(originally published 11/21/16)
This review was supposed to be up last week. On Monday, Fearless Leader Ed Travis emailed me to ask if I was all set to cover Morris from America, now on home video, and I answered in the affirmative. The movie had arrived, I’d watched it, and a goodly portion of it was already written. I figured I’d finish the write up on Tuesday and have it ready to roll for the back half of the week.
And then Tuesday night happened.
I can’t speak to how anyone else reacted to Donald Trump winning the election, but I spent the entire night lying in bed and staring at my ceiling, the imagination that had so often acted as a security blanket through life’s toughest patches now strangling me with endless imaginings of every nightmare scenario that orange dildo might unleash on our country, our world. In the days after his victory, it was like something had switched off inside my head. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, went robotically through work, and came back to my apartment to force down meals and sit in silence.
It felt like we’d arrived at the end of things, and nothing had a point. Not any book I tried to read, not any movie I tried to watch, not any action I tried to take. None of it mattered, and certainly neither did finishing a review of a little comedy movie. I spent the weekend inviting myself over to friends’ houses so I could surround myself with other people and wash it off in waves of booze and conversations about literally anything else.
So on Sunday I heard about this gathering happening in a theater down in Cambridge, where folks of an artistic bent would meet and talk about what Tuesday night meant for us as individuals, as a country. Nothing got solved that night, nothing’s getting solved for a long time, but sitting in a room with people older than me, younger than me, different colors and different shapes and different walks of life, all united by fear and anger and a desire to break free from those emotions that make even the act of breathing feel like inhaling glass shards, it shook me back awake, and it reminded me of how important art can be to shine a light on something good even in a dark world.
To that end:
Morris from America is not a grand epic of a film. No buildings are leveled, no starships explode against a background of celestial majesty. There are no grand revelations about life and the human condition, no histrionic Oscar-reel moments. It’s a small, quiet little comedy about people finding their way through a tangled and troubled moment in their lives, and it is exactly the ray of sunshine I needed in this moment.
Morris (the terrific young actor Markees Christmas) has newly arrived in Germany with his widower dad (Craig Robinson, exceptional) and is struggling to adjust to the shift. His tutor (Carla Juri) encourages him to interact with his new home, but Morris’s instinct is to withdraw. His nationality and his race put an exclamation mark over him at all times (other kids assume he’s great at basketball; when a joint is discovered near school, he’s the first one questioned) and Morris finds it easier to retreat into his own head, cruising on a soundtrack of classic rap and hip-hop (in one of the movie’s best scenes, an entire museum bops along to Morris’s beat).
The kid could probably go on in this kind of comfortable isolation, but of course there’s a girl. Her name is Katrin (Lina Keller) and she sparks to the very things that have defined Morris as an outsider. She’s blunt and crude and sometimes even cruel, but poor little Morris can’t help but fall and love and chase Katrin down an expanding rabbit hole of experiences.
If that sounds cut from the same cloth as a thousand other coming of age films, I get it. The trick is in the details though. Writer-director Chad Hartigan has an eye for the kind of details that make a character feel complete and whole, even without large swaths of exposition to explain things.
And there are times when Morris the movie and Morris the character give themselves over to sensation, and the film takes on an almost lyrical quality, deeply felt and keenly observed.
Hartigan is careful not to overplay his hand. There’s no real villain, and what might in another film have been the Big Dramatic Climax is actually a tee-up for the real conclusion, which is somber and grounded in the real sort of emotional battles that we fight every day.
Movies cannot save the world, and they will not save us from what is coming. But movies, and art in general, can remind us just what it is that we are trying to save as the world spins and it feels like the worst of us are getting a stronger and stronger grip on the world. Morris from America may be a small gem, but it is a precious thing, an observation into family, masculinity, maturity, and responsibility. It’s a movie about coming to terms with the hard choices that face adulthood and choosing to try to do better.
Let’s all make that choice.