To Do: Away We Go, Nurse Jackie, Neko Case

There is not a moment in the new Sam Mendes film Away We Go, not one frame, that is not one of pure enjoyment; pleasurable in a way movies rarely are. Slight and small might work as adjectives for a marketing team to describe the effort, written by David Eggers and Vendela, and starring the spectacularly underappreciated talent of Maya Rudolph and the very fine John Krasinski as a long time couple who are about to have a child and who find themselves by happenstance, searching for home. Not a home, but home, a distinction so subtle, but so seriously important to the tone of the movie and the message it finally manages to convey.

Somehow sitting side by side next to the empty noise that is the blasphemous remake of The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3, Away We Go is apt to be dismissed as the inevitable indie film – that brothel for fake hipsters who cruise for what is next and new and then reduce anything and everything to nothingness – but please, please see it, without expectations, and let the movie unfold at its pace, surprise you with moments of joy – Allison Janney in particular is good as is Maggie Gyllenhaal and a surprising Catherine O’Hara – and ultimately break your heart. The critical response to the film – that it traffics in alienating and cheap misanthropy - is as confusing and it is misleading, especially attacks on the character’s “self-absorption,” I thought, leaving the screening, of how much the tiny treat reminded me of Alice Doesn’t Live Anymore, with careful detailed character studies and a steady command of telling a story that reflects the way we live now, all grownup, but stubbornly so.

Nurse Jackie, the sly, subtle new Showtime series, merits watching if only because Edie Falco offers a master class in acting, beyond anything I could ever imagine. Falco, who is tremendous in everything, including the little seen John Sayles film Sunshine State, plays Jackie Peyton, an ER nurse in New York City, who is best deemed mercurial in mood. That, however, is what makes Falco and this series standout, because in comparison to the one note delineations of most television characters – people are either good or bad, right or wrong, whores or saints – Nurse Jackie is impossibly interesting because all of the characters are unusually nuanced. I was worried, initially, that the self-medicating ways of Jackie was a cheap conceit and one that would warp quickly, but it hasn’t yet, and instead is one clue that might or might not serve to solve the mystery of who this complex, fiery, sad working mother might be. Comparisons to Showtime’s older, scary brother Dexter and to Paddy Chayefsky’s late, great paranoid indictment of health care, 1971’s The Hospital, are certain, but the most obvious influence at work here is Mad Men, who’s creation of a new language, one that allows characters to say much and little of anything, is at the center of Nurse Jackie. Watch it, gorge on the great acting (Peter Facinelli is an actual revelation) and relish the show’s moral and social indignation, revolutionary as it is.

When Neko Case sings, full throated, midway through the impossibly great new album Middle Cyclone, “fucking bird sings in the middle of the night,” it is like an alarm going off for Case and you, an announcement that liberation is just at hand. Mediations on life, love, and loss, have rarely been articulated as gracefully poetic as Case does, foreboding and forlorn at once. Case is the kind of artist so good, that she surprises you by seeming to steal your thoughts and privates prayers, singing them loudly for all to hear. Full of quirky sounds and songs hot with hate, it is easily one of the best not only of this year, but of the last thirty years. And that voice. It is that voice, is it not?