Jim Cummings is some kind of genius

A few years back, when I was always searching for short films to share with my students, I found Thunder Road, Jim Cummings’ Sundance-winning short film. He later turned it into a Sundance-winning feature film, which I will watch soon—I can’t believe I haven’t already, but I guess I was scared it wouldn’t come close to the brilliance of the short.

This week I remembered about him and decided to watch his other films. I watched The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020) and The Beta Test (2021) and I feel like I just discovered my new favorite band. These movies are not perfect and they will not please everyone, but his sensibility is one of the closest I’ve ever found to my own—to the way of telling stories I want to do, or the films I would want to make. His movies are comedies—because they’re very funny—but they are also dramas and satires and genre films. The line he walks so sublimely in Thunder Road as an actor/writer/director is a great distillation of his sensibility and style. (Although the one-take aspect is not something he overuses elsewhere—in fact, he tends to use Edgar-Wright-style fast editing more often.)

Few artists can balance the kinds of tonal changes and wild swings Cummings goes for, and this is part of what makes him a tough watch for some viewers; it’s what for me makes him such an exhilarating watch. Is he really going to almost make me cry at the hilariously cringey stress breakdown of the local sheriff in a werewolf movie? Apparently, yes.

I was trying to think yesterday of the triple-threats in film history—people like Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Woody Allen and others—who have written, directed and starred in their own films. It’s rare; it doesn’t always go well for everyone who tries it.