Movies show glimpses of life before cellphones

"Remember," a father says to a son. "Our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. … And before you know it, your heart is worn out. And as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now, there's sorrow. Pain. Don't kill it, and with it the joy you've felt."

If the Luca Guadagnino movie "Call Me by Your Name" wins an Academy Award, it will be in part because of that unspeakably tender scene wherein a father, a father with his own struggles and regrets, tries to tell his gay, 17-year-old son that he is not alone.

Although the screenplay to the movie is by James Ivory, this piece of dialogue comes pretty directly from the 2007 Andre Aciman novel upon which the film is based. It's pretty much a restatement of a philosophy often associated with the English romantic poet John Keats, who wrote in the poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn":

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Of course, they would have to switch off their phones first.

Watch "Call Me by Your Name," a film set in the early 1980s and centered on an academic family, and you'll surely be struck by the amount of family conversation going on. Meals are long, slow affairs, peppered with intergenerational chatter. When the 17-year-old protagonist (played by Timothee Chalamet) wants to use a phone, he has to sit in the hallway on a long, corded affair, so public that his parents can at least half-hear his conversations.

Actually, they already have a sense of what is going on with him: He spends a lot time just sitting with his parents, talking. It's not that the family conversations are easy, but the film makes clear they are happening and maybe saving this kid's life or, at least, significantly improving the odds of his future happiness.

They're happening in "Lady Bird," too. That film — a likely rival at Oscar time — is set in a very different time and place: Sacramento, Calif., in 2002.

But there were no iPhones around then, either, and few invasive screens to close people off from those they love. Intentionally or not, both of these films reveal something about the price we pay for our attention to our feeds.

Indeed, it's the rhythms of the mother-daughter conversations that dominate the film and the characters' consciousness. Even when they're arguing, they're unmistakably alive.

Greta Gerwig, who wrote and directed the film, clearly understands how many family fights are repetitions of battles previously fought, but she also argues in this movie that even antagonistic chatter between an adolescent and a parent is far better than no talk at all.