I told people about this project, overwhelmingly, they would say “Oh, good, it’s not just me who’s obsessed with this stuff.” A lot of people are curious about this. Money is intricately entwined with the type of work we do. We don’t have to like it, we maybe don’t even have to be good at the money side, but we have to acknowledge it and know that that’s okay.

Emo Nostalgia and Obama Lit: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

The Rise of Emo Nostalgia

Jia Tolentino | The New Yorker

“A decade later, the emo teens are grown up, sort of, and they are re-immersing themselves in the sound of adolescence—that squeal of medical-grade angst and longing. There are emo nights in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Portland, Denver, Tampa, Houston, Baltimore, and Boston, among other cities. They are oddly specific celebrations of near-term nostalgia in which music made to help teenagers flail their way to adulthood provides an opportunity for adults to succumb to the histrionics of teendom again.”

Tom Hardy Makes Brooding an Art

Shea Serrano | The Ringer

“Tom Hardy is so good at brooding in his movies that he placed an understanding of the word ‘brooding’ in my heart. That’s a real thing, even if it doesn’t sound like it is. How many other actors are so good at a specific thing that they can make you understand the definition of a word without you even having to learn it? (Like: Miles Teller and ‘peacocking,’ or Vince Vaughn and ‘turbo salesmanship.’) You just feel it. Tom Hardy broods with such meaning and strength that it gives the dictionary a texture.”

How Movies and TV Address Rape and Revenge

Amanda Hess | The New York Times

“Stories that hinge on avenging rape with killing risk sidestepping the complicated dynamics of recovery in favor of the easy resolution of the victim achieving simple physical dominance over her attacker ... But at their best, the violence works largely as metaphor, luring audiences into more complex and intriguing examinations of rape’s psychological consequences.”

Human After All: On Janelle Monáe in Hidden Figures and Moonlight

Emily J. Lordi | Pitchfork

“What is surprising is not the fact that Monáe is acting, but the roles that she is playing—two characters that contrast dramatically with her musical persona as well as with each other. If Monáe sings about escaping a metaphorical ‘Cold War’ dystopia by spaceship, her character in Hidden Figures participates in the actual Cold War, helping to propel white men into space. Her role in Moonlight, where she plays surrogate mother to a black gay boy with few escape routes from loneliness and violence, brings both stories down to earth.”

Considering the Novel in the Age of Obama

Christian Lorentzen | Vulture

“That we’ve been passing through an era that especially prizes authenticity in fiction is no coincidence. These were years when America was governed by someone who’d written a genuine literary self-portrait, whose identity was inscribed with the traumas of the age of colonialism and its unraveling, whose political appeal hinged on an aura of authenticity and whose opponents attacked him by casting doubt on the authenticity of that identity. Now, as he leaves the scene, we’re troubled by questions of fakeness.”

From Split to Psycho: Why Cinema Fails Dissociative Personality Disorder

Steve Rose | The Guardian

“DID is a condition that lends itself to extremes of behavior, conflict, torment, secrets and mysteries—everything a juicy drama requires in one character. Unfortunately, those dramas have tended to be horror movies and psychological thrillers, which has not really helped us understand the condition.”

What Meryl Streep and Donald Trump Share

Josephine Livingstone | The New Republic

“In contrast to Streep’s trustworthy, ’90s-style speechifying, Trump speaks the language of the time in which we actually live. His reactions are incoherent but delivered at lightning speed. He has no dignity to place in danger and his face is at home in our ridiculous newsfeeds. In the movies of late-20th-century America, he would play a risible villain … But today, he plays the president.”

Ryan Gosling Is a Star After His Time

Bim Adewunmi | BuzzFeed

“While moving from unglamorous child actor to the upper echelons of the Hollywood pyramid, Ryan Gosling has occupied a unique space in the minds of audiences. Despite his male bulk, he exudes a distinct feminine energy (as is almost de rigueur for male actors of a certain age, he is close to his mother and sister; he was briefly home-schooled by the former, and performed dances with the latter). The dichotomy of his physicality and his sensibility gives viewers pause, and it interesting to note that his softly spoken, almost slurred speaking voice is no accident.”

What the Investigation Into the Chicago Police Department Found

The results of the investigation into the Chicago Police Department’s use of force released Friday by the U.S. Department of Justice shows the city’s police engaged in systemic practices that violated residents’ constitutional rights. Here are some of the key findings from the report, which you can read in full here. The findings come 13 months after the investigation began, and more than two years since the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, whose death—which was captured by police dash-cam footage and withheld by Chicago authorities for more than a year—prompted the inquiry.

The report’s release comes a month after the city announced that there were 762 were homicides in Chicago in 2016—more than Los Angeles and New York combined. Only 29 percent of these cases resulted in police identifying the suspected killer—a clearance rate less than half of the national average, the report pointed out. Here are some other key findings:

Unlawful use of deadly force against individuals who pose no threat

The investigation uncovered numerous incidents of police officers using deadly force against individuals who were unarmed or posed no immediate threat. Some of these incidents, the report notes, were initiated as foot pursuits “without any basis for believing the person had committed a serious crime.”

View note

Unlawful use of  less-lethal force

In cases where less-lethal force, such as tasers, was used, the investigation also uncovered evidence of unlawful or retaliatory conduct, noting that some officers “resort to Tasers as a tool of convenience, with insufficient concern or cognizance that it s a weapon with inherent risks that inflict significant pain.” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said the department will equip every officer with Tasers, though evidence does not suggest they reduce officer-involved shootings.

View note

Unlawful use of force in cases of health crises

Though law enforcement is often the first to respond in cases of mental or behavioral health crises, the investigation found that officers use force against people in crisis in cases where force could be avoided. A “meaningful number” of these instances, according to the report, were deemed unconstitutional.

View note

Failure to address racially discriminatory behavior

The investigation noted that some police officers disproportionately target minorities, citing statistics that show the department used force against black Chicagoans 10 times more frequently than their white counterparts. The report also noted the routine use of racially discriminatory language targeting blacks and Hispanics.

View note

Lack of sufficient officer training

Underlying the systemic issues within the department, the reports finds, is a lack of sufficient training and supervision for the approximately 12,000-member strong force. This includes the use of outdated and inconsistent materials, as well as insufficient instruction by field training instructors.

View note

Lack of accountability

The lack of sufficient training is supplemented by a lack of proper procedures to ensure that officers are held accountable for possible cases of misconduct. In the five years preceding the Justice Department’s investigation, it found that less than 2 percent of 30,000 police misconduct complaints were sustained, with the remaining 98 percent resulting in no discipline. The report cites a number of systemic factors precluding misconduct investigations, including an unwillingness to investigate anonymous complaints, provisions in union agreements, and officers’ “code of silence” aimed at covering up misconduct.

View note

Emanuel called the investigation’s findings “sobering” and pledged to negotiate an agreement with the Justice Department to achieve systemic reforms. It is unclear what impact such an agreement will have in the final days of President Obama’s administration. Jeff Sessions, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, voiced concern over police oversight investigations during his Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday, testifying that federal lawsuits against local law enforcement could “undermine the respect for police officers and create an impression that the entire department is not doing their work consistent with fidelity to law and fairness.”

Waking Up to Coachella’s Conservative Tinge

Just as one right-leaning businessman takes command politically, another has become the focus of debate in rock and roll. Earlier in January, the music press suddenly seemed to realize that the parent company of Coachella, the iconic two-weekend Southern California festival, is owned by Philip Anschutz, a prominent Republican donor who has supported efforts hostile to LGBT rights. The fallout: calls for boycotts, accusations of “fake news,” and a petition asking headliners Beyonce, Radiohead, and Kendrick Lamar to donate their festival profits to the Human Rights Campaign.

The situation that led to the brouhaha isn’t new. In fact, it’s one that is very familiar in American entertainment. A large corporation long ago acquired a cultural organization valued for its coolness, and left-leaning consumers and creators continued to patronize it in spite of the fact that large corporation owners don’t tend to lean left. Only by a quirk of the moment—some combination of the online media economy, shifting generational mores, the election, and this year’s particular headliners—have the politics behind Coachella become a factor.

The festival’s operator Goldenvoice first made a name as an independent champion of underground sounds in Southern California in the ’80s and ’90s, but in 2001 Anschutz Entertainment Group bought it. “The deal … should give Anschutz’s concert division, Concerts West, added credibility in rock music circles,” the Los Angeles Times wrote back then. Coachella’s present national profile largely came about after the acquisition—as did its multi-weekend format, sister classic-rock and country-music festivals, and $375 general-admission price tag (up from $50 in 1999).

Anschutz’s name really should be familiar: His holdings include the country’s second-biggest movies chain, Regal Entertainment, and AEG Live runs a number of prominent events venues, among other things. The man’s politics have never been a secret. In 2003, OC Weekly wrote about the Anschutz Foundation—the philanthropy founded by Anschutz that is the source of the current controversy—noting that it had given money to a group whose goal was to stop “the militant gay agenda” and who claimed that “pedophilia is a basic part of the homosexual lifestyle.” Over the years, news accounts have mentioned Anschutz or his foundation supporting the likes of Focus on the Family and Rick Santorum while he bankrolled conservative-leaning movies and The Weekly Standard.

What ostensibly got it all started this time around was a (now deleted) blog post at Afropunk that praised the newly announced Coachella 2017 lineup but said that Anschutz’s “politics are icky, sticky with the slime of the swamp that folks like president-elect Trump loves to associate [with].” Uproxx aggregated the info about Anschutz’s donations to anti-LGBT groups and his ties to climate-change deniers, which then went viral to such an extent that AEG and Anschutz himself replied. The company said that “attempts to perpetuate and spread false news on a variety of topics are part of a long-running and coordinated attempt by our competitors to smear AEG” and touted “a supportive and inclusive environment that respects the rights of all employees, artists and fans, as well as promoting a philosophy of sustainability throughout the world.”

Anschuntz’s denial was more colorful, bearing some rhetorical trademarks of the current political moment:

Recent claims published in the media that I am anti-LGBTQ are nothing more than fake news—it is all garbage. I unequivocally support the rights of all people without regard to sexual orientation. We are fortunate to employ a wealth of diverse individuals throughout our family of companies, all of whom are important to us—the only criteria on which they are judged is the quality of their job performance; we do not tolerate discrimination in any form.

Both The Anschutz Foundation and I contribute to numerous organizations that pursue a wide range of causes.  Neither I nor the Foundation fund any organization with the purpose or expectation that it would finance anti-LGBTQ initiatives, and when it has come to my attention or the attention of The Anschutz Foundation that certain organizations either the Foundation or I have funded have been supporting such causes, we have immediately ceased all contributions to such groups.

It’s an odd reply because it can so easily be picked apart. Pitchfork quickly pulled financial disclosure documents showing that in the past five years the Anschutz Foundation has parceled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, and the National Christian Foundation. The first two organizations have clear histories of opposing gay rights; the National Christian Foundation provides significant funding for the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Is it coincidence Trump’s inauguration month brings backlash to another conservative billionaire?

The outrage is a sign that Coachella, like a lot of pop-culture events, is assumed to be associated with liberal ideology: Roger Waters famously blasted George W. Bush from the stage in 2008 and then blasted Donald Trump last year at a Coachella spin-off festival; 2017’s three headliners are all politically outspoken and to the left; flower crowns and MDMA don’t generally don’t scream Republicanism. Yet all along the festival has also drawn accusations of faux-hippiedom, troubling headware, and rank consumerism: The Daily Beast’s Marlow Stern described it as an “Oasis For Douchebags and Trust Fund Babies.”

It might seem tempting to now single Coachella out as a uniquely corporate appropriation of indie aesthetics. But many alt-Coachellas in Southern California—L.A.’s FYF Fest and Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival—are also AEG Live productions. So are other significant fests like Seattle’s Bumbershoot. Major League Soccer is flush with Anschutz money, as are thousands of movie theaters. The issue at hand is, in reality, far more entrenched in the pop-cultural arena than just Coachella. It may not be a coincidence that new attention is being paid to this fact in the same month of Trump’s inauguration—after all, the Afropunk post that began the dustup compared Anschutz to Trump.

In any case, the backlash—however belated it might seem—hasn’t quite been futile. When Pitchfork contacted the Anschutz Foundation about its donations, its lawyer reportedly said that anti-gay groups would get no money from the organization going forward. “Once it was explained to us that there was an issue, it stopped,” he said. It’s not a revolution, but it is the kind of thing a lot of people are clearly itching for lately: a change in the previously ignored status quo.

How Victoria Aims to Connect With Young Women

Victoria, a new miniseries charting the famous queen’s early reign, premieres Sunday on PBS’s Masterpiece—nearly 180 years after the monarch ascended the British throne and five days before Donald Trump assumes the American presidency. Here in Columbia, Missouri, the college town where I live and teach, we had a special preview of Victoria’s opening episode on December 5th. Over 500 people turned up, most of them women in their 40s through 60s. But college students, many of whom came into adulthood following the soapy adventures of Downton Abbey’s Lady Mary and Lady Edith, also attended. So did teenagers, who texted right up to the moment the lights went out.

Judging by audience reactions and conversations I had with attendees, the older women enjoyed Victoria, but the younger ones devoured it. They oohed and aahed over the palaces. The gardens. The shot-silk gowns. Many gushed over Victoria’s lapdog. Some mooned over Rufus Sewell, who plays a smoldering Lord Melbourne. Most of all, they seemed to thrill at watching a feisty teenage girl running a country. Afterward, in the theater’s lobby, their comments entwined Victoria with the U.S. election. “Why can’t we live in England, where people are smart enough to put a female in charge?” one asked another. “I want a girl NOW for president!” declared a child of nine or ten, whose teenage sister replied, “America doesn’t want a woman in power.” Her words spoke to the value of shows like Victoria: In offering true stories about inspiring leaders, period dramas can speak to the politics of the present. And, in the case of Victoria, to  young women.

The miniseries exemplifies a new turn in British television period drama, away from literary adaptations and toward political history. Within the last two years, over 20 such dramas have appeared, and, according to sources like IMDB, at least 20 more are in production. They include Wolf Hall; Rebellion; The Hollow Crown; Churchill’s Secret; Victoria; The Crown; and King Charles III. If we assume that period drama is always somehow about national identity, these series offer British audiences a way to think critically about nationhood in the wake of Brexit, the referendum whereby 52 percent of British citizens voted to leave the European Union. But in the months after the U.S. election, as Victoria illustrates, they also give Americans a means to reflect on leadership—its abuses and constraints, its symbols and privileges, its long history as an anxious and inconstant idea.

Like Victoria, these series seek to engage young audiences. Many of the shows portray political leaders in their youth, casting popular actors like Matt Smith (who plays Prince Philip in The Crown) and Jenna Coleman (who plays Victoria). Collectively, they also seem to renounce nostalgia, that emotion so native to the genre and so appealing to, ahem, older audiences. With its understated tone and behind-the-scenes approach to the Windsor family, The Crown, for example, seems to studiously avoid sentimentality about the past. Wolf Hall’s portrait of Henry the VIII’s court, despite its stunningly beautiful camerawork, recalls scenes from The Godfather more than it does earlier period dramas about the king. It’s as if the past is no longer to be wistfully mourned but, rather, reconsidered. Hence, the surprises that lie in wait for many viewers, whether the discovery that Prince Philip was a radical reformer, or that Wolf Hall’s Thomas Cromwell wasn’t quite the nasty thug we thought him.

Victoria, however, delivers the biggest surprise. Although scores of photographs exist of Victoria as a young woman in the 1830s and 40s, an image of her as a stout, jowly sourpuss garbed in widow’s weeds persists—as do certain myths about her monarchy. Myth #1: Victoria relinquished all political responsibility to her husband, Prince Albert, after they got married. Myth #2: Victoria stopped ruling once her beloved Albert died. Myth #3: Victoria remained a grieving widow, an incurable melancholic, up to the day she drew her last breath. These myths are, of course, “dead wrong,” Daisy Goodwin, the creator and writer of Victoria, told me. As a doctoral student at Cambridge University, Goodwin wrote her dissertation on Victoria, using the queen’s voluminous diaries to unearth a woman who reveled in the freedom the crown brought her, who loved sex and relished power. The reward of finding this Other Victoria has deeply influenced Goodwin, a novelist and TV producer who said she “loves filling in the female blanks of British history.”

Victoria offers elemental truths about courage, love, justice, and kindness all through a female perspective.

Projected to run for six seasons, Victoria spans the long life and career of the queen. For Goodwin, who wanted to try a “bigger, less solitary project” than novel-writing, it marks a foray into scriptwriting. But how do you begin the story of a woman who ruled for 64 years? Goodwin got her answer after having a fight with her teenage daughter, Lydia, about homework. Reflecting on how Victoria assumed world-historical power at roughly the same age, she wondered, “What would it be like if Lydia were the boss of me?”  And so Victoria took root.

The first season, airing weekly through March 5, follows Victoria from the time she becomes Queen in 1837 through her courtship and marriage to Albert. It portrays Victoria as a bold, sparkling, and clever teenager possessed of an iron will. “The first thing she did was give herself a new name,” Goodwin tells me. The monarch’s real name was Alexandrina Victoria, but as Goodwin explains, “Nobody back then was called Victoria. It was ...  like calling yourself Beyonce.”

Still, Victoria’s first season doesn’t seek to lionize its subject or sugarcoat her reign. “She makes tremendous mistakes,” Goodwin says, “because she doesn’t yet understand the world in which she is operating. She shows girls that you can make mistakes and move on.” For example, Victoria callously decides to have the unwed Flora Hastings, one of her ladies-in-waiting, medically examined when she suspects Hastings is pregnant. It turns out the devoutly religious woman had a tumor. She dies soon afterward. Humbled and ashamed, Victoria becomes a much less impulsive ruler after this event.

As the series evolves, Victoria will also need to take into account those aspects of Victoria’s reign that cannot be written off as youthful “mistakes.” The British government’s response to the Irish potato famine during the 1840s and early 1850s, for example, was horrendously inadequate. Victoria often expressed pity for the plight of the Irish, but she took no action to address it. And so one million people starved to death over the course of seven years, thrown into the ground without ceremonies or coffins. During the Indian Mutiny of 1859, Victoria offered her support to those military leaders who punished troops for their revengeful actions against the Indian rebels. But during her reign, countless women in India, Africa, and elsewhere were raped or killed or widowed in the endless series of “little wars” that expanded her empire. Future Victoria episodes remain to be seen, but one hopes Goodwin will also address these more complex, more systemic failures; her audience needs to know about them too.

For now, and in keeping with its youthful appeal, Victoria’s first season deploys conventions from romance, fairytale, and young-adult fiction but refashions them to offer a complex portrait of its female protagonist. The series makes Victoria the dominant character (she appears in every scene of all seven episodes). It romanticizes her relationship with Lord Melbourne, the older and wiser man, but underscores his shortcomings as well as hers. The show plays up Albert as Victoria’s Prince Charming but also portrays him as a buttoned-up nerd who’s far less appealing to watch. And as with all young-adult fiction, the series presents a protagonist who matures quickly and dramatically; by the end of the season, Victoria is far kinder and less impulsive than she was at the outset. Most notably, Victoria offers elemental truths about courage, love, justice, and kindness all through a female perspective.

“Victoria had her own glass ceiling. She was surrounded by men who told her she couldn’t do the job.”

No doubt, some critics will view Victoria’s portrait of the queen as naïve or simplistic. They’ll point out the inaccuracies or scoff at the show’s occasional use of caricature. But they’d be missing the point: Victoria aims to provide a political history that resonates with today’s young women. And, apparently, in Britain it  has. Victoria consistently dominated TV ratings with a consolidated average of seven million viewers, according to Goodwin. She added that many of the show’s viewers were females between 13 and 25, and that Victoria is the highest-rated period drama ever among this age group in the U.K. Some of these viewers tweet Goodwin about their new resolve to study history or post photos of themselves hugging their copy of Goodwin’s novel, Victoria. Hundreds of these women, calling themselves “Vicbournes,” have taken to writing fan fiction or creating mashups based on the series, imagining plots in which Victoria elopes with Lord Melbourne. “It’s a real phenomenon here,” Goodwin says. Like her, these girls are filling in the female blanks. But they also live in a country with a strong tradition of women holding top political positions, including the prime minister.

And what of America’s young women—will they enjoy Victoria? The night of my hometown’s preview suggests the answer is yes, but with a caveat, a subtext. As that night conveyed, many young women in America remain devastated by the election. Recently, when I asked one of my college students to share her thoughts with me about Hillary Clinton’s defeat, she said, “The election told me that it doesn’t matter how smart you are, how qualified you are, how well you understand the system and can play the game—you will never win.” Comments like these raise questions about period drama’s relevance and responsibility to young women, especially now. As a story grounded in history, Victoria can give them hope coupled with truth. Young viewers can think, “This story happened and so, no matter what present history tells me, a woman can be in power.”  

Rebecca Eaton, the executive producer of Masterpiece, tells me Victoria’s U.S. premiere wasn’t timed to coincide with the week of the presidential inauguration. But she says she hopes it will have a positive influence on America’s young women. Since Masterpiece’s rebranding in 2008, Eaton has aggressively sought period dramas that will capture a new audience of “smart girls,” girls in their teens and 20s who read good books, imagine big careers, and want to learn about history. Until this past year, Eaton had mainly been focused on providing them with good drama. But 2017 brings a slightly different agenda. “This is a very important time to present stories of strong, independent women,” says Eaton. “Victoria had her own glass ceiling. She was surrounded by men who told her she couldn’t do the job.” She adds, “I’m very pleased to have this story at a time when women’s issues, unfortunately, are back in play all over again.”

On Sunday night, I’ll re-watch Victoria with my 15-year-old niece Sophie and her friends. I’ll take pleasure in seeing their reactions and sharing with them what I know about Victoria’s life: how she often performed small, individual acts of kindness to the poor; how, against the advice of her senior counselors, she pardoned under-age criminals; how she survived eight assassination attempts. It will be a different viewing party than those I had for Downton Abbey, a more earnest experience. We’ll watch Victoria not because it depicts an old-fashioned past, but because it portrays their imagined future.

20th Century Women Is an Ode to Female Resilience

In a scene early on in 20th Century Women, Dorothea (Annette Bening) helps her son construct a birthday cake in the kitchen, plugging candles into a mess of whipped cream and strawberries. “Wait a few seconds and then bring it in,” she says, heading into the living room. Then, dutifully, she feigns surprise as he places it in front of her, while all the assembled guests sing “Happy Birthday.”

The nuances of Bening’s performance—in just a few seconds, she communicates both the requisite efficiency and the sharp loneliness of single motherhood—anchor 20th Century Women, Mike Mills’s paean to the women he grew up with. Set in Santa Barbara in 1979, it’s a charming, unfocused movie that acknowledges nostalgia but doesn’t wallow in it, capturing the emotional messiness of womanhood from the perspective of an outside observer, 15-year-old Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann). Over the course of two hours, Jamie considers three different women in his life, while Dorothea considers the fact that, in growing up, he is turning into a creature who’s increasingly alien to her.

The film is based, loosely, on Mills’s own experiences being raised by his mother and sister. (He tends to draw on his own life for inspiration: 2005’s Thumbsucker follows an anxious 17-year-old coming of age, while 2010’s Beginners is about an adult man whose father comes out as gay late in life, as Mills’s father did.) Dorothea, feeling that she knows Jamie less each day, enlists the help of two women, Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a photographer immersed in the emerging punk scene, and Julie (Elle Fanning), a friend of Jamie’s whom he’s besotted with. Jamie narrates brief portraits of each woman, each very much a product of her time and place: the year they were born, the books they read, their hopes and dreams. And Dorothea, in turn, considers Jamie, how she can help him become a good man, and what that even means at a time when the strictures of masculinity are evolving so quickly.

If that sounds yawningly idealistic, it’s buffeted by a wicked sense of humor and Mills’s distinctive visual approach, honed during his years making music videos and TV ads. Jamie describes characters as the camera glances through the detritus of their lives: Dorothea’s Birkenstocks and Salem cigarettes, Abbie’s birth-control pills and tattered red shoes, Julie’s Judy Blume novels and teen-therapy sessions. This approach adds depth to the characters that often bests simple description. While we learn a fair amount about William (Billy Crudup), Dorothea’s lodger, from her description of his history, we learn infinitely more in the moment where he professes to Abbie that he makes his own shampoo.

The most surprising part of the movie is how well Mills writes his three women, and how accurately he pinpoints their very distinct anxieties, aided by three spectacular performers. As the fiercely independent Dorothea, who was raised in the Depression, Bening is magnificent and unflappable, accepting her son’s various experiments with indomitable spirit, but also revealing the loneliness that keeps her up at night. Gerwig, an endlessly versatile actor, shows Abbie’s toughness and vulnerability along with her frustration at being stifled by the limits of life in Santa Barbara. Fanning’s Julie is sweet and complex, mistaking the freedom to act out with freedom itself.

But Zumann’s Jamie matches all three with his sensitivity and awkward attempts at masculinity, reading Abbie’s feminist manifestos and lecturing surly boys at the skate park on clitoral stimulation. He’s so emotionally intelligent and so curious that it’s hard to share Dorothea’s concerns for his future, which stunts the dramatic tension of the movie just a little. Mostly, it’s a pleasure to be in the company of the engaging misfits living in Dorothea’s vast, crumbling house, and to remember flashes of what it felt like to be encountering adulthood in all its perplexities. Mills creates a strong sense of the late ’70s via music (Black Flag and the Talking Heads), clothing, cars, and political flashpoints (Jimmy Carter’s “crisis of confidence” speech features in one scene), but the most nostalgic element of the movie might stem from how familiar his characters can feel: 20th-century women in all their adaptable, resilient glory.

Black-ish's 'Lemons' Is Art for the Age of Trump

What will the Trump presidency mean for the nation’s artistic output? Will the United States’s new Commander in Chief, who has been by turns part of the entertainment industry and a mocker of it, inspire creators in their endeavors? Will he deter them? “In dark times,” David Foster Wallace mused, “the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” While these times, of course, are not dark for everyone, for those for whom they are—for the Americans who are confused and angry and fearful about the new course of the nation—it’s an open question: What will art look like in the years to come? Will it protest? Will it grapple? Will it retreat?

Here’s an early entry in the canon of Trump-era art, one that might well offer a clue to all that: “Lemons,” the episode of Black-ish that aired on ABC on Wednesday night. The episode takes that humblest of things—the primetime TV sitcom—and uses it to find, per Wallace’s mandate, the human magic of this moment. “Lemons” (the title is both a reference to, and a rejection of, the old adage about making lemonade) is art that is supremely aware of its own ability not just to reflect the world, but to help people make sense of it. It is art that achieves the neatest of tricks: It expresses anger while also insisting on empathy.

“Lemons” expresses anger while also insisting on empathy.

“Lemons” is set two months after the 2016 election—which is to say, this episode of Black-ish is happening now-ish—and it finds the Johnsons each, in their own way, coping with the aftereffects of Trump’s upset victory. (“America has a love affair with upsets,” Dre notes in the episode’s opening monologue. But “what happens when the winners and losers are supposed to be on the same team?”)

Dre, for his part, is trying to move on from the events of early November, focusing his attention—or, at any rate, trying to focus his attention—on a big pitch at work. Bow, on the other hand, is taking refuge in activism. (“Everything you’re wearing is from an NPR commercial!” Dre tells her, as he takes in his wife’s Black Lives Matter button, Habitat for Humanity sweatpants, and UNICEF flip-flops.) Jack is determined to be optimistic. (“I don’t see this glass as half-empty, I see it as half full!” he exclaims, while staring at a vessel that is actually 1) a bowl and 2) empty.) Junior, with the help of Pops, is working on a monologue that he will deliver at Valley Glen Prep’s appointed Healing Day—a recitation of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. (“Lemons,” fittingly, is airing directly before the national holiday that celebrates King’s legacy; the iconic speech runs like a refrain through the episode.)

And then there’s Zoey, who busies herself making, yes, lemonade. Bow, confused and a bit dismayed by her daughter’s evident impulse toward escapism—she suggests that maybe Zoey should take a few minutes to make calls on behalf of Planned Parenthood instead—attempts to ascribe political meaning to Zoey’s beverage-brewing effort. “I get it—the country gave us lemons, and you make lemonade,” Bow says. Or maybe it’s more like Beyoncé, she says—how “she uses lemonade as a symbol for women, and their self-knowledge and healing.” Later, though, Zoey explains herself. “It’s not liberal lemonade, it’s not conservative lemonade,” she tells her mother. “It’s just lemonade—that I made with love. That’s what I want my contribution to be. Love.”  

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Lemonade, in other words, isn’t just the political power of things that can be shared, apolitically; it’s also the extremely varied ways people have of coping with the world and its surprises. Someone zigs. Another zags. It’s unpredictable. It’s chaotic. These characters, after all, are in mourning. And mourning is as individualized a thing as it is an unpredictable one.

At Dre’s work, too, everyone is reacting to things just a little bit differently. People are distracted, but in slightly different ways. In one set piece, “there is no way we’re getting any work done today” gets repeated in the Stevens & Lido conference room as November 9 becomes December 9 becomes January 9. People are angry, and looking for someone else to blame. (On a whiteboard in the firm’s conference room is scrawled a question—“Whose fault is this?” under which is written, alternately, “THE GAYS / LATEEN-OHS / THE BLACKS / WHITE WOMEN.” Each blame-ee has been crossed out as the workers realize that fault cannot be neatly assigned.)

At one particularly powerful moment, Lucy, the firm’s litigious employee, makes a confession: She voted for Trump. Not because she likes him or agreed with the claims and threats he made during the campaign, she says, but because she gave Obama a chance—twice—and hasn’t seen her life get much better. “It’s eight years later, my dad’s still out of work, my hometown is about to go under,” Lucy tells her colleagues, “and Hillary comes out saying she’s basically going to keep everything the same.” Lucy was conflicted about her vote. But she wanted to shake up the system. Her colleagues hear that. They don’t agree with her. But they hear her.

“Lemons,” in general, takes for granted that its viewers will share the politics of its characters: The episode figures that, when Bow tells Zoey that “as a mom, it is my job to deliver a world where the values that I raised you to believe matter,” those are values that are, in broad ways as well as narrow ones, shared by Black-ish’s viewers. And yet this is a piece of TV that is acutely aware of the dangers of filter bubbles, and that isn’t satisfied with simply reflecting half of the country back to itself. “Lemons,” its glass-half-empty title notwithstanding, is trying to understand. It is giving someone like Lucy a voice, and a hearing. It is giving those things, too, to Dre, who finally loses his temper when Mr. Stevens accuses him of apathy: “I love this country,” Dre retorts—“even though, at times, it doesn’t love me back.”

‘I love this country—even though, at times, it doesn’t love me back.’

And then Dre gives a summary of the civil rights movement, as archival images and footage fill the screen in a montage, and “Strange Fruit”—the song made especially powerful because it is Nina Simone’s achingly taut rendition—plays as a score. Dre talks about striving, in spite of injustice. He talks about hoping, in spite of history. He concludes, “I love this country, as much, if not more, than you do, and don’t you ever forget that.”

It was a scene in a sitcom that was also a history lesson that was also a plea for empathy. It was a validation of what TV—particularly network TV, with its relative ability to summon wide and varied audiences—can accomplish, even as culture fragments, even as Americans threaten to self-sort themselves away from empathy.

Kenya Barris, Black-ish’s creator and showrunner, has generally resisted, he has said, the soapboxery of the Very Special Episode vein. Black-ish may have had episodes that overtly doubled, like “Lemons,” as cultural commentary—“Hope,” “40 Acres and a Vote”—but “we don’t like to say ‘these are the topics,’” Barris told TV Guide in September. He and his co-creators preferred a more organic approach to merging their fictions with the truths of the world beyond. The 2016 election, however, changed that. “From Tuesday night to Wednesday morning, I think my show changed,” Barris told NPR’s Rachel Martin of the events that turned November 8 into November 9. In the aftermath of the election, Barris said,

We sort of calmed down and we were like, you know what? We have to talk about things that people might not want to talk about openly. But we have to dig in deeper and stay later and have more real conversations and argue amongst ourselves more and really bring our emotions to the surface and really say things that people want to hear... We have to do that more. We have a responsibility. It’s not just TV for us anymore.

It’s not just TV. It’s art.

Live by Night Is Too Epic for Its Own Good

Ben Affleck has a Ben Affleck problem. As a filmmaker, he long ago proved himself an interesting, versatile voice in Hollywood, an heir to the gritty crime-thriller directors of the ’70s who excelled at staging small-scale action and getting big, pulpy performances from well-selected ensembles. He keeps making a mistake, though. He keeps casting this stiff, uncomfortable-looking actor in his lead roles, a man who too often seems distracted and unhappy, lacking the movie-star charisma he’s shown in other projects. Sadly, that actor is also Ben Affleck, and his appearances in these films show no sign of abating. Live by Night, Affleck’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning smash Argo is a fascinating mess of a movie, but it’s undone in part by the charisma vacuum at its center.

Why can’t Affleck direct himself to a good performance? In his two previous films, The Town and Argo, he played characters burdened with uninteresting arcs but who orchestrated the action around them—it’s almost as if Affleck can only imagine himself as a director within his own movies. In Live by Night, Affleck plays Joe Coughlin, a petty criminal in Prohibition-era Boston who robs card games and speakeasies with fellow hoods and hangers-on. Joe is intelligent, intimidating, and politically adept enough to eventually leave his hometown and rise to the top of the Tampa crime scene, playing the Italian and Irish mobs off of each other. Live by Night, adapted from a Dennis Lehane novel, has a fun time picking apart the web of alliances Joe builds, but it never manages to sell the man himself.

Affleck is ridiculously stoic and unfunny throughout the film, an absurd choice given the freewheeling tale being told. Joe, the son of a respected Boston police captain (Brendan Gleeson), is ripping off the card games of Irish mobster Albert White (Robert Glenister) while secretly romancing White’s girlfriend Emma Gould (Sienna Miller). Affleck, now 44, struggles most with the youthful exuberance of the film’s first act, where Joe is an upstart in a crime world defined by ethnic conflict. Though Irish, he earns his stripes by allying with the Mafia and going to war with White. The film depicts Joe as the kind of leader who can win over his enemies with his charm, but there’s not much evidence of that in Affleck’s flat performance.

After burning his bridges in Boston, Joe ends up running the Mafia’s emergent operation in Tampa, where he tries to untangle a net of power structures, including the immigrant Cuban rum operations and the insidious Ku Klux Klan, whose members occupy a slew of political positions across the state. Lehane’s more recent books are intrigued by the levels of government, legal and illegal, present in America’s early 20th century, and the systemic racism they usually enforced. Novels like The Given Day and Live by Night are not mere crime thrillers; they’re also attempts to flesh out what America’s underworld reflect in its legitimate political power structures.

It’s easy to see why Affleck was drawn to the book (he wrote the screenplay himself, a first for him), but Live by Night might have been more suited to a blown-out television miniseries. There’s the constant feeling that captivating moments are being glossed over as Joe seizes control of the Florida rum industry. Affleck’s best film remains his feature debut, 2007’s fantastic neo-noir Gone Baby Gone, which was also adapted from a Lehane novel. But that was a much simpler potboiler—a pair of private eyes solving a straightforward mystery (it also featured Affleck’s brother Casey in the lead role, rather than Ben himself). Lehane’s interests have since deepened, as have Affleck’s, but Live by Night is hampered by a 129-minute running time; it feels choppy and abridged when it should linger in the details.

For example, Zoe Saldana is given a plum role as Graciella Corrales, a Cuban rum lord whom Joe partners with and eventually marries. But she’s quickly relegated to the role of supportive love interest as the film pivots back to Joe’s battles with the KKK and the Irish mob, who resurface in Miami. There’s a real sense of missed opportunity in her performance. Elle Fanning plays a crucial role as Loretta Figgis, the Tampa sheriff’s daughter who falls into a life of prostitution, is reformed, and then begins to speak out against the legalization of gambling—a key prong in Joe’s takeover of Florida. It’s an arc that should dominate the second half of the film, but instead feels mildly irritating since Affleck doesn’t give her much screen time. The only member of the ensemble who really sticks out is Chris Messina as Joe’s right-hand man Dion, an avuncular, shrunken troll of a sidekick who gives the film a sense of humor its leading man sorely lacks.

It’s understandable that, coming off a huge Oscar win that capped his comeback and his return to the Hollywood A-list, Affleck would tackle a project of such scope. But along with his own disaffected acting, it’s that scope that betrays him. Live by Night is illustrating a crime saga with the ambition of The Godfather, but it’s trying to do it so quickly that it ends up simply going through the motions of the genre. One of the film’s final set pieces, a chaotic shootout between warring mobs in an opulent Tampa hotel, is so wonderfully staged, its action crisp and easy to follow, that it reminds you what skill Affleck has with the camera. Next time, he should perhaps confine himself behind it.

Baltimore Police Agree to Stop Abusing Their Power

The U.S. Department of Justice and the city of Baltimore announced an agreement to reform the city’s troubled police department on Thursday. The 227-page document lays out a detailed plan for the Baltimore police to try to correct egregious violations of constitutional rights, racial disparities in their practices, excessive use of force, and a culture of retaliation against whistleblowers. The agreement could represent one of the last hurrahs for the police-reform movement before the Trump administration takes office.

The agreement, which the city voted to fund Thursday morning, even before it had been made public, resolves a federal investigation that began with the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in April 2015. That death provoked widespread demonstrations in the streets of the Charm City, and some rioting, drawing the spotlight to a long history of racial division and unequal policing in Baltimore. While a prosecutor’s bid to convict officers for their role in Gray’s death failed, the Justice Department produced a stomach-churning report last August.

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The report found, for example, that Baltimore police tended to make frequent stops and arrests, even when there was no useful law-enforcement reason for it, and often at the expense of community relations. But the problem ran much deeper: Police often made stops and arrests that fell afoul of constitutional protections. Many stops ended with no citation or arrest, and even when they did, booking officers often rejected charges as too flimsy—doing so 11,000 times between 2010 and 2015. Sometimes cops rounded up large numbers of people, then “unarrested” them when they determined they had no grounds for it. Justice also found that people were often arrested simply for exercising their First Amendment rights by criticizing or talking back to officers.

But those most likely to be arrested were disproportionately African Americans and people in heavily African American neighborhoods. Blacks were more likely to be arrested for minor, apparently pretextual violations like throwing dice—for which 99 percent of arrestees were black. The problem was so bad that boilerplate language provided to officers for logging arrests assumed by default that suspects would be black males. African Americans were also more likely to be exposed to excessive use of force.

Police were routinely mishandling cases with mentally disabled suspects, and they belittled or pressured victims of sexual assault. And when some officers tried to speak up, they were subject to reprisals from fellow officers. DOJ surmised that the numbers it received from BPD probably underestimated the problem, since there appeared to be many encounters that were not property logged.

The agreement reached Thursday is 50 percent again as long as the initial report, and offers a series of detailed prescriptions intended to solve the problems that report had documented. Although “the City and BPD did not and do not admit or agree with the findings in the United States’ Report,” it says, they “recognized that the United States’ findings raised issues of importance to the City, BPD, and the community that should be addressed, and they committed to address each of the concerns raised.”

Many of the clauses in the report are fairly standard—like a commitment to better training, or homage to the importance of community-oriented policing, today’s big buzzword in law-enforcement reform. But others are more specific. “BPD will ensure that it conducts all Investigatory Stops, Searches, and Arrests in accordance with the rights secured or protected by the Constitution, and state and federal law,” the agreement states. Officers will have to tell individuals stopped for voluntary interviews that providing ID is optional, and refusing to cooperate will not justify detention, arrest, search, or issuing a ticket. People who run from the police cannot be stopped or arrested simply for that fact, as Freddie Gray was.

Moreover, an officer must have “specific and articulable facts, that a person has committed, is committing or is about to commit a crime” in order to detain them or conduct an investigatory stop. Police will have to document each of these stops, and they will not be allowed to use boilerplate language.

An individual’s presence in a location, such as an area police deem to be high in crime or proximity to a crime, will not be enough to justify a stop or detention. Except in certain circumstances, police will also have to seek a superviser’s permission before arresting people for a range of crimes that might actually represent pretextual stops, including obstructing, hindering or resisting an officer; disorderly conduct; gambling; failure to obey an officer or making a false statement to an officer; and misdemeanor trespassing. Whenever police arrest someone but let them go without charging them, whether for lack of probable cause, an identity issue, or other reasons, the department will have to report that to monitors.

Police face new restrictions on unholstering their service guns. They will be prohibited “from exhibiting or pointing a firearm unless the officer reasonably believes that the situation may escalate to create an imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death to the officer or another person.” There are new guidelines for dealing with people in mental-health crises. The procedure for dealing with victims of sexual assault is being overhauled.

One set of new rules focuses on the central question in Gray’s death and the trial of officers. Gray was apparently healthy when he was arrested and placed in a police wagon, but by the time he was removed less than an hour later, his spinal cord was nearly severed. He died after a week in a coma. But the question of how Gray had been injured was never resolved. Contrary to department regulations, he was not seatbelted in, though officers said that was common. Reform advocates, and prosecutors, suggested that Gray had received a “rough ride” in the back of the van, a practice in which police drive erratically so as to bang a prisoner around. But they couldn’t prove that in court. New regulations are designed to avoid that sort of problem. Officers will be required to seatbelt prisoners in, and vans will be equipped with cameras to track what’s going on in the back.

It is not a coincidence that the agreement between Baltimore and the Justice Department arrives in the final 10 days of the Obama administration. DOJ consent decrees have proven to be one of the most common, and most consistently effective, tools for forcing police departments to reform themselves and end abuses, particularly with regards to unfair police practices toward African Americans. (That is not to say that such consent decrees are a silver bullet: The Cleveland Police Department was under one in the mid-2000s, emerged from it, and then was placed under another in 2015.)

In December, The Washington Post reported that the Justice Department was rushing to finish a consent decree with Baltimore and another with Chicago, another police department with a troubled relationship with African American citizens. The Trump Justice Department is not expected to be nearly as active as the Justice Department under Obama Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. In his prepared remarks before a confirmation hearing this week, Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions complained that “law enforcement as a whole has been unfairly maligned and blamed for the actions of a few bad actors and for allegations about police that were not true.”

Last fall’s Justice Department report on Baltimore, as well as its earlier report on Ferguson, Missouri, show just how appalling and systemic the flaws in police departments can be. But starting on January 20, the push to fix those problems will no longer be able to rely so heavily on the investigative and punitive muscle of the federal government.