'Call Me By Your Name' Review

Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Actor; Timothée Chalamet, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Song "Mystery of Love" (written by Sufjan Stevens).

Won: Best Adapted Screenplay.

Call Me By Your Name takes place in Northern Italy during the summer of 1983, and follows seventeen year old boy Elio as he reads books, transcribes classical music, and flirts with his friend Marzia. When American student, Oliver, arrives to help Elio's father as a research assistant, Elio and Oliver begin to discover things about themselves they could have never imagined and a romance blossoms between the two.

Call Me By Your Name is helmed by Italian director, Luca Guadagnino, and is an adaptation of André Aciman's novel from screenwriter James Ivory. The film has received heaps of Oscar buzz and critical acclaim, with some going as far to declaring it to be the best film of the year, so naturally my interest was peaked and I decided to check it out. I'm going to come straight out of the gate though and let you know that this film just wasn't for me. 

Art is subjective, so it can mean more to one person and less to another. In this case, Call Me By Your Name simply didn't speak to me. I'm not trying to be edgy and cool by speaking out against this movie or anything like that... I had similar feelings about Moonlight last year as well, which I respected for being a well-made film, but was otherwise apathetic towards. I was fully aware of the general plot and central gay romance so that wasn't really a deciding factor in my disinterest, but I'll touch more on that in a moment. In general, Call Me By Your Name just bored me. 

I understand Guadagnino meant for the film to be a slow burn, but slow burns always have a spark at some point, and Call Me By Your Name had none. The relationship between Elio and Oliver is clearly meant to be said spark, but I was personally perturbed by the relationship... First, the age-gap is quite alarming. Oliver is twenty four and Elio is seventeen. While a seven year age gap doesn't really matter in the older stages of life, you've gotta admit that it's at least a LITTLE unsettling, regardless of whether those involved are gay or not. An age-gap like that legitimately qualifies as pedophilia in my book... I understand the age of consent is different in Italy, and this sort of thing is more readily accepted... but that's not what I picked up from the film because it seems to have been frowned upon in 1983.

So, let's say the relationship was hypothetically more age appropriate... Even then, the leads didn't have particularly great chemistry with one another in my opinion. The characters feel emotionally distant and are rarely developed, so I had an extraordinarily difficult time investing interest in anyone onscreen. I'm sure anyone reading my review that thinks otherwise will say it's because I'm a straight white male, but I promise that has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Timothée Chalamet has already been making the rounds in the early awards circuit for Best Actor, and I couldn't disagree with the sentiment that his performance is one of the year's best any more if I tried. Chalamet has MOMENTS of greatness here, and I thought he was quite good as the shunned son in Interstellar and the cool kid in Lady Bird so my comments aren't in any way insulting his acting ability. However, Elio mostly casts a vacant, expressionless stare... 

I'm sure Chalamet was asked to do so by the director for the purposes of communicating Elio's insecurity, but it's just so wooden that I couldn't help but lose interest. There are a few emotional outbursts that I'm sure sparked the Best Actor conversation, but it's nowhere near as powerful as the other exceptional acting I've seen from lead male performers this year. Just look to Get Out, Logan, Baby Driver, War for the Planet of the Apes, The Big Sick, Detroit, Wind River, The Disaster Artist, Darkest Hour, and even Star Wars: The Last Jedi for goodness sake!

As for Armie Hammer, I've liked him in both The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and The Lone Ranger, and feel he's just as charismatic here. However, I couldn't get past the aforementioned "creep factor" of their relationship, and one unique use of a peach certainly didn't help matters... Other members of the ensemble who I feel are far more deserving of a mention would have to be Michael Stuhlbarg, who's simply killing it this year with his choice of projects (mainly The Shape of Water and The Post), and Esther Garrel. Stuhlbarg has one very subdued quiet conversation with Elio that was absolutely extraordinary, and Garrel had a captivating screen presence throughout despite her limited role.

None of this is to say the film isn't good though... I actually think the sun-soaked cinematography offered plenty of picturesque moments, Sufjan Stevens' songs are sensational ("Mystery of Love" in particular), and the arrangements assembled for the soundtrack are pleasant to the ear. It's just that I struggled maintaining interest in the characters and events unfolding onscreen, and that's something that's important to me as a viewer.

I'll call Call Me By Your Name for what I really think of it as, an overly long, uninteresting film. Hard to believe it's actually getting a sequel...

Film Assessment: C