Call Me By Your Name
It seems every once in a while, there is at least one film the critics adore, everyone goes crazy for — that for me, just doesn't land. Leaves me feeling ambivalent. Avatar (Cameron 2009) and Birdman (Iñárritu 2009) are two fine examples. This year, it's Call Me By Your Name (Guadagnino 2016).
Make no mistake — I liked it, how could I not? An avid fan of the old Merchant-Ivory productions of the 80s and 90s, how could I not? It has all the classic M-I elements: The lavish landscape! The beautiful, deliberate pacing! The romantic entanglements! And something the older films don't have: incredible performances from Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet.
But despite the wonderful performances from Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, (some really superb acting here), there was for me a undercurrent of... the not quite right.
Seventeen year old Elio is smart, accomplished, sophisticated in the Arts, but he is just a boy in many ways, in perhaps the most meaningful ways. Though he pursues Oliver, who is reluctant at first, is Oliver acting nobly by indulging Elio's infatuation? Has he taken advantage of the tender, vulnerable Elio? Can you truly take advantage if both partners are willing? Well, I think you can. Throughout the film I considered how it would play out if Elio was a girl, and it definitely felt slightly... pervvy. Oliver is older, wiser, more worldly, bigger, stronger — he is a grown-ass man, Elio is a boy. The filmmakers surely sought to exploit this disparity in Oliver and Elio's maturity, casting actors with very different physicality, and to great effect.
James Ivory's script sounds stilted and at times wooden, the dialogue not entirely believable. If he had directed as originally planned, the visual and the audible might have coalesced better. Near the film's end, there is a beautiful monologue by Elio's father, which though full of (perhaps) anachronistic acceptance, is an indulgent bit of screenwriting as monologues are as rare as unicorns in real life. And did we really need this overt stamp of approval? Weren't we all very aware that Elio's cooler-than-cool parents were every teenagers dream? Is the father simply projecting his unrequited love on his son's relationship? In 1983 a new, deadly sexually-transmitted disease was making headlines and spreading like wildfire, as such I think this film should have been set in the late 1970s rather than during the AIDS epidemic. Whoops. Richard Brody of The New Yorker, called the film 'empty and sanitized.' My assessment is a bit more charitable — earnest but ultimately unseemly.
