The Distancer: Sunday, April 5, 2020
DAY 24: The Nice Guys
Hope this finds you having a nice wind-down to your weekend and settling in nicely to the knowledge that there is work ahead tomorrow, friends.
Keeping this edition short and sweet.
~when you realize tomorrow is Monday~
As a reminder (or maybe it's your first time to hear this)...
🗣 You can still sign up for healthcare through the Affordable Care Act if you've lost your job (or someone you know has). It will just require a little paperwork. Learn more at healthcare.gov -- you never know who this information might help or save.
Also, every New Yorker has access to three free meals a day. More here.
Finally, a publicist I've worked with shared that a friend of his is crowdfunding snacks for her unit in a New York City ICU that's caring for COVID-19 patients. If you feel so compelled, make a small contribution that goes a long way to helping our heroes.
Now, what you came for...
(Past suggestions archived on Letterboxd)
DAY 24: The Nice Guys (available on HBO GO)
If you've ever watched a '70s detective movie (I beg of you, please go watch Chinatown if you haven't filled that blindspot), you probably know that these films are generally pretty grim in their outlook on the world. This cinema that emerged from the twin catastrophes of the Vietnam War and Watergate held neither people nor institutions in high regard. Everyone was corrupt - often times, including the hero - and every system was rigged or irreparably broken.
Shane Black's The Nice Guys, a '70s-set PI narrative, takes the form of these classics, but not necessarily their outlook. Sure, an investigation into a dead adult entertainer turns up malfeasance in both law enforcement and government, but the overarching takeaway is not nihilistic in the slightest. Black's tribute to a classic period of Hollywood cinema is able to take a step back from this fatalistic time in American life to show how, actually, the kinds of worries they had were not particularly unique. Though it took a new paranoid form in the '70s, corruption and collusion has long been a facet of the American experience (and still is, depressingly).
"This is what I'm talking about, it's over," Ryan Gosling's private eye Holland March laments early on in The Nice Guys. "The days of ladies and gentlemen are over. This what Holly's looking down the barrel of, this is what she's dealing with." As a single dad, he's fretting about how an increasingly permissive and licentious society is seeping into the world his daughter will come to inhabit. It's a smart wrinkle to add to the genre - of course a parent worries about what corruption portends.
But the humorous irony is that it's not Holland who should be worrying about what the young people are doing; it's the precocious Holly (Angourie Rice, who's sure to become a big thing) who should be worrying about how much her parents' generation will mess up the world before she and her cohort have a chance to run it. In The Nice Guys, the people like Holland March and his unwitting companion Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) who make it their sworn mission to protect the youth are the ones who do the most to imperil it. And it's up to Holly's ingenuity and intelligence to get them out of jam after jam.
This is a subtle tension running throughout the movie, but it's one that I've found incredibly resonant each time I've watched The Nice Guys. (That's three as of this afternoon.) It'll strike a chord with anyone who's either served as tech support during COVID-19 or is simply waiting for the gerontocracy that runs our country to act more responsibly in the interests of younger generations.
I think my description of what makes The Nice Guys so special also makes this movie sound like an entirely somber affair. And if you take nothing else away from my recommendation, it is anything but that. Black pays loving homage to this erstwhile genre, but he's spoofing its rigid masculinity in equal measure. Ryan Gosling is absolutely game to send up the strong silent detective archetypes, and it's an absolute masterclass in physical slapstick, facial reactions and pure commitment. He's being totally wasted in movies like Drive (yeah, I said it) and Blade Runner 2047 that ask him to stare at the camera and give nothing.
Enjoy him in all his majesty here -- I found myself cackling with as much delight watching Gosling today as I did four years ago. Sadly, not enough people saw this in theaters, so it's time to build up a fanbase from at-home viewership and bestow cult classic status on The Nice Guys.
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall