To close out the year, GQ is revisiting the most fascinating ideas, trends, people, and projects of 2023. For all of our year-end coverage, click here.
In the title role of William Oldroyd’s psychothriller Eileen, as a young prison administrator wading through obsession and grotesquerie, Thomasin McKenzie is terrific; her accent, less so. As she develops a fixation on the confident, glamorous new staff therapist (Anne Hathaway) at work and bristles against her alcoholic ex-cop dad (Shea Whigham) at home, Eileen’s girlish naïveté gives way to a nervier self-possession—but all the while, she speaks in a woodwind half-brogue that doesn’t evoke Massachusetts in the ‘60s as much as it does the Ghost of Christmas Past after a few Sam Adamses. No one has ever talked like this, much in the same respect that no human in recorded history has had McKenzie’s actual voice, a crystalline all-treble whisper that can be played for malevolence as easily as timidity. (In Last Night in Soho, she uses it both ways.) She’s not just missing the mark, like past offenders Julianne Moore in 30 Rock or Vera Farmiga in The Departed. She’s strayed into uncharted vocal territory more captivating than accurate.
The best Bay State-accent film is 2016’s Manchester by the Sea, in which some actors nail the salt-watery Nawth Shaw dialect and others don’t bother. That’s how it goes in real-life Massachusetts, whose populace is mostly comprised of regionally indistinct regular folks with a smattering of central-casting townies. The differences and commonalities throughout the state have piqued the interest of the movies this year, spurring them to look past the go-to stereotypes of fusty academics or the blue-collar workers responsible for the sand-and-gravel authenticity now being leeched from Carhartt. With the occasional affectionate nod to these not-always-incorrect caricatures, a small handful of films have charted the area’s cultural topography and found that all roads lead not to Boston, but back to a shared psychological hub: repression. More than fried seafood and rioting after sporting events, the true heritage of Massachusetts lies in the resolute refusal to confront troubles hiding internally or in plain sight. Around these parts, being honest with yourself is wicked hard.
In Manchester by the Sea, that hardness was literal and figurative; a grieving son must forestall his dad’s funeral until the rock-solid earth has sufficiently defrosted to allow for burial, and the most poignant beat hits when a long-estranged couple can barely bring themselves to speak during a chance encounter. Not talking about things is in the local DNA, a significant concept hanging over a state founded by Puritans and built by Irish Catholics, both of whom held up reticence as a key tenet of good Christian virtue.
In his seasonal slasher Thanksgiving, Newton native Eli Roth gets in some solid hyper-regional potshots; when a Black Friday sale turns bloody, Roth takes care to identify the dirtbags beating down the barricades as visitors from Hanover. But between its creative mutilations, the Plymouth-set film is held together by the recurring theme of blinkered dismissal. A year after the doorbuster stampede that claimed three lives, a carving-knife-wielding killer picks off the townspeople for their overeagerness to put all the unpleasantness behind them, an insistent happy face that also frustrates mourning final girl Jessica (Nell Verlaque).
The culprit’s gimmick involves an Instagram account posting photos of the table he’s gradually setting with the disfigured corpses of those who stood by and did nothing at the scene of the RightMart massacre, their grisly comeuppance just one way of dragging out what's been swept under the rug. Even the lumpier stuff concerning Jessica’s departed mother speaks to the Massachusettsian belief that issues must only be processed under the most extreme duress, though that more often entails some moderate fisticuffs rather than several homicides.
Denied trauma becomes a sinister, metaphorical quantity in Eileen, an id festering under the placid surface of suburbia in a cozy corner of the past. Despite the nostalgic glow of string lights marking the time as Christmas, something’s not right around X-Ville, the oceanside non-place mentioned in Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel. The name gives away an overt literariness, a whiff of the conceptual that grows more pungent as Eileen’s world seems to turn against her: the bitter cold outside, intrusive thoughts tormenting her with her own unalleviated horniness, the dried puke caked in her hair when she’s rudely awakened. (Moshfegh and co-scriptwriter Luke Goebel opted not to include the part in the book where Eileen repeatedly, perhaps fetishistically, shits herself while wearing adult diapers. That’s Hollywood for you.)
Hathaway’s bewitching Dr. Rebecca St. John has the feline smile of a woman with a secret, and Eileen assumes she’s crossing a professional line with a handsome murderer (Sam Nivola) during their private sessions. Gradually and then suddenly, Oldroyd unveils a hotbed of dysfunction far grimmer than anything Eileen dared to imagine, hiding in plain sight around a community where everyone knows everyone’s name and business. The horrifying climax takes place in a basement, an appropriate location for the excavation of shames long- and deep-buried. As the institutionalized subject’s mother, Marin Ireland commands one of the year’s showstopper scenes with a monologue in which she confesses to the unspeakable with chilling composure, owning the guilt built up over years spent turning a blind eye to gravest sin for the sake of maintaining an illusive normalcy. She’d sooner destroy her family with an agreed-upon lie than take up the ugly work of honesty, the stomach-turning details of her complicity a dark echo of the predatory-priest-reassignment scandals that rocked Massachusetts harder than most.
While no less emotionally intense, The Holdovers counters that this spirit of self-withdrawal can be as mild as an armor of grouchiness. Classics professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) cultivates a frosty exterior to match the barren fields of ice surrounding Barton Academy, a stand-in, judging by its proximity to Boston, for tony boarding school Phillips Andover. (Speaking of wallpapering over the unseemliest bits of our history: Andover never made any formal apology for their student-exchange program with Nazi Germany in the years prior to WWII.) There’s no stock type closer to the essence of Massachusetts than the tweed-jacketed, elbow-patched faculty egghead, gazing out over campus from his handsomely appointed oak-paneled office at one of the state’s many proud old bastions of higher learning. But as he spends some quality time with an insouciant student (newcomer Dominic Sessa) left behind over the winter break—and we spend some time with him—Paul transcends the cliché, offering a glimpse at the wellspring of stifled hurt underneath his stern disciplinarian exterior.
The kids murmur about Hunham as a battle-axe hardass, an impression he’s all too glad to back up with pop quizzes and merciless grading that let him take out his resentment of spoiled rich snots who’ve been handed everything on a platter. But he’s only a mean old bastard until he’s not, an alchemy of personality common to the prickly characters dissected in the films of Alexander Payne. As he and his reluctant charge Angus argue, then chat, then confide during an unapproved field trip into a lovingly recreated Boston circa 1970, we learn that every off-putting quality has its fair rationale, though Paul’s never felt the need to justify himself. He’d rather cut himself off than let anyone know about the trumped-up plagiarism accusation that imbued him with a contempt for the wealthy all those years ago, or the medical condition responsible for an unsavory odor he can’t help exuding. Even once Payne permits this hardened facade to crack, there’s no sappy outpouring, only of a gruff acknowledgement between two kindred misanthropes that putting up walls brings loneliness along with safety.
These statewide themes of suppressed feeling will gain a fascinating wrinkle next spring, when this past fall’s festival sensation Janet Planet gets a theatrical run from A24. In her first feature, playwright-turned-filmmaker Annie Baker ventures into the central-Mass boonies that raised her, and emerges with a patient, gentle, yet deceptively cutting critique of the post-hippie attitudes that flourish in the remote collegiate colony around Amherst. Their earthy liberalism can work as its own sort of cover, its openness disguising vanity or an impulse to detach. The more one talks, the less they can get away with saying.
But all stripes of local are united in a reluctance to probe the tenderest parts of ourselves, in spite of all the (ultimately fair) typifying of Mass-holes as incurable loudmouths. Born into sin before statehood with the Salem witch hysteria—affectionately and semi-respectfully recreated as a large-scale diorama complete with glowing-red-eyed Satan at the Salem Witch Museum, my teen-years job—the state has always cultivated a conflicted relationship to its spotty past. (One more bit of local color: in my hometown of Danvers, the derelict mental asylum whose crimes against human dignity inspired the horror picture Session 9 has long since been bulldozed and paved over with luxury condos.) Likewise, its onscreen denizens prefer to put the hardest parts of life far in their rearview, where a person’s demons become tiny and far-off. But they’re still there, nagging and visible, just waiting for the right moment to rear their nasty heads once again.
