Two movies about sad boys with an affinity for peaches who find self-acceptance through a dreamlike adventure — it's Call Me By Your Name vs James and the Giant Peach.
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Every episode of Tasteless, I take a critically acclaimed film and compare it to one that shares the same themes but didn't get the attention it deserves — and explain why that second movie is my pick. This week: two movies about sad boys with an affinity for peaches who find self-acceptance through a dreamlike adventure. It's Call Me By Your Name versus James and the Giant Peach. This is not just because of the peach, okay? I swear to God it's not. But I was watching James and the Giant Peach and had a real lightbulb moment. This episode makes sense. I swear to God. Just let's get into it.
Call Me By Your Name
In the summer of 1983, 17-year-old Elio is spending the days with his family at their villa in Lombardy, Italy. He soon meets 24-year-old Oliver, an intern working for Elio's father. They discover the heady beauty of awakening desire.
Came out in 2017, has a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. It won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for James Ivory. It was nominated for Best Lead Actor for Timothée Chalamet, Best Motion Picture, and Best Original Song for Sufjan Stevens.
I am coming at this movie in the year 2021 as not a gay man, not a man, and it is a post-Armie-Hammer-is-a-cannibal world. So you can take this review with a grain of salt. I watched it for the first time and I think it really suffered from the non-movie-theater experience. If I had watched this in a theater in the dark with a big Coke and some buttered popcorn, I would have been more easily sucked into the fantasy than watching it at home at 8 a.m. with my neighbors making as much noise as possible.
I understand completely how this movie could mean something to someone, how you could see yourself in it. But I'm going to approach it from my angle of not liking a single person in this movie.
Timothée — actually, Timotay is how you're supposed to say it — is a teen who is with his parents at their really gorgeous house for the summer. Because this is set in the 80s, it seems totally normal to everyone that they just give Timothée's room to Armie. So Elio — let's call him Elio — gets shuffled off into this weird side room through the bathroom. He has to come out of the bathroom to leave the room. That sucks. Imagine if every single summer your parents were like, go sleep in the closet, I'm giving some other dude your room. Why don't they put him in the closet room? I mean, he is ten times the size of Elio, so maybe that's why he couldn't fit. But I would be so mad.
Immediately Elio is rubbed the wrong way by this hunky American. Every time Oliver is leaving, he's like, later. Elio is like, don't you think he's impolite when he says later? Don't you think he's arrogant? And everyone's like, Elio, who cares? He's not trying to be rude. That's just how he says goodbye. It's fine. Why are you so mad about it? You should be much more mad that your weird dad invites someone to sleep in your room every single year.
There are so many bugs in this movie. Mostly all over him. There's a scene where he's about to start touching himself and there's this fly on his crotch. When they're outside at one point, Oliver is laying in the grass and Elio is playing guitar and bugs are everywhere.
When Oliver first gets there, he's tired, he's traveled from America to Italy, he conks out. Some bell rings and Elio is like, that's the bell. The bell means it's time for dinner. Oliver doesn't wake up. So he goes in and takes a book and slams it onto the ground. The bell! It's time for dinner! Oliver's like, hey, I'm going to keep sleeping. Could you make an excuse for me, buddy? Thanks. I'm a grown man. I'll eat dinner. Leave me alone.
I was really disgusted by Elio telling his dad he almost had sex with a girl. He's like, yeah, I almost had sex with this girl the other night, Dad. All I had to do was find the courage to reach out and touch and she would have said yes. And his dad's like, ooh. And Oliver's like, then why didn't you? Why are you telling this story? I hate him. I hate Elio. I get he's a kid. I get it. Teen boys have a lot of things to deal with. I did not like him. Timothée Chalamet, perfectly talented. This is not his fault. I wanted to punch Elio in the face.
Armie Hammer as Oliver — he talks like an alien trying to be a human. All his words are very purposeful. I think that's why he was so great in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., because he was playing a Russian agent so he had to be very specific with his words. He gets to this town and he's like, hey guys, I'm here. Is there a bank in town? I'd love to start an account while I'm here. The professor's like, ooh, none of my students have ever wanted to start a bank account while here. Why would you start a new bank account in this town?
Armie straight up eats a raw egg. He keeps eating eggs that I guess are supposed to be poached or cooked or something. They just look raw. He's shoveling down raw eggs. And he drinks his juice so fast. I don't know if it's supposed to be attractive. And then they talk about apricot juice for a really long time and the professor is giving the most boring lecture and Armie goes, actually, I'm sorry, but I need to talk about the etymology of apricots because actually it's from this and not what you're saying. And then the whole family is like, ha ha, you passed the apricot test. I was like, God, I hate these people so much. This is the worst family I've ever seen.
Armie, in real life, has been accused by multiple women of lewd messages and inappropriate acts. He's been taken off every project he was involved in. And it's unfortunate because this was a mainstream movie about two men in love — and how often do we get that? Very rarely, especially to have it win the awards it did, get the consideration it did. So it sucks. It sucks that Armie Hammer was creeping around.
I was not not into it when he was doing his dance in shorts and sneakers and very long socks. He's said in interviews the most uncomfortable he felt during filming wasn't the sex scenes but the dance scenes. That's because only someone with a chiseled face like that and a head of hair like that can dance so goofy.
A trivia fact that really delighted me: during the party scene where the Psychedelic Furs' "Love My Way" begins, the opening lyrics are there's an army on the dance floor — and there is literally an Armie on the dance floor. I will never get over someone naming their kid Armie Hammer, who's an heir to the Arm & Hammer fortune. It's sick. It's like if my name was In-N-Out and my parents created In-N-Out. That's not right.
Regarding the peach scene — obviously we have to talk about the peach because it is technically what made me think about this film. Director Luca Guadagnino went to Timothée Chalamet and told him that he had tried masturbating with a peach himself and found it was indeed possible. Therefore he thought they should do the scene. Chalamet responded that he had also tried it and agreed. Very American Pie vibes.
Also, whenever he's eating a peach shirtless in his bed, he throws his peach pits just onto the ground in the corner of this room. The same gross dusty room where he brought that girl to have sex with her on the dirtiest mattress of all time, this poor girl. And then later he's in that room just flinging peach pits into the corner. This kid's an animal.
Elio's final conversation with his father shows how things have changed. His father for the first time connects with Elio as a fellow human instead of his child. He talks to him about love, about how he had something special with Oliver and how Elio must realize how rare that is. And then weirdly is like, I almost had that, but I didn't. Do you not like Mom? Apparently in the next book they get divorced. So I guess he doesn't like Mom. But maybe don't tell your kid you have never felt love before.
James And The Giant Peach
An orphan who lives with his two cruel aunts befriends anthropomorphic bugs who live inside a giant peach, and they embark on a journey to New York City.
This movie came out in 1996, has a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Music, Original Musical or Comedy Score for Randy Newman — lost to Emma by Rachel Portman. I don't remember Emma having a song that explains its plot, so I'm not sure how that happened.
This will be my third Roald Dahl book-to-movie adaptation that I'm vouching for on this podcast. I hadn't actually realized how much I loved his body of work until this. Combine it with producer Tim Burton, the darker side of Disney — the director Henry Selick also directed The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline. I found this movie most similar to Coraline in terms of its darkness and unique visuals. It's a really creative movie. It's a PG movie that is frightening, that has intense scenes, that has a moral. It is just stellar.
Paul Terry plays James and this is the only film he ever acted in. We first meet James with his parents — he's a little kid, they're hanging out on the beach, looking at clouds, talking about this trip they're going to take to the Empire State Building. They're in England but they're going to go to New York. Then tragedy strikes: his parents are eaten by an escaped rhinoceros from the zoo. You know how that can happen.
He is sent to live with his two aunts, Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge, who are super mean, basically have him working all the time, wake him up early to do chores. They are played by Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margolyes. Joanna Lumley as Aunt Spiker is an all-time scary villain. There is a scene where she has this wet mascara running that haunts me. Rewatching it brought back such strong scared emotions from childhood. This further confirms my thesis that funny people can be the absolute scariest, because this character is miles away from Ab Fab and yet has a similar edge to it.
Aunt Sponge is played by Miriam Margolyes. She also voices the Glowworm. She has been in every British thing ever.
These two aunts have him working all the time. Then a strange man, played by Pete Postlethwaite — who you know from being tall and in everything — is like, hey buddy, I got these magical crocodile tongues, here you go. James takes them and drops them all over the ground next to his aunts' old peach tree that hasn't grown anything in years. And of course a magical gigantic peach grows. His mean aunts use it to make money — as you would, you charge people to see the giant peach. If I found a real big fruit, I would get out my calculator and a little lockbox for the change.
James winds up going inside the giant peach in secret, transforms into a stop-motion boy, meets some magical human-sized bugs, and they go on an adventure. Very normal stuff.
But here is the thing. In this film, a little boy sings a song and yet I still love it. A little boy messily eats a peach, chomping away, and yet I still love it. He says "whino" instead of "rhino." The scary whino ate my parents. Yet I still love this movie. It overcomes these things. There is something so eye-catching, something so memorable — such beautiful moments, stunning visuals, haunting villains.
Rewatching it brought back so many memories. As things were happening, I had such strong déjà vu of — oh my God, I watched this a million times. I knew what was going to happen despite not seeing it for decades.
I'm pretty sure the spider in this movie is why I like spiders. There's this big bulbous black spider that James sees when he's still a flesh-and-blood person. When he goes inside the peach, he meets her and her name is Miss Spider and she is French and she is played by Susan Sarandon. Of course she's French, why not? The Times of London reported that James and the Giant Peach was once banned in a Wisconsin town because a reference to Spider licking her lips could potentially be taken in two ways, including sexual. They were like, this spider is too sexy. Which is what you get when you get a French Susan Sarandon spider. Sorry, you knew what you were doing.
Richard Dreyfuss is Mr. Centipede. He has a newsboy hat. He is the worst of the bugs. He's like, I can navigate this peach — because guess what? The peach is flying. It's flying across the world. He's like, I got this, I'll point the peach in the right direction. Then he falls asleep and they get lost in some scary ice world and have to go underwater to get a compass and rescue the centipede. Do your job, Mr. Centipede. You had enough time to put on that hat. Get it together.
Jane Leeves is the Ladybug and I love her. She of course, Daphne from Frasier, star of Hot in Cleveland. I want this ladybug to adopt me so bad. She's the nice one, the little old ladybug that's just like, let me just hold on, I'm coming along with you guys.
David Thewlis is the Earthworm — he has little sunglasses on his little face and they move because it's this incredible stop motion. You see him make little facial expressions and his little sunglasses make faces. You know, he's Remus Lupin in Harry Potter. I know him from Basic Instinct 2. Simon Callow is Mr. Grasshopper. He plays grasshopper songs.
Sometimes I can break down the plot, but sometimes you just have to see it because it's all a feeling. You have to watch it. I love the stop motion — it's something that is never not impressive. And then there's this scene with a sort of 2D paper effect that's really cool.
I'm sure it's on Disney+. It is. None of you have any excuses. All of you have access to someone's Disney Plus account. If you haven't seen it or if you haven't seen it in a while, watch James and the Giant Peach. I think you're going to be surprised by how many little elements have stuck with you.
Shared Themes
Elio and James are young. They're treated as children, treated as disposable — or if not disposable, at least pliable. Like their thoughts don't matter. Like what they want doesn't matter. Elio's room is taken from him each year for the visiting grad student. He's shuffled off into that weird side room. James is ignored by his aunts, other than getting labor out of him. But in these films, their lives are changed because each boy is treated like he matters, like what he wants has consequence.
Each year, as a new student comes and hangs out with his dad, Elio wanders his family's gorgeous compound, making eyes at one girl while another makes eyes at him. His parents force him to wear a shirt he doesn't want to, ask him to play piano for their guests like a trained monkey. Normal things, but when you're a kid, it feels so much bigger — like they're exerting control just because they can. He doesn't feel like he's in charge of his space or himself.
When he meets Oliver, he's immediately struck by him. Oliver is so self-possessed. He's not worried about what people think when he says "later" instead of goodbye. No one's going to chide him. He is a grown man. Elio is jealous of this, calling out the behavior, trying to turn his family against a person he believes to be arrogant. But his tune changes when Oliver starts to pay attention to him. He writes in his diary that he hadn't liked Oliver because he thought Oliver didn't like him, that he had the wrong impression. Oliver sees him, talks to him, asks his opinion, tells him about his paper, massages his tight shoulders. Okay, that last one is where things change a little bit.
Elio is trusted with his own choices with Oliver. Oliver basically says, hey, if this is what you want, meet me at midnight. If not, no hard feelings. And when Elio says, this is what I want, I'm an adult, I can handle this, Oliver takes him at his word. That takes away a little bit of the tragedy for me. It's of course sad at the end when he's crying over his first big love. But he was given this gift in having someone who truly saw him, and it ended on good terms.
Elio's final conversation with his father shows how things have changed. His father for the first time connects with Elio as a fellow human instead of his child. He gives weight to what Elio felt. He's not like, it was a fling, whatever. He really does treat it as serious. He validates it. We see the parents decide to let Elio have alone time on the phone with Oliver, getting off their receiver and giving each other knowing looks after Oliver shares the news he is engaged. They let Elio make his own mistakes and give him time to grieve. There's a respect there. A shift into Elio feeling like an adult.
In James and the Giant Peach, after James' parents die, he is sent to live with his hateful aunts. They see him as a nuisance. A stupid child not worthy of their time or energy. He's never spoken to about his feelings, simply told to shut up, put to work. His opinion isn't wanted, his feelings don't matter. Then he journeys away with the bugs that reside in the peach, and they treat him as a full-fledged person. They look to him for answers. He helps decide the course of their travel and solves problems like when the scary metal shark is coming after them.
He's always been shoved aside by his evil caretakers, but with the support of his new friends, he overcomes that. At the end of the film, when the aunts come to take him away, he confronts them. He stands up for himself. He says, I matter. This dream he has of going to the Empire State Building — this fantasy, this one thing he's holding onto — it happens. He gets there. He tells the aunts, I made it. I'm not nothing. You are.
The bugs told him he mattered. They asked his opinion. They trusted his judgment. When he decided to go with the spider into the icy ocean to save Mr. Centipede, they're like, do you really want to do that? It's super dangerous. But when he says, yeah, I'm not leaving anyone behind, they respect that. They want to hear from him in a way he hasn't experienced since his parents died.
Call Me By Your Name and James and the Giant Peach are both fantasies. They have a dreamy quality, and much like dreams, the events of the films allow our main characters to work through how they feel. What you believe is as important as what is real.
Call Me By Your Name has such an ambiance — a feeling of summer, of longing, a reverie of eating directly from a tree, paddling around in a river, having no obligations, and the sole attention of a hunky dude. It's in this space that Elio gets to explore himself. He doesn't have school, he just whiles away the days figuring out what he likes, who he likes, who he is. He's in this isolated capsule away from the real world so he can express things more freely and see where his complicated emotions surrounding Oliver lead.
Oliver is charming with everyone, has an easy way about himself. At first Elio isn't sure if he wants to be Oliver or be with him. Although Oliver claims he made his intentions clear with the shoulder massage, it is Elio who first admits his feelings — super vaguely, but he tells him something's going on. The whole "call me by your name" aspect — to call each other by their own names, to say their own names reverently with love and experience life as the other even for a moment — shows Elio a different side of himself, a side he loves. It shows him he matters.
Oliver leaving is heartbreaking but doesn't take away from how important this time was. Elio never really wanted to be with that girl he was sleeping with — he kept blowing her off and neither was quite sure why. When he falls into this affair with Oliver, he has sex with her to gain some sort of control. And when things end with Oliver, she's understanding because she realizes he didn't know himself well enough to know he would hurt her. This was something brewing for a long time. His inability to get close to these women — to finally have an answer to why that might be is a relief for him as much as it is for her. He had to be isolated to this special, strange space where anything could happen for him to work through how he actually feels.
James and the Giant Peach presents fantasy as reality, showing a giant peach and floating bugs in New York City surrounded by human children at the end. But whether it happened isn't what's important. James, when no one believes him, says to everyone for the world to hear: I flew the giant peach across the ocean. He believes in the adventure he has had and it empowers him. He no longer cowers at the sight of his aunts, though they have never looked scarier. He speaks up to them.
There's really such a feeling to this movie. The crackling of the paper when James lights his paper lantern. The texture of the peach chunks when they're singing their Eat the Peach song. It puts you into the mindset of anything being possible and allows you to be taken away by the magic of it all.
Whether it happened or not, not important. It only matters that James has had this meaningful, life-changing experience. He speaks his mind, he stands up for his friends, he immediately is letting all the little street kids eat off his dirty peach. I mean, maybe these kids have homes. I would not bite into that peach that has just rolled its way down a building onto the concrete. To each their own. He has lived this fantastical life and it shows him what's important — sharing, kindness.
There's also an undercurrent of darkness to both films. Something just out of reach because you know things will go wrong. Elio and Oliver can't be together forever. You worry about someone finding out. They're in a little bubble. Same for James — he's floating around up there, it's fun and there's dancing and peach eating, but he's going to have to come back to earth at some point. And that eventuality looms. But by the end, our characters realize real life isn't so bad.
What James And The Giant Peach Does Better
Both films take place in dreamlike locales where the unexpected can happen. But there is a hollowness that Call Me By Your Name possesses, while James and the Giant Peach is much more fantastical but has an emotional core that has kept me thinking about it for decades.
There's a crackle of something — of perhaps longing, if not quite chemistry — in Call Me By Your Name. Whenever Elio and Armie aren't talking but simply sharing knowing glances, you feel it. But then they talk and it's like, is this what we were waiting for? The way they talk to each other is so stilted and weird. There's this whole exchange when Elio is playing something on the guitar — I'll show it to you on the piano. Did you change it? I changed it a little bit. Why? I just played it the way Liszt would have played it if he'd altered Bach's version. Play that again. Play what again? The thing you played outside. Oh, you want me to play the thing I played outside? Please.
It's all so weird and aggressive. Just play the song, man. Why you gotta be so difficult? This Who's on First forced teasing — it's like false intimacy. They're trying to make us think there's a connection when there really isn't one. What on earth does Oliver see in Elio? I don't buy it. The parents are too chill with it. The girlfriend too calm. It all feels like things fall into place in a way that — I don't need realism, but something about this rings false.
I love the longing Elio has for their relationship, but the moments when they are actually together, there's a lack of emotion. I think Elio really could have gained many of the same lessons from experiencing that longing and intrigue without ever becoming physical with Oliver, because it's really Oliver's approval that makes such a big difference. Oliver admitting he likes to spend time with Elio, that he was looking at him when they were playing volleyball — that's what is important.
But the casualness with which Oliver has sex with his professor's underage kid and then is like, okay, well, this was fun, gonna go get married — there just isn't a real connection. I don't feel the humanity. It's very manic pixie dream girl — he flits in, is like, I like you too, bye bye.
In James and the Giant Peach, James is hanging out with talking bugs — obviously insane — but Spider, whom he saved before he knew she could talk, looks out for him in such a kind way despite her slightly hardened edges. The bugs coddle him just as much as they turn to him for his thoughts. There's a give and take, a push and pull. We see who James truly is — going out of his way to save the centipede even though the centipede screwed them all over. He's a good kid and he wants to help people, and the bugs sense that about him.
When they first meet, Spider vouches for him — look, he put his neck out there with Aunt Spiker in coming to my aid. There's a connection here that is real, that is true. They all eat their little peach lumps together, they sing a song, and I feel like I'm at home. I feel part of things as the viewer. I feel the memories James has of his parents and how the new ones he's making with these bugs help alleviate some of his sadness.
Something about this fantasy allows the viewer to fully connect, to really get into the mindset and feel what James is experiencing — having people who love him again, how important that is. Mr. Centipede is probably the closest to Oliver in this film — he's just like, whatever, I'll navigate, I got a cool little hat and 40 hands, what's up? He's a jerk, he messes up, but he has remorse. He tries to fix it. There's never that moment with Oliver. Oliver is such a hollow, false, Greek-god-of-a-man with no actual substance. There's no vulnerability.
There's a very sweet scene where the Earthworm is stressed about what just happened when they were trying to escape the metal shark. James says, when I had a problem, my mom and dad would tell me to look at it another way. Earthworm says, how? First I was bird bait, then I was shark bait. James says, I suppose. But you could say you gave us wings to fly and defeated a giant shark single-handedly. Earthworm says, no-handedly. James says, you're a hero. Earthworm says, I am? I'm a wonder worm. James replies, you are.
I get more humanity out of a centipede than I do out of Oliver. And that's too bad. Although I still would be so attracted to Oliver in real life.
Being older doesn't mean you know more. Doesn't mean you know better. Growth is possible for people at any age. And yet Oliver seems unchanged by his relationship with Elio, whereas James and his anthropomorphic bug friends learn from one another. Equally.
In Call Me By Your Name, one of the most interesting elements was Elio's father coming to him as a man. When he talks to Elio about how rare that kind of love is, there's real emotion there. But I hated that Oliver truly seems unaffected. There's just no conflict for him. He had a fling with Elio and moves on completely, still the exact same guy. That's what makes the relationship strangest and brings me back to — why? What are you getting out of this?
Elio really lets himself be free. He's totally honest with Oliver in a way he isn't with other people. He's goofy instead of trying too hard to look cool. He realizes it's okay to open yourself up, even if it doesn't end how you hope. He grows.
In James and the Giant Peach, these bugs have been living their weird bug lives for ages. They've been in a rut. Then James plops into their home and suddenly they're on an adventure. Suddenly they're honest with each other. Centipede admits fault. They share about their pasts, their goals for the future. There's learning and growing. All of them gain new knowledge from their time together, new appreciation for the ways of the world.
Every relationship doesn't have to teach you something. But it certainly feels more equitable, more meaningful, to have our hero influencing the life of someone else the way James influences these bugs. These bugs that have been hiding, have been almost stepped on — they're now front and center and proud, ready to web up the mean aunts that people have been terrorizing when they were too small to fight back.
Give James and the Giant Peach a shot. It's very fun. It's like 80 minutes. It's short, it's cool, it's beautifully done. It's on Disney+.
And if I'm missing something in Call Me By Your Name, feel free to tell me. Hit me up at @tastelesspod on social media where we can talk about which bug was your favorite, or about Joanna Lumley as Aunt Spiker being one of the scariest villains of all time.