I Don’t Recommend This: The Hollars
I feel like the only audience I have for these essays are intimately familiar with my life, but if you aren’t, here’s something to know about me: When I’m not writing, I’m making movies professionally, most often with film director Matthew Stanasolovich, who is going to be one of the major film directors of my generation. I’ve thought this since very early on in knowing him, and since then he has made four (four!) feature films, all of which have increased his visibility as a filmmaker and convinced many more people that he will soon be a well-renowned artist.
One of the reasons we work so well together is that we share similar philosophies on filmmaking. Sometimes we disagree on specific choices within films, but on the whole, we’re on the same page about the kind of movies that we want to make: Radical, politically engaged, expressions of self that help us better understand the world around us. As you might imagine, these are not “money-makers,” to borrow a term from the studio/network system (where I make my day-to-day living). But here’s the thing, neither are most of the movies that the major studios produce these days, barring Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, and Disney Animation movies. Though I’m definitely letting my bitterness show, I’m spitting facts here. Disney hasn’t dominated the film industry, they have become the industry.
Still, that doesn’t stop idiots like Matt, me, and all the other wonderfully delusional directors I work with from making movies. And it’s not just us! There’s this entire realm of filmmaking called “independent production” where hundreds, nay thousands of people make movies that no one will ever watch. There are tiers in this world, starting with kids making movies in their backyards all the way up to filmmakers whose films star movie stars and the financing might as well come from established studios. Still, I think that even the most well-financed “independent” film has more in common with kids making movies in backyards than Disney movies insofar that they remain primarily expressions of self. Disney movies have become nothing but a way to extract money from a public hell-bent on reliving their childhoods as a way to escape life’s daily reminders that human self-awareness was an utter mistake on Elon Musk’s part.
That does not mean that most independent films are well-made or interesting. Most, like all pieces of art, are mediocre-to-bad. That’s okay. Making interesting art is hard. I would argue I’ve only achieved that a handful of times in my life and I would never disparage an artist for trying to make something different and falling short of the goal they set for themselves.
Sometimes, though, artists don’t try. Sometimes they make cynical, pandering movies, which is a crime I deem punishable by death. When an artist makes a movie outside of the studio system that’s a clear attempt at making a lot of money, or worse, an attempt to impress the people with money so that they’ll be hired to direct a blockbuster, that’s when I gag.
The worst, and I mean the very worst, example I’ve ever seen of this kind of filmmaking is The Hollars, directed by John Krasinski.
The most interesting thing about this movie is that it’s part of an incomplete trilogy authored by Jim Strouse, an independent filmmaker and maybe-cartoonist. This is the second movie produced in the trilogy, and it happens to be the second part of the story. The third part of the story is a movie that Jim both wrote and directed titled People Places Things. The “first” entry in the series has yet to be produced. On the whole, the series tracks the life of a cartoonist and the relationships in his life.
The Hollars is about a character played by John Krasinski being called home to help take care of his mother, played by Margot Martindale, who is dying of movie cancer. John brings his girlfriend home, who is played by Anna Kendrick. Soon after they arrive home, Anna announces that she’s pregnant. Life is crazy, dontchaknow?
There’s nothing wrong with that plot. In fact, you might be thinking of a few movies, books, and plays with similar plots right now. Some of those might hold a special place in your heart as works that helped you through a difficult time. The Hollars is not that for anyone. The Hollars has a scene wherein Sharlto Copley and Richard Jenkins slap one another over and over, each slap sucking more humor out of a stillborn joke. John Krasinski, who at this point had not learned to let his cinematographer and visual effects producer direct his movies, doesn’t have the presence of mind to cut back and forth between the slaps to infuse this moment with some life. This moment plays out in one long torturous shot.
That, however, is me picking on John Krasinski’s lack of skill. That doesn’t even bother me. What bothers me is that every choice in this movie was made in an attempt to make something best described as “a feel-good indie comedy”. The flatly lit scenes, the locked down shots, how each line is delivered with a wry smile that tells the audience from the beginning that everything is going to be okay, don’t you worry — every single choice pisses me off. You want to know why it pisses me off? Because no one, and I mean no one, wants movies like this.
Let me put it plainly: Movies like this are the reason why independent film has curled up and died in America. It’s a fiction that there was a time when a large portion of Americans went to go see independent films, but when they did go to see those movies, at least they had the choice to see something different. Take the example of Poison (1991), directed by Todd Haynes. Produced on a shoestring budget, on the topic of being gay, closeted, and dealing with the AIDS crisis in America, this movie got conservatives and evangelicals protesting outside of movie theaters in objection to its content. Imagine that in 2021. A movie so incendiary that it gets people to leave their homes and protest it.
The Hollars, ostensibly made by a group of people who were trying to say something about the human condition, could quite literally have been directed by a film executive in between lunch meetings. It is harmless, which is the worst descriptor that I can think of for a piece of art.
The Hollars isn’t the first movie like this, nor is it the last, but it is the worst. Unfortunately, the movies to blame for the existence of The Hollars are three movies that are all pretty good in their own right: My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Napoleon Dynamite, and Little Miss Sunshine. All three movies are pretty good, and unfortunately, their only mistakes were making a whole bunch of money, which encouraged a bunch of studios to try and emulate their success by making benign films about white people experiencing minor trauma.
I don’t want to turn this essay into another diatribe about money and cApiTaliSm. For one, I do that in almost everything I write these days. But more importantly, that lets filmmakers like John Krasinski off the hook for deliberately setting out to make a mediocre movie and failing at even that.
The person that writes most eloquently on the topic of urgency in filmmaking is Ted Hope, who has been ringing his bell for nearly two decades now. Unfortunately, because not enough people listen to him, awful independent films continue to be produced no matter how many times he repeats the same points over and over. Ted has written two editions of a book on the topic. But if you’re reading this essay and haven’t read Hope For Film, allow me to share with you one of the points of the book that I reference all the time.
Don’t pretend that you’re making a movie more expensive than the one you’re making. There are a few applications for this advice. The most direct one is to not hide your production value, but to embrace it. Think of Ed Wood, who might not have intended for his movies to look so cheap, but because they did, they became their own style and visual language that people rip off today. The bigger point I get from that advice is to not make a movie that someone with more resources could do better than you and make more money at it anyways. Netflix is making their terrible romantic comedies. No one wants to watch yours. When an audience member goes out of their way to watch an independent film, they want to see something exciting, transgressive, enlightening, or at the very least not something they can get at the multiplex (the fuckplex as my college professor Bob Gosse referred to it).
If you follow that advice, I can’t promise you that you’ll make money. In fact, I can probably guarantee you the opposite. Instead, you will find the hearts of people that are looking for enlightenment through movies. There are a lot more of those people out there than you would expect, and not a single one of them wants to watch anything like The Hollars. I sure as hell don’t.
