Scenes From a Marriage, The Harder They Fall, and Taylor's version

Wild feelings and the Wild West, plus the public re-litigation of an old and buried relationship

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Nov 16, 2021

Hello!

On this week’s episode of Criticism Is Dead, we discuss Scenes From a Marriage and The Harder They Fall, two recent works with mixed reception worth exploring (we love gray areas).

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02:44 Scenes From a Marriage, streaming on HBO Max, is hard to watch, but emotionally rich and raw with superb performances.

We’ve all seen the red carpet moment and the Oscar Isaac photos. But behind some truly beautiful stars is a miniseries that will certainly make you think, even if that thinking is sometimes, “I gotta hit pause and go lie down for a good hour” (that will be you if you try to watch this in its entirety all in one go).

But although this new adaptation of the original Swedish series can be a lot to take in, it strikes a chord for its portrayal of all the difficult complexities of love and marriage. Isaac and Jessica Chastain act the hell out of their characters. That alone makes this probably worth watching (especially if you like suffering a little), but nearly as compelling is how this series thrives in the gray areas of moral ambivalence. You might not like all the decisions at work here, but you have to respect them for the craft, at least.

28:09 Despite its fun flourishes and the seed of a great concept, Netflix’s The Harder They Fall is ultimately more style over substance.

Black bandits, marshals, and saloon owners! Joyfully chaotic anachronisms! A truly fantastic soundtrack that pulls together hip-hop, reggae, and orchestral scores. This film could have been excellent. But it’s undone by its story, which is simultaneously too scant and too bloated with subplots and gratuitous action scenes that should have been trimmed to better highlight the gem of an idea at the center of this movie: the subversion of the myth of the white American West, and the question of what it means to be an outlaw, to travel outside the dominant white institutions, and to claim to build a Black utopia while subjugating the people you claim to protect.

Here’s Robert Daniels for Polygon:

The prospects of a Black Western with this much star power invited hopes of a paradigm shift that would allow more of these movies to be made, and fight the enduring, dangerous Western-based myth that America’s history was primarily white. These big productions promising change through representation often do invite us to focus on their importance, to the point where we backseat the actual quality of the movie. But Samuel isn’t interested in telling real people’s stories, choosing between glut and substance, or providing a worthwhile political or emotional conceit. And all those things are important for a film that’s out to make a difference.
Instead, he’s remade the Western not wholly in the image of Black folks, but in the image of a Netflix movie — a low-impact, high-prestige, easily digestible streaming project. Never has the Western genre looked so small and devoid of meaning.