On Ken Loach, COVID-19, and quarantine

Sorry We Missed You, directed by Ken Loach

Here we are. I did not have anything planned, and this will probably be as much stream-of-conscious as anything, but I wanted to write, and here we are. We all know there is a pandemic going on, and hopefully you are all safe at home with loved ones around, in spirit if not in person. All this time at home, all this time online, maybe some of that brought you here. If so, welcome, or welcome back, as the case may be. So, here we are.

The writing was on the wall early this month. You could see how it was going to go. But, even with that, my wife – my moviegoing partner through thick and thin, sickness and health – and I still made our trips to the theater. We caught The Invisible Man in (true) IMAX at the Universal City Walk AMC on the first of the month. For a popular movie on an opening weekend Sunday afternoon, the theater was kind of empty.

A few days later, still attempting to maintain our New York City walking ethos, we trekked from home into Hollywood to catch Kelly Reichardt’s wonderful First Cow at the ArcLight Hollywood. It was a beautiful night. Serene. Few cars on the road as we strolled along the uneven Sunset Boulevard sidewalks. Even fewer people at this screening, despite it being a Saturday night. Perhaps folks had yet to catch on to the beauty of Reichardt’s gentle western parable.

Then came Tuesday, March 10. It rained. My wife and I share one car and I prefer to take public transportation to work, but in a downpour, it can be a pain. So, she came to get me after she got off. It is rare that we are on that side of town together, and we thought we would make a night of it. We had yet to visit the Landmark Nuart on Santa Monica. We love the Landmark Theatre chain. Brilliant films in a proper movie theater setting. If you do not know what I mean by that, visit the theater at your local mall (a pair of institutions in parallel decline) and imagine the opposite experience.

The Landmark Nuart is a one-screen theater next to the best video rental store in LA. That week, the feature was Ken Loach’s latest humanist masterwork, Sorry We Missed You. Trailers for excellent-looking films played, and I turned to my wife after every one and said, “We definitely have to see that.” Among them, the preview for Werner Herzog’s new documentary Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin played. As luck would have it, Herzog was scheduled to appear with the film at the Nuart a month later.

Herzog has always been a dream Q&A for us. We have just missed him twice – once for Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected World and once for Into the Inferno, both excellent, both on Netflix, and both highly recommended. Seeing an opportunity, as we walked out of the theater, we went back to the ticket booth and purchased two tickets for the April 10 screening of Nomad. As you probably know, that screening will not be happening. Nor will many of the others we had looked forward to over the coming weeks.

A double bill of Charlie Chaplin’s Gold Rush and City Lights would have been a particular highlight, on the big screen, accompanied by a live piano. I was excited for the release of Eliza Hittman’s much-buzzed-about Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Francis Ford Coppola’s other 1974 masterpiece The Conversation was to return to theaters, and Quentin Dupieux’s mad-seeming horror-comedy Deerskin was to debut. None of that will happen in the current moment, and there is uncertainty over what the future holds.

The theater exhibition business was suffering before this, and I have watched some of my favorite independent theaters close in recent years for no reasons other than monetary. This forced, if sensible, closure will surely kill a few more. That saddens me, and I wonder what the future of moviegoing looks like. But it is a small price to pay to save potentially millions of lives. Or to save thousands of lives. Or, really, to save one life. When we say Cinema Is Life, we mean it is a way of living, not a reason anyone should be dying.

On the first day the theaters reopen, I will be there, but for now, we still have the movies. In the nearly two weeks since my last visit to the cinema – my longest break in years – I have caught up with some old favorites, shared some recent discoveries with a friend, and settled in for the kind of comfort watching we could all use right about now.

If you feel like watching something great, watch something great. If you feel like watching a romcom, watch a romcom. If you feel like watching a great romcom, watch When Harry Met Sally …, which is how we spent a rainy Sunday afternoon. Whatever brings you comfort in a time like this, there is no wrong answer.

I did not know Sorry We Missed You would be the last movie I would see in theaters for the foreseeable future, but I cherished the experience as I cherish every visit to the cinema. It is about a man who gets sucked into the never-ending spiral of futility that is the modern economy for so many working people. All he wants is to give his family a better life, but paradoxically, in trying to do so, he destroys his family. Like so many of Loach’s best films, it lays bare the hypocrisies that underlie our societal structure and the false promise of upward mobility.

It is a dark, tragic story, but if there must be a hopeful lesson to take away, it is this: The things that matter most to us will have no value to the outside world, to the economy, to the culture. These are our loved ones, our private joys and secret passions, our personal triumphs and small miracles. The machine will grind us down if we let it, but it cannot grind to dust that which we hold closest to our hearts.

So, stay home. Be safe. Trust science. Believe doctors. Treasure what matters most. We all get through this together or none of us gets through it. And, whatever the world looks like on the other end of this tunnel, I’ll be at the movies. I hope to see you there. We can share a popcorn.