Tumbledown: two thumbs down
A hopefully entertaining and educational rant
Note: All links are affiliate links 🫠 except for ‘red flag guy’ which just goes to Instagram!
My daughter Katie and I watched the preview one night for the movie Tumbledown with Rebecca Hall and Jason Sudeikis. It came out in 2016, but as per my usual, I am late to the party.
Hall plays the young widow of a folk singer who attracted a devoted following. Sudeikis plays a reporter who has an advance to write a book about her dead husband. They end up collaborating on a biography.
Katie reached for the remote saying, “Don’t watch that, you’ll hate it.” I nodded, knowing the movie would end with Hall’s character ‘moving on’ with Sudeikis’s. A trope I hate not because widows can’t have a chapter two, that’s fine! Normal even! But the narrative around it, that they get ‘over’ their first love is so unbelievably false, it fills me with the cliched rage of a thousand burning suns, etc., etc.
Look, it’s like suggesting to parents that the only way they can have a full and happy life is that they need to ‘get over’ the love they have for their firstborn child. Yes, the firstborn is alive and everything. They have to ‘move on’ and ‘heal’ in order to have a second child since there’s no way for them to love both children at the same time.
It’s just so stupid. Parents can have multiple children and love every single one. A widow can have other relationships and love more than one person, even if one person is dead.
Love grows. Love expands.
And yes, my analogy is flawed because a living child vs dead husband is a leap; it’s clearly too large a hurdle for many screenwriters to comprehend, anyway. Regardless, my point remains.
Katie and I watched Juliet, Naked instead, which did not make me mad. (It did, however, have me pulling up clips from Reality Bites, while trying to explain how Ethan Hawke became the reluctant face of Gen-X and why we all loved him. To my daughter, he’s just Mia Hawke’s old and somewhat crusty father.)
Later, after enduring another lonely and empty Father’s Day, I decided I wanted to be mad and watched Tumbledown by myself. And no surprise here, it did make me mad. But it also had some sweet and poignant parts. Sadly, those sweet and poignant parts did not carry the movie. In the end, I wanted a physical DVD that I could throw across the room and watch smash against the wall*.
In the beginning, Rebecca’s character — which the internet tells me was named Hannah — narrates:
“In the middle, you feel like it's never going to end. But he was with me. I was going to make it.”
She’s talking about swimming across a remote mountain lake. Her husband is behind her in a canoe. She goes on, after explaining that he got an idea for a song while she was swimming:
“Together as it was supposed to be, because the plan was never to live in the fricking woods all my myself. But here I am, still way out in the middle... without him.”
This was early on in the movie and I thought, Huh, maybe there’s going to be some grief awareness after all. Maybe the whole widow thing won’t just be a lazy vehicle for a discount Hallmark romance.
Because that ‘alone in the middle’ thing is very real. When you’re in a good partnership it really does feel like you can weather just about anything together. When that partnership is abruptly ended without warning and without your consent (or even after a long and terrible illness), it’s very, very difficult to figure out how to keep swimming, even if all the partner did was stand on the sidelines and cheer before. That cheering matters. My god, it matters so much.
After Eric died, I floundered for two full years because I didn’t know how to function without that cheering. I was not able to scrape the imploded bits of my life together and remake myself into a functional human being until I had a dream (which yes, I still intend to write about one of these days) where I felt like Eric was telling me his love and support still existed.
Anyway, back to the movie.
Since Hannah’s dead husband (Hunter Miles) obtained a bit of a cult following from his twelve songs, she has to share his gravesite with fans. I was horrified, watching her clean up his monument, throwing items away, reading notes, and saving anything that seemed sweet or of value. It was hard enough for me to make concessions for my husband’s interment due to his parent’s wishes, I had never thought about how difficult it would be to share his memory with a hoard of strangers connected by parasocial relationships.
Sudeikis’s character — checks Google — is named Andrew and he is harassing Hannah for an interview. At first she is very boundaried, deleting his calls and yelling at him when he turns up, invasively, in her home town. Her (shitty!) friend, an older man who runs a bookstore or cafe of some kind, reads her first draft (she’s trying to write her own story about her late husband) and tells her it’s terrible. He says she ought to listen to this Andrew guy, and even sabotages her boundaries by befriending him.
When Andrew and Hannah fight outside the bookstore, he yells, telling her she’s being selfish, that the public is entitled to Hunter’s story because his music resonated with them — and, though he doesn’t say it implicitly, he’s also implying that he deserves to tell Hunter’s story because… I don’t know, because he’s a man? Because he’s a reporter? Because he’s been researching his life for a few years? He reacts to Hannah’s grief by giving one of the worst, most tone-deaf apologies I’ve ever heard. He says something like, “Well, it’s been a couple of years, I thought you’d be ready to talk about it.” Again, the world assigning expiration dates to a widow’s grief as if they know best.
After stealing his notes on her husband and destroying some of them (yes, go girl!), Hannah screams something along the lines of, “He’s mine. His story belongs to me.” And Andrew finally realizes she’s working on a book of her own. And guys, she is a Ph.D.! A published writer! If anyone can tell his story, it’s her! She should get to share it (or not share it!) in her own time and however she wants. And sure, she has grief-induced writer’s block and maybe needs a helping hand, but from this guy? Oh hell no.
But alas. The movie says, hell yes.
The movie is so obviously shipping these two from the moment the opening credits roll, yet they do a great job of making Andrew a complete tool bag. He’s sarcastic, rude, and snobbish. He has a horrible red dye job that doesn’t blend well into his beard. His pompadour never moves. He insults everyone, including Hannah’s family. He rummages through Hannah’s private things when she’s not home, even though she is letting him into her most sacred memories.
When he discovers an unheard Hunter Miles song on a cassette tape, he acts affronted when Hannah wants to listen to it alone. Later, when she leaves the house, he lets himself into her husband’s studio and listens to it without permission.
I hate him so much, I cannot even.
I know I said there were some sweet moments, and here is one of them. This small town in Maine is somehow all cute and fun with maple syrup barn dances and not a single Trump flag anywhere. LOL, as if. When Andrew goes to the barn dance, he asks Hannah’s sister where she is. Hannah’s sister says that they don’t expect her because it’s (and she stumbles over the words here) their, I mean her, wedding anniversary.
We then see Hannah alone on a mountain pouring out a drink and cheers-ing no one.
So many aspects of spousal loss and grief are extraordinarily lonely, and my wedding anniversary is one of the worst. It’s a day no one else really remembers or cares about — why would they? It was mine and Eric’s to share and now that he’s gone, it’s just mine.
This seems to stop Andrew in his tracks. He finds Hannah later in her husband’s studio and puts a blanket over her. He seems really compassionate and more aware of her grief than he had been before. I felt like he was seeing her, really seeing her… and if this moment had instigated visible growth and change in his character, I think I would have been able to get on board with their budding connection.
But there is no growth. Only orange juice tantrums.
Later, when we’re supposed to buy that they’re falling in love, he throws an epic tantrum because she has a ‘shrine’ to her husband (his studio! which he, Andrew, invaded and creeped on, and stared at with awe and worshipful wonder!) and is so pissed off that she’s still in love with him, he hits the glass of orange juice on the breakfast he brought her on a tray, sending the sticky juice spraying all over her bedroom. Where is red flag guy when we need him?
This whole convo is insane. She breaks down crying after sex because it’s complicated and there are lots of feelings! When he hugs her and tells her it’s going to be okay, he says, “He doesn’t want you to be a puddle of tears the rest of your life.”
AND OMG, I threw the remote. You don’t get to say that! I shouted. You didn’t even know him. You can’t speak for him! It’s the worst most common kind of grief shaming and grief silencing there is.
Initially, Hannah nods and accepts a hug, and I scream some more. But then she says, “You don’t get to say that,” and I cheered. When he asks why, she says, “Because it’s a conflict of interest.”
I got up and danced, y’all.
YES! It IS a conflict of interest. Because he wants her to forget her husband, at least to some degree, he’s not allowed to tell her how her husband would have felt about the situation. Even if whatever is left of her husband’s soul or essence or whatever DOES want her to be happy. It’s not for Andrew to say.
So then Andrew gets frustrated. “I’m competing with a saint,” and says the bit about Miles’s studio being a shrine. Which is HELLA RICH given that this man wants to write a book about his musical hero and has been harassing his widow for MONTHS in order to do so. Andrew tells Hannah he’s rescuing her and then I’m shouting again. Then he smacks the orange juice(!!!) and if I wasn’t done being mad, I would have shut the movie off.
The ending is the hottest of hot messes. Andrew leaves the sticky orange juice mess (a fact I cannot get over), wraps his pretentious neck in his pretentious scarf and huffs off to his rental car to head back to New York. Hannah goes to a funeral where she tells the woman in a casket to tell her husband goodbye for her (WTAF?), makes a scene at said funeral, then races off on an ATV to stop Andrew from leaving.
They kiss and will live happily ever after even though literally nothing was resolved, and her bedroom is still covered in orange juice.
This relationship is doomed if it is built solely upon Hannah telling her husband goodbye through a dead woman. Sorry guys, but her love for Miles will not evaporate into thin air and Andrew will not automatically wake up an emotionally mature human being capable of allowing the woman he thinks he loves to hold space for her first husband in her heart forever.
When I told my daughter I watched it, she was incredulous. “Why?!” I said, “Because I wanted to be mad.” She said, “Oh, okay. Fair. Did it do the job?”
Yes. Unequivocally. It’s been five days and I’m still furious.
* Speaking of the DVD! This was the hideous, hideous cover for it.
Dianna Agron plays an easily replaceable and forgettable girlfriend of Andrew, and I think that is supposed to be her Sudeikis is hugging? But it definitely isn’t. She’s got bright blonde hair the entire movie and is not sporting a tattoo. We never meet or see Hannah’s dead husband, so putting him on the cover of the DVD alive and well while she looks cheekily at Sudeikis’s character? Ugh, gross. No.
Hannah’s mom, played by the normally lovely Blythe Danner, throws her own tantrums about Hannah needing to move on and give her some grandchildren. I am not kidding when I say that everyone is so stupid in this film.
Movies I didn’t hate!
The Way Way Back - Adorable. I mean, I wanted to strangle a few of the adults, but this was really good. Liam James does such a good job of nailing that painfully awkward 14-year-old era. I mean, his posture, his expressions, the way he interacts with tone-deaf adults… chef’s kiss. Steve Carell’s character is tangibly disgusting. I hate him! But we’re meant to, so mission accomplished.
The Sunlit Night - Jenny Slate does an amazing job in a serious, heartfelt role. I loved it. And how pretty is the land of my forebears? (Norway)
I have been on a bit of an non-fiction kick lately:
The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones - Okay, you hear so much about King Henry the VIII, I wanted to know more about what led up to that era, and this book scratched that itch. I absolutely had to stop several times and look people up along the way, but it was very thorough and interesting and as expected, extremely bloody.
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean. I thoroughly enjoyed this! I want to get a physical book copy immediately. I really love chemistry and have always been sad my dyscalculia greatly hindered my ability to pursue it academically.
Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings by Neil S. Price. I’m not finished with this yet, but so far it has been riveting. My father’s family is from Norway, so we’ve got some Viking blood banging around in our DNA. I love how Price is tackling some of the stereotypes that have arisen in books and films but also isn’t shying away from the icky parts of Viking history. He’s also doing a good job of honoring the Sámi people, as both are indigenous groups native to the Scandinavian areas.