Trend Spotlight: America's Emotional Realism

A wide spectrum of American filmmakers have, in the last year, embraced a radical brand of emotional realism that borrows as much from European art films as it does from America’s own classic melodramas. The trend emerged early in 2008 at the Sundance Film Festival and ran all the way through the year-end rush of award contenders and beyond.

In decades past, the story of a contentious family gathering or a homeless woman on the road with her dog might’ve been shot through gauzy filters and scored with strings, but Rachel Getting Married and Wendy and Lucy, like a number of American films released in the past year, have considered their characters with a style that’s stripped of artifice. These filmmakers are telling their stories with handheld cameras, natural light, and music that arises from the film’s locale, not the soundtrack album. Each is marked by sweet belief and unflinching honesty.

No one thing links this diverse body of filmmakers—which includes Kelly Reichardt, Lance Hammer, Azazel Jacobs, and sometimes even Darren Aronofsky and Jonathan Demme—besides a harmonious aesthetic, but many of them cite the films of the Belgian duo Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne as inspiration. “I’m a huge Dardenne fan,” Aronofsky, director of The Wrestler, told me in Chicago. And at Sundance, Ballast director Hammer said, “I’ve learned to be courageous through them because, thankfully, they are so courageous. That’s the debt I owe them.”

American filmmakers may have drawn ideas from cinema’s favorite Belgians, but they’ve adapted the brothers’ spare, empathetic style to purely American landscapes: the wrestling rings, strip clubs and supermarkets in The Wrestler, the Mississippi delta in Ballast, the highways and parking lots of the Pacific Northwest in Wendy and Lucy, and a multi-cultural New England wedding in Rachel Getting Married.

In The New York Times, Manohla Dargis called the earliest incarnation of this trend “the new American realism,” but what’s remarkable is that these films build not only on European austerity but also on homegrown melodrama. It might not be foremost in your mind to invite classic Hollywood storytellers like Howard Hawks and Douglas Sirk to your Dardenne party, but onscreen the blend of grit and emotion feels entirely natural. We accept the blaze of glory at the end of The Wrestler and the tearful confrontations in Rachel Getting Married in part because of the credibility established by the camera’s unfiltered gaze. And we accept the idiosyncratic plots that lurch without obvious direction or sit still longer than we expect them to because they’re committed to the roads of their characters, wherever they may lead.

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck inadvertently helped launch this trend in 2006 with their debut film, Half Nelson. In their second film, Sugar, they follow a Dominican baseball player into the U.S. minor leagues, but they let the movie drift with his wandering, broken heart. Their films, like those of their peers, are about particular characters, but they’re also about people who share our world, people we know. Really, they’re about us, and, with any luck, these filmmakers will each have the opportunity to make a dozen more gently searing portraits. We’ll look back at them one day, and we’ll see how we lived.