When Bojack Horseman issues a declaration, it can take the work of millions to undo it. Case in point:
“esteemed character actress” Margo Martindale, who was thus anointed by the cult show and now cannot escape its golden handcuffs.
And so you doubted her in The Americans, waited for her to erupt in Sneaky Pete, wanted to erupt at her in Million Dollar Baby, watched her scheme in Justified, rooted for her to avoid an ursine in Cocaine Bear and many other things you have done and will continue to do for an esteemed character actress.
But you’ve never seen Martindale in a lead film role, because she’s never had a lead film role. And now that she has, we may need to text Raphael Bob-Waksberg. Because the old moniker no longer applies. “Tour de force gut-punch lead actress” applies.
We’ll call it right here: Margo Martindale deserves an Oscar nomination this year. Yes, it’s only June, but it’s late enough. January would have been late enough. If there are five better performances than the one she gives in the new indie drama The Long Haul, let them announce themselves. Now someone just needs to buy the damn movie.
The role in question involves Martindale as a truck driver named Carol Jane, or CJ, as she tries to make a living in a world punitive of independent truckers. (You need to be part of a bigger conglomerate, tapped in online and even part of a trucker influencer world — really.) Haunted by the past but stubbornly unbroken by it, willing to take a certain amount of guff but watch out if you push her too far, CJ is one of the more indelible lead film characters you’ve seen in a long time, and in guises we rarely see even among the delible: a working-class, woman-over-70 character.
The movie itself might be described as “Narrative Nomadland,” the lead character struggling economically but really spiritually as she leads a life on the road suppressing long-ago traumas and encountering new adventures. Though here that life involves less community and more personal journey. Stephen Root as an old family friend, Yalitza Aparicio as an enigmatic prostitute and Cole Sprouse as a trucker-bro are also fantastic as the stops along the way. Perhaps they can play the role of esteemed character actors.
David Drake’s debut film premiered at Tribeca last week. It as yet has no buyer. It is tragically insane and surprising that it has no buyer, though when you think about the state of indie dramas, let alone indie dramas with septuagenarian lead actresses, it is just tragically insane. The world would be better if it had a damn buyer.
The movie may also be the anti-AI film we need this moment. Not because it is making a statement— because by simply existing as a beautifully handmade and exquisitely human piece, just hanging out and doing its thing, it refocuses our eyes to ask whether we should rush headlong into this machine-thinking future. CJ’s refusal to embrace any kind of technology — the CB radio is her Internet — partly explains why she’s so hard up for work. Yet that refusal also stands in as a symbol for the movie’s larger message. Life’s a little cleaner when we declutter the digital.
Watching this decluttering, you feel a thrill about the possibility of filmmaking — of human storytellers, of hand-crafted wardrobes, or people-chosen locations. This would, admittedly, be more thrilling if someone bought the damn movie.
Drake is a fascinating character in his own right. To meet with him is to be reminded of what filmmaking can be at — someone who knows how to tell a story and just happens to have picked up a camera, not someone who spent $100,000 on a fancy school hoping for an internship at CAA. Drake never went to college — his Jehovah’s Witness mother didn’t encourage it. He didn’t need to — his autodidact truck-driver father read him poetry from the cab. Raised in a rural blue-collar town 90 minutes north of New York City, Drake worked as a machinist after high school before moving to Northern England to work blue-collar jobs. There he met his wife, had a kid and now 20 years later still lives there. He says he could not afford to be a filmmaker if he lived in many other places.
In recent years he transitioned to photography and design work. That’s how he got the money to pursue indie filmmaking. That’s how he got the inspiration to make this movie, traveling around the world, especially the American west, shooting album covers for The 1975, particularly a shoot for songs from the 2016 record “I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It,” proving that all good art starts from out of nowhere, and with Matty Healy.
Everything you need to know about Drake’s worldview comes from this fact: When a popular AI model is mentioned, he doesn’t know what it is.
Anyway, that’s Drake. Back to Margo. A Manhattan resident, she is currently in a Los Angeles hotel room having shot productions up and down the West Coast, including the second season of Ryan Murphy’s All’s Fair, in which, she tells us, she will play “an Ina Garten sort of character.” (We are suddenly newly interested in the show.) She is about to start shooting the Prison Break reboot. She turns 75 next month, but she won’t stop working. She needs surgery for a burst eardrum but if she gets it then she won’t be able to fly for six weeks, and who wants to stop acting for six weeks? Her husband is not happy about this. Producers don’t mind.
Here’s what she has to say.
Have you ever driven a truck and if not, why not?
I did not drive this truck in the film — I had a woman named Dolores who raised her daughter in the truck doing that — but I learned how to drive a truck when I was growing up in Texas. I drove in general when I was very young. A Chevy Supersport Camaro. I was 12, driving people all around.
They let you do that in Texas?
It was a very small town.
Did the people in the car know that you were 12?
They were 12 too.
I was struck by just how quiet but powerful the movie is — it totally snuck up on me. You think you’re watching this poetic story of life on the road and then whoa, you start realizing all she lived through and saw, and you have to figure out what that is, like a character mystery.
I think it’s one of the most beautiful scripts I ever read.
And you’ve read 5,674 of them.
Maybe more. But it’s true, what David did here, it made me cry. It rang every bell that I loved, it had silence, it could just sit there. It never spelled anything out. You had to just wait and see and discover what’s going on. And the world too, just peeling away at it. I think this film is unique, a piece of art. It was magnificent.
Now you’re going to make me cry.
I don’t want to do that.
It’s the curse of the esteemed character actress. Or I guess now esteemed lead actress.
That sounds nice.
Obviously, you’ve done so many different things, but so many viewers in recent years know you from Justified and The Americans, and of course, Bojack. Long-running shows with many episodes and this is just 90 minutes and that’s it. How did it feel different to work on?
A series is happening. It’s alive. You can manipulate where the writers go a bit if you know what you’re doing.
Don’t give away all your secrets here.
I love television but it feels more immediate. This is reflective. And I’ve never been satisfied this way in a movie. But I’ve never been the center of a feature until now.
And then the movie you get to anchor feels like such a beautiful throwback.
It’s true, this kind of movie we don’t see much anymore. I did Nobody’s Fool many years ago, and that was a story like this, about a town, and a man, a quiet movie. This kind of thing satisfies me in a big way.
The lived-in quality is what’s so striking. Like this is a real person with a real history.
My imagination has been active since I was a little girl, you know, in the backyard making up all those stories, and acting kind of comes from that sort of place, pretending. And this didn’t feel like pretending. I really felt like I was her.
Does this feel overdue? I know you want to be grateful, but it’s not crazy to ask from the outside, like, why haven’t we seen Margo Martindale get this kind of role before? You’ve got amazing juicy roles, but not a lead part in a film where you’re in every frame.
I feel like I’ve had a really great career. I have nothing to complain about. Have I wanted a lead in the movie? Yeah, I have. Bu, you know, it wasn’t something I had to have.
Would you do the awards gantlet if someone said I’m going to buy this film and build a big Oscar campaign around Margo?
Big time.
With all you know about the grind even just from the Emmys circuit? You couldn’t act as much.
I’d still do it.
What do you make of the YouTuber phenomenon we’ve been seeing? Talk about people denied chances who went out and proved them wrong.
I think there’s a lot of ways — a lot of ways to become an artist. Some people can’t get in on the mainstream, or maybe the mainstream is too old-fashioned for them. Yeah, I welcome it. But I haven’t seen any of these movies. I have literally been working, and when I’m not working, I’m learning lines.
Oh, so you’ve been on the road for weeks now, or months even?
I started in Vancouver doing a Scott Cooper movie in March, a lovely, lovely small movie with Adam Driver. Actually I started in November in Prague doing Age of Innocence. I was back home for a little. And now I’m here and I’m just finishing All’s Fair, which is really fun.
Who do you play?
An Ina Garten sort of character.
Well that does sound fun.
It is fun. It’s ridiculous. Ridiculously fun. And then [this week] I go into the Prison Break reboot.
You’re not kidding with the busy-ness.
My husband did say to me, when are you going to slow down, I never see you. I need to have this eardrum replaced because it burst on an airplane. But I don’t want to take the six weeks off.
Well, we want you to be able to hear, and we don’t want any body parts exploding on planes, so hopefully you get to take care of that.
I will. At some point.
We’re in such a tough climate for any indie film, let alone a quiet drama. Yet that’s also why it’s needed. It’s such an antidote — to the CG stuff, the AI stuff, just technology in general, how it pervades our life. Your character is very much about resisting that. And your movie is just a real person dealing with real feelings.
We do need more human stories, we really, really do, or we’re going to see it all slip away. You know what I mean. So I just hope and pray that somebody says, “you know, I’ll buy it.”
Someone needs to buy this damn movie.
That’s for sure.