Flower (Max Winkler, 2018)

Discussions of specific films and franchises.
Post Reply
Message
Author
User avatar
domino harvey
Dot Com Dom
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Flower (Max Winkler, 2018)

#1 Post by domino harvey » Thu Mar 16, 2017 11:46 am

Old news but I hasn't heard about it til seeing it listed in the Tribeca FF program, but Max Winkler is finally following up his underrated comic gem Ceremony (I know swo is also a fan of this one) with Flower. It's based on a Black List script from 2012 that tied with Whiplash and Hell or High Water in their rankings, so hopefully this isn't like Phil Morrison finally following up Junebug with All is Bright!

User avatar
swo17
Bloodthirsty Butcher
Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 10:25 am
Location: SLC, UT

Re: The Films of 2017

#2 Post by swo17 » Thu Mar 16, 2017 12:04 pm

Cool beans

User avatar
PfR73
Joined: Sun Mar 27, 2005 6:07 pm

Re: The Films of 2017

#3 Post by PfR73 » Thu Mar 16, 2017 12:51 pm

That's great to hear. I just purchased Ceremony on Blu-Ray last week (saw it at SXSW several years ago) and was wondering why he'd not made another film.

User avatar
domino harvey
Dot Com Dom
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: Flower (Max Winkler, 2017)

#4 Post by domino harvey » Thu Mar 16, 2017 12:56 pm

Here's the festival's thumbnail
“Flower”
Director: Max Winkler, Screenwriters: Alex McAulay, Max Winkler, Matt Spicer
Rebellious and quick-witted, 17-year-old firecracker Erica Vandross (Zoey Deutch) kills time with her friends gawking at older men in bowling alleys and sexually scheming guys out of their money. However, her biggest scheme is still to come when her mother asks her boyfriend and his troubled, fresh-out-of-rehab son to move in with them in this biting dark comedy. With Kathryn Hahn, Adam Scott, Tim Heidecker, Joey Morgan, Dylan Gelula. (World Premiere)

User avatar
domino harvey
Dot Com Dom
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: Flower (Max Winkler, 2017)

#5 Post by domino harvey » Fri Nov 17, 2017 11:05 pm

Has anyone heard any updates on a release date for this?

User avatar
bainbridgezu
Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2011 10:54 pm

Re: Flower (Max Winkler, 2017)

#6 Post by bainbridgezu » Fri Dec 01, 2017 3:05 am


User avatar
domino harvey
Dot Com Dom
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: Flower (Max Winkler, 2017)

#7 Post by domino harvey » Sun Dec 10, 2017 2:24 pm

Surprised they're not moving this up to capitalize on the timeliness of its premise (though even that's a little bait and switch-y in the trailer, from what I understand), but glad there's finally a release on the horizon

User avatar
Black Hat
Joined: Thu Nov 24, 2011 5:34 pm
Location: NYC

Re: Flower (Max Winkler, 2018)

#8 Post by Black Hat » Mon Dec 18, 2017 4:57 pm

Wow all this time I thought Zoey Deutch from this and Everybody Wants Some, Haley Lu Richardson from Edge of Seventeen, Split and Columbus and Kathryn Newton from Big Little Lies were the same actress.

User avatar
Big Ben
Joined: Mon Feb 08, 2016 12:54 pm
Location: Great Falls, Montana

Re: Flower (Max Winkler, 2018)

#9 Post by Big Ben » Wed Jan 10, 2018 6:22 pm


User avatar
domino harvey
Dot Com Dom
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: Flower (Max Winkler, 2018)

#10 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jan 10, 2018 9:46 pm

Much more promising trailer, looks great

User avatar
DarkImbecile
Ask me about my visible cat breasts
Joined: Mon Dec 09, 2013 6:24 pm
Location: Albuquerque, NM

Re: Flower (Max Winkler, 2018)

#11 Post by DarkImbecile » Sat Mar 31, 2018 2:57 pm

Max Winkler's Flower is either a tone deaf, morally repulsive disaster, or a portrait of selfishness and entitlement that semi-brilliantly walks a line of unreliability and ambiguity like the edgy teen romcom version of Taxi Driver, committed to the perspective of the protagonist for better or worse. Having just seen it, I think I'm coming down closer to the latter, but I'm not so firm in that opinion that I couldn't be swayed.

Zoey Deutch’s Erica is basically the female version of Jonah Hill’s Superbad character wreaking havoc in what would otherwise be a fairly standard Sundance family dramedy, alternately aggravating and charming her mother (Kathryn Hahn) and prospective stepfather and stepbrother (Tim Heidecker and Joey Morgan, respectively), while conspiring with her girlfriends to scam older men, until the Adam Scott character becomes more significant than just the “hot old guy at the bowling alley”, and the plot takes... quite a turn.

I've never seen Ceremony, Winkler's previous feature effort, so I have no idea if it was a similarly dark comedy - Flower was seemingly workshopped to be as misaligned as possible with prevailing attitudes toward sexuality and abuse - or if this most recent effort is an outlier, but the script and performances here lean hard into the punch Winkler had to know would be coming from a sizable chunk of the critical community.

Either way, Deutch gives a striking lead performance, and the shift this film makes at the two-thirds mark is surprising to say the least. Even with my charitable interpretation of what the film is doing, it’s not great, but it’s worth seeing for Deutch and for its various provocations (even if what different viewers see as provocative about it will vary).

User avatar
domino harvey
Dot Com Dom
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: Flower (Max Winkler, 2018)

#12 Post by domino harvey » Sat Mar 31, 2018 7:36 pm

One of Ceremony's greatest virtues was in setting up familiar narrative beats and then circumventing the expected outcome. Making a film about abuse that doesn't tow the socially excepted line sounds quite bold and perhaps of a piece with that aspect, though nothing I recall in Ceremony could really be considered controversial to most audiences

User avatar
Never Cursed
Such is life on board the Redoutable
Joined: Sun Aug 14, 2016 12:22 am

Re: Flower (Max Winkler, 2018)

#13 Post by Never Cursed » Wed Jul 25, 2018 3:10 am

This was godawful and stupid and morally ugly and I hated it. It amazes me that the script for this was a Black List darling (with the incredible Whiplash no less), because it's a shallow and contrived mess, with Book Of Henry-tier tonal shifts executed with about the same level of competence. It's very telling that there's no synopsis online, because reading one end to end would kill anyone's desire to watch this.

The movie starts with the premise that Zoey Deutch (who does a commendable job with the material here and whom I'd like to see in a better movie) plays the ringleader of a group of underage girls who run a scheme where Deutch prostitutes herself to older men, has the other girls in the group record the sex acts, and extorts money out of the johns for all the girls to share. Super gross, obviously, but it's not presented as an excuse for the movie to sexualize Deutch (there's actually no nudity, penis drawings notwithstanding, or onscreen sex) and it's the kind of concept that could form the backbone of an interesting, perhaps even genuinely transgressive, movie if it were fleshed out.
SpoilerShow
But not only do all the film's good ideas go nowhere (the whole extortion thing never happens again, for instance), the movie seems more interested in using these moments as an excuse for Deutch's incredibly unpleasant character to be her misanthropic and utterly charmless self for minutes upon minutes, almost to the point where she seems like she's been ripped from Three Billboards Outside Of Ebbing, Missouri. If you thought that movie was hilarious, then you'll like this one's comic scenarios (fellating a drug dealer to get roofies to drug a suspected pedophile so you can pretend you were molested by him, anyone?) just as much. For everyone else, well, this movie's idea of a running joke is to have Deutch refer to her fat, insecure, in-rehab step-brother as a pathetic virgin throughout the movie so that when they have sex (!) at the end, she can say "you know, I was actually a virgin this whole time too!" for cheap laughs that don't even make sense (the underage prostitute was a virgin?).

The real plot of the movie is made of the movie's worst idea, involving the step-brother - he claims to have been molested by the aforementioned pedophile, so Deutch pursues him and ends up drugging him with the roofies for money/revenge (the movie doesn't really establish why she goes after the pedophile), but after he's drugged, the guy breaks down and emotionally says that the step-brother is a pathological liar and that he never molested anyone. He falls asleep and the gang of girls takes the photos, but the guy ends up dying for stupid reasons that I won't get into here, leading Deutch and the step-brother to run away to Mexico, turning the movie into a road movie for twenty minutes, which of course leads the two to confess their love (the two never display any chemistry before this) for each other and fuck in the desert as police cars close in on them. And that ending! Not only do they stay together, it turns out that the pedophile didn't molest the step-brother, but did molest a ton of other girls, making the whole thing okay and morally justifiable (a bit like the end of Three Billboards, coincidentally).
This movie confuses "obscene" with "transgressive." None of these scenarios are funny or novelly presented or particularly dramatic, just explicit in a weaksauce sort of way. Easily the worst movie I've seen since Red Sparrow, which is saying something.

EDIT: Mike Stoklasa agrees! (spoilers)

User avatar
therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: Flower (Max Winkler, 2018)

#14 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Dec 18, 2021 3:09 am

I saw this upon release and hated it, but for whatever reason felt compelled to revisit the film, which has stayed in my mind with ferocity as an anomalous experiment in narrative provocation, beyond mere identification with morally-challenging characters. Its entire world is established as confounding and disturbing from the get-go; loose strings desperately striving to create a strong hold on the path Zoey Deutch has crafted for herself, or the choices her step-brother Luke has made to get his nebulous needs met. He's used drugs to cope with life, but is unable to explain why, and we sense that he himself does not know. His disposition screams vacancy of identity. Erica presents as comparatively self-actualized, but it's a ruse, as her rationalizations of immoral behavior as feminist empowerment are equally tragic. It's all so fruitless, sad, and empty. Deutch, like Travis Bickle- to use DarkImbecile's apt comparison upthread- is a lost soul, traumatized by an irreparably toxic development from a ruthless cocktail of passive-parenting and parental loss in addition to social alienation, and has gravitated towards tangible constructs in sex acts, robbery, and who knows what else to make sense of her life. She wears the oversimplified and misguided identity of vigilantism like a badge of honor, but even she has a strong part of her that wants romance and doesn't know how to appropriately engage in authentic contact with Scott when the opportunity comes.

Her world is contractual, defensive, and dishonest. Even Erica's mother doesn't trust her. She mercilessly directs Erica to go after the boy she's just met because it "works for us," and her selfishness and resentment explode at the first opportunity when Erica is suspected (fairly or otherwise) of acts that disrupt her own desire for stability. The mother's boyfriend is equally disoriented regarding how to respond to Erica, let alone his own son (Heidecker's scene in the hospital is quietly powerful). The film doesn't judge its characters, but deeply feels for them. We can understand how, in an atmosphere this lonely, where social awkwardness and avoidance are the dominant languages, each character is on the brink of total brokenness; thin-skinned towards triggers that ignite a fight/flight response to prevent annihilation of the little shred of balance they have left.

Winkler, nor the tricky yet impressively daring script, let these characters off the hook either. They are stripped of their delusional justifications nakedly before us, toeing an unbearable line between pity and disgust, and occasionally finding a pocket of nonjudgmental humanism in the midst of this wreckage. If we're lucky, we slowly come to understand that, as the film leaves them vulnerable, it's mimicking their harsh schemas and so their consequential reckless amplification of these behaviors are reactionary to both the socially-constructed forces within the film and the oppression of us, the audience.

I now think the left turn the film takes is fitting within its internal logic, by which I mean that of the two main principal's psychosocial relationships with their milieu. Erica's moral drive kicks in and she tries to prevent the plan from moving forward out of genuine empathy, and Luke makes things worse by trying to help her when misreading the situation on the fly, also from empathic instinct; but both are messily impulsive manifestations of their chaotic cognitive-emotional bearings attempting to engage with an untrustworthy, barren social context. The subsequent deviations from these fleeting instances of enlightenment are born from self-preservation, and the film questions whether this return to deceit and unprincipled behavior is sourced in protective inebriation, or sobriety to how the world truly operates- because subjectivity is the name of the game, and without supports these characters don't have many other options.

DarkImbecile is right that this film is engulfed in the characters' subjectivity- constantly at odds with the audience's objectivity, and Winkler makes a very risky and impossibly-satisfying choice to boldly refuse to craft false avenues for us to align harmoniously with their worldviews. As a result, the film is uneven, messy, off-putting, but it's true to the implicit existential tangle each character faces. Even Luke's lies, like Erica's, are sympathized with. When we find out about Luke's dishonesty, the film silently asks us to question why he, a shy and invisible and scared kid, would feel impelled to cause so much commotion in his life and others'. It's not to be noticed, which would be cheap but neither the performance nor the script indicate this as a possibility; instead it's derived from the same 'moral' drive Erica has in the midsection's climax- just as directionless and confused in how to flex it, but driven to do so all the same. In its own fucked-up and ironic way, the actions are 'true' to the innocence within their respective souls, and simultaneously symptoms of raw and relatable self-destructive tendencies to hug their self-fulfilling prophecies of resignation to their personal worth in sacrifice of another's value- which is also a fucked-up sublimation of utilitarian ideals!

The final decisive act to "go home" is a surrender of the facade, a stand against their defaults of avoidance, and a commitment to greet the world and its consequences while still maintaining the shred of authenticity in their own idiosyncratic identities with self-respect. So in the end, there is 'growth', and harmony found in collectively sharing this fatalistic estrangement with 'normalcy' but also a moral charge to face fears of social intimacy and finally tap into the ethical realms of their psyches with confidence. This is only possible because they find trust in one another- and the film has a lot to say (without ever directly saying it) about how we all need at least one person to trust and depend on in this world to safely transition from safeguarding narcissism in isolation towards willing moral development external from the shell of 'self'.

Flower has a lot more in common with Winkler's first feature, Ceremony, than I initially credited it with- though that earlier film is more charitable to its characters and the audience, investing in a transparent reveal (rather than coy conceal) of how we concoct defensive suits of conceit to protect against vulnerability that destabilizes us. This film doubles down on its predecessor's ideas to produce a more audacious but ultimately less gratifying product, even if that's by design. Maybe one day I'll love this movie, but for now I just kinda like (and certainly respect) it, which is honestly a huge win for a film as self-destructively devoted to repelling its viewers as its social environment is to its characters, and vice versa.

Post Reply