Interview with Walter Goggins

With a great white shark of a grin and a maniacal laugh that's at once infectious and chilling, it's no wonder that Walton Goggins so often plays shady characters. As Justified's Boyd Crowder, the actor was first seen as a white supremacist bombing black churches in an episode that was meant to be the character's last gasp, but Goggins's performance was so mesmerizing that his death scene was reshot. Crowder made it to the last scene in the series as Deputy Raylan Givens's main antagonist and ally, a complex, charismatic and surprisingly sympathetic man who's at least as much victim as perpetrator.

Goggins is now co-starring in Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, an Agatha Christie-esque mystery in the guise of a western, in which a motley collection of shady individuals trapped inside an enclosed space spin stories, spar, and kill one another as the question of who's behind the murders and other mysteries are gradually revealed. Chris Mannix is another of Goggins's antiheroes turned unlikely hero, a vigilante who's just been appointed sheriff of Red Rock, Wyoming, and a proud but defeated Confederate who forms an initially reluctant alliance with a former Union officer—and a black one at that (Samuel L. Jackson's Major Marquis Warren).

When we spoke earlier this month, Goggins was analytical, witty, and sincere as he talked about having come to terms with playing “that guy,” being grateful for the opportunity to play smart, complicated characters for the past few years, and the Zen of discovering a new character.

Sisters

Sisters may be too formulaic to pose a challenge to the status quo and too silly to be mistaken for a manifesto, but it’s more than just another party-to-end-all-parties bromance with women in the starring roles. The plot (childishly furious that their parents have sold their childhood home, two 40-ish sisters throw one last wild party, hoping to scotch the deal, and spurring a series of epiphanies) may be as predictable as the sunset, but its strong girl-power vibe and steady thrum of rueful early-middle-aged self-awareness keep it from degenerating into the knee-jerk misogyny and mean-spirited outsider-shaming that often turn this kind of comedy into a cinematic bullying session.

Best Movies of 2015

Here is Slant's list of the top 25 films of the year, which I contributed to.

And here are my picks

Top 10
Mad Max: Fury Road
Timbuktu
Coming Home
Son of Saul
We Come as Friends (my interview with director Hubert Sauper)
Salt of the Earth (my interview with co-directors Wim Wenders and Julian Ribeiro Salgado)
Room
Diary of a Teenage Girl
45 Years (my interview with director Andrew Haigh on another of his movies)
It Follows

Honorable mentions:
The Look of Silence (my interview with director Joel Oppenheimer), Spotlight, Carol, Joy, Of Horses and Men, In Jackson Heights, Madame Phung’s Last Journey, Mustang, What We Do In the Shadows (my interview with Jemain Clement), The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution

Timbuktu

In Timbuktu’s opening sequence, a line of ancient African figurines and masks torn apart by jihadi bullets lie in the sand like so many mutilated bodies, a foreshadowing of killings to come. But writer-director Abderrahmane Sissako, who grew up in Mali and Mauritania, is less interested in the terrible violence jihadists have inflicted on his people than in the many smaller humiliations and restrictions the jihadists impose and the heroic acts of defiance that often greet them. 

As he did in Bamako, Sissako illustrates the damage done by a ruthless institution (in this case, fundamentalists bent on establishing a new caliphate) by focusing on its effect on one formerly happy family. Professional and non-professional actors alike—including singer Fatoumata Diawara, whose improvised song of mourning provides the film with one of its most terrible and beautiful scenes—contribute to the film’s realism by inhabiting their characters with unself-conscious ease. At the same time, Sissako ramps up the underlying sense of dread. Unfolding his story of occupation, resistance, and collateral damage at a stately yet relentless pace, and often either cutting just before a moment of high drama or filming it from a distance, he maintains a powerful thrum of tragic inevitability while avoiding any hint of propagandistic exploitation. Written for Slant Magazine

Best TV Shows of 2015

Here's Slant's list of the top 25 shows of the year, which I contributed to.

And here are my picks:

Top 10
Fargo
The Knick
The Americans
Jane the Virgin
Mad Men
Justified
Transparent
You’re the Worst
Louie
Master of None

honorable mentions (too much good stuff to stick to just 10):
The Leftovers, Jessica Jones, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Mindy Project, Episodes, Bojack Horseman, Black Jesus, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Silicon Valley, South Park, Veep, Homeland, The Middle, Playing House, Girls, Doll & Em

Mad Men

Cool tomcat and longtime shape-shifter Don Draper (Jon Hamm) may have found yet another way to adapt in the final scene of this elegant series, but he spent most of the last season sidelined as people he once eclipsed without even trying—like his long-suffering colleagues Peggy (Elizabeth Moss) and Joan (Christina Hendricks), and his freethinking wife, Megan (Jessica Paré)—began to come into their own. As the series completed the arc it had been slowly building for eight years, Mad Men left us with an indelible portrait of the root-deep changes that shook up American culture in the 1950s and ‘60s, both for better, as in the emergence of feminism and civil rights, and worse, as exemplified by the increasing cynicism and sophistication of the pitches the gang at Sterling Cooper developed to sell America to itself. Written for Slant Magazine 

Fargo

Even more than its excellent first season, the second season of Fargo channeled the absurdist humanism of the Coen brothers’ film. The series features a rogue’s gallery of characters, each motivated by an urgent mission and many at least “a little touched,” as someone says of Kirsten Dunst’s accidental gangster Peggy Blomquist. Jean Smart’s grimly effective gang matriarch and the matter-of-factly unhinged characters embodied by Dunst and Zahn McClarnon, not to mention Bokeeem Woodbine’s sardonic henchman, are as indelible as the ones Steve Buscemi and Frances McDormand played in the film. Although they appear to be on a collision course toward mutually assured destruction, watching these vivid oddballs crash into one another in a deadpan dance of life, death, and (at least for Peggy) self-actualization is an oddly joyful experience. Written for Slant Magazine 

Transparent

Jeffrey Tambor’s odd blend of clueless narcissism and warm sincerity fits Maura, the loving but sometimes damagingly oblivious patriarch turned matriarch of a close but dysfunctional clan, much better than the muu-muu-like garments she favors. The show’s first season focused primarily on Maura, as she came out to each member of her family and experienced life as a woman. This season, it spends more time with other members of the family as they explore their own sexuality—and their near-universal inability to form long-lasting intimate relationships. Daughter Ali (Gaby Hoffman) is trying to make sense of the family history of secrecy and sexual nonconformity. Her quest is a reminder, like the show’s bittersweet opening credit sequence, that LGBT people have always been part of society, even though society has so often tried to deny their existence. Written for Slant Magazine 

Jane the Virgin

The birth of the baby with whom she was accidentally impregnated by a careless gynecologist at the start of last season focused all of Jane’s (Gina Rodriguez) attention on motherhood. It had a similar effect on this light-footed dramedy/spoof telenovela, paring away a couple of subplots that had been getting a little too baroque (that Sin Rostro business, for one) to get back to basics. But there’s still plenty of melodrama to trip up kind, earnest Jane, and to keep our suave but chummy narrator alternately flummoxed and delighted, as Jane figures out—with the help of the mother and grandmother who raised her—how to be a mother while pursuing her dream of being a writer. Written for Slant Magazine 

South Park

South Park spent much of its latest season calling out social constructs that sneak inside our heads and control the way we think and act, from the seductive, fake online news stories that fool everyone but Jimmy in “Sponsored Content,” to the knee-jerk celebration of LGBT culture that makes even Tweek and Craig’s parents kvell over their ostensibly brave gay sons in the wake of false rumors that they’re lovers. The series is also still rudely honest enough to give us a Caitlyn Jenner whose post-surgery face looks like a cubist painting, and silly enough to have her plow into a pedestrian every time she goes for a drive. South Park may look as if it was drawn by a six-year-old, but it’s consistently turning out some of today’s funniest and most incisive satire. Written for Slant Magazine 

You're the Worst

This smart, slightly acidic rom-com was bracingly unsentimental during its first season, when Jimmy (Chris Geere) and Gretchen (Aya Cash) were a couple of millennials hardened by single life who hooked up because they were the two worst-behaved guests at a wedding, parted ways with no intention of getting together again, and were later somewhat mortified to find themselves falling in love. The series followed Gretchen and Jimmy to a deeper place this season as the two, now officially a couple and living together, gradually let down their guards and got to know things about one another—like Gretchen’s bouts of clinical depression—that add poignancy and emotional depth to their sparring exchanges.  Written for Slant Magazine