I went to Austin, Texas this week, leaving New York just as the weather dropped from around 100 degrees to the low 80s. Everyone I talked to there — and I do mean every single person — apologized for the heat. It was 103 in the daytime. “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s been about this hot in New York for weeks, and New York is a swamp, and we have to walk around in it, and go underground. And our buildings are older and leakier.” They nodded, looking like they did not quite believe me, but said that in Texas it was “more of a dry heat.” (The restaurant at the hotel had a cocktail named More of a Dry Heat.) A few who’d lived in D.C. in the past commiserated. As terrible as New York is in the heat, D.C., I wager, is worse.
Anyhow, I was there to show Driveways to a group of people, which meant I saw Driveways twice last week, after not having seen it since May 2020. It is still a lovely movie, gentle and subtle and saying all kinds of things between the lines instead of out loud. Hong Chau and Lucas Jaye play Cathy and Cody, mother and nine-year-old son, who have driven from their home in Michigan to upstate New York. They’re going to clean out the house of Cathy’s late sister April, who was twelve years older than her and died recently. When they arrive, they discover that she was also a hoarder and a bit of a shut in. They didn’t know. Cathy is wracked by guilt.
Next door lives Del, a Korean War vet whose wife passed away some years ago. He is played by Brian Dennehy, on of America’s greatest theater actors; he died just weeks before the film was released in May 2020, so this is his final role. When we first meet Del, he’s in his house, and then he’s sitting on his porch, wearing his Korean Vet hat. He eyes the folks next door, and they exchange terse words, none of them quite sure where they stand with one another. Cathy and Cody are of Asian descent; Del’s hat makes us think we’re about to see a movie about how Friendship Can Conquer Racism or something, but that’s not it at all.
Instead it’s a story about loss and friendship and guilt and walls and kindness and regret, about a sensitive kid who finds solace on the porch of an old man who has been alone for a while. That’s what I wrote about, when I wrote about the film, back when it came out. Reading my review from back then, I can see how much the circumstances in which I was watching it — early pandemic days, when things were uncertain in a whole different way from how they are now — shaped what I saw. “Someday we will look back at now, and I think what we’ll remember most is how we treated one another in the face of our weaknesses and fears,” I wrote. “For me, a film like Driveways is like a firefly caught in a jar, a small light of something like hope that we can learn from one another and love one another, despite whatever storm is raging in the outside world. That we can meet each other on our porches — or at a healthy distance — and keep the ties between us strong, even now.”
Rewatching it now, more than two years later, I picked up on other things. Del is not really alone. He has a community of other old guys with whom he plays bingo down at the VFW. One of them, Roger, is clearly starting to lose his memory, and Del cares for him so tenderly it’s easy to miss it’s happening at all, which is, of course, the point. They talk about getting old. The past is alive to them. In Cody, they see the future.
The group I showed the movie to included a lot of older people, and I could hear them chuckling at moments of comedy that had to do with getting older. And it made me smile — of course, I know many people who are decades older than myself, but I haven’t been one yet. Sitting in a darkened movie theater full of people from all stages of life, I heard and saw things in the movie I hadn’t seen before.
And isn’t that the point of movie theaters? To let our diverse and different experiences come to bear on a film all at once, to be together instead of bringing to a work of art only what I have experienced, what I know, how I see the movie? It’s so isolating to keep art to ourselves. Hell can be other people, so to speak, but they can also be heaven.
(Driveways is streaming for free with commercials on YouTube and Amazon Prime, along with some other services, but I’d recommend ponying up the three bucks for the commercial-free version on your digital platform of choice; that seems like a rude way to watch such a quiet and gentle film. I’m told it’s also on Kanopy and Hoopla, if you’ve got access to those.)
Writing
For Vox’s new service vertical, I wrote about how to get back into reading if you’ve lost the habit, even if your mind is mush. (People seem to have really liked this piece.)
I explained Jordan Peele’s wonderful new alien thriller/movie about the addiction of spectacle Nope, including the Nahum reference at the beginning!
I struggle to muster interest in the lives of celebrities, but I was interested to watch the much-maligned Gigli after Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez tied the knot, and boy, was it bad! But also interesting. So I wrote about it.
I actually rather liked Ron Howard’s approach to the Thai cave rescue story in Thirteen Lives, so I wrote about it. (In theaters now, on Amazon Prime next weekend.)
It is a summer of unusual, strange, and downright kooky love stories at the movies, so I wrote about them.
Also of note
I have just finished drafting (very very very roughly) the first chapter of my next book, We Tell Ourselves Stories, which is due in just over a year. It’s hard! Writing is impossible! Nobody has ever done it!
But it’s been really fun hearing from people about Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women. If you have read it and enjoyed it, please don’t hesitate to post to your various channels / tell your friends about it! It’s been fun to watch it reach its audience.
While I was in Texas I had a bunch of great food and, perhaps more importantly, hibiscus margaritas. Then I came home and made some hibiscus flower concentrate, because I had a big bag of dried hibiscus flowers sitting around. Method: 2 oz of hibiscus flowers (which is maybe around a cup?) and 4 cups of water; bring to a boil, let it sit on the stove at least an hour but as long as you can, then strain. Serve mixed at least half and half with water or anything else; I like it over various sparkling waters, and you might want to add some sweetener, or a fun liqueur. I also added a cinnamon stick, a few dried allspice berries, and a vanilla bean (split open lengthwise) into the mix. In the past I’ve added lime or dried chiles. Delish.
"Nobody has ever done it!" Lol