Netflix Picks: Miss Stevens
Why you should watch Miss Stevens: Because it's a sensitive story about people, because it has Betty from Riverdale and she's great, because you can be like I knew about Timothee Chalamet being talented and not just the "annoying kid from Homeland" before Call Me By Your Name wins all the Oscars ...
or at least has the most passionate online following during the next awards season.
What is Miss Stevens: The first movie by Julia Hart (who wrote The Keeping Room, and directed an upcoming movie with Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and, er, whose husband, the only adult on the stage, thanked her when he did not win the Oscar for La La Land), it's a small, quiet movie about a lonely teacher (Lily Rabe) who accompanies a rag-tag group of students (the straight-A perfect girl, the young gay kid, the edgy loner kid) to a drama competition. So far, so expected; but where it gets rare and touching is in the way that it approaches grief and loneliness. Miss Stevens is in a delicate position. Her mother passed away. These kids need a teacher to see them for a weekend, and they get her out of her fug, if ever-so-slightly. There's a quality to the storytelling here that feels like a short story - the emotions are roiling and strong underneath, even if the plotting is relatively expected - and in the edges, you see these characters change.
There's one scene with Chalamet's character that's pretty much amazing, and it will make you fall in love with him, just a little bit.
It's weird, right? Netflix is an amazing resource: streaming movies! Here in your home! And yet Netflix is a potentially powerful, amazing tool that's also remarkably disinterested in what it sets out to do, with a mediocre library that it is barely interested in telling you about. In short, Movies are to Netflix what Books are to Amazon. However! Sometimes there are gems and when I feel like it, I'll tell you about them.
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