Locke (2014) A Film by Steven Knight

Locke’s secret ingredient is its modesty, a quality that, in this case, is both a virtue and an achilles’ heel. The film is, at its core, a pressurized look at problem solving—not problems with Earth-shaking stakes, but with immediate, definable ones. After 85 minutes of smooth, continuous freeway driving and incessant speakerphone Bluetooth calls, Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) reaches a point where his predicament is, if not fully solved, at least temporarily mitigated. Damage has been done, but Locke has tried his best to minimize it. Then the movie ends, with no emotional fireworks display necessary. Its matter-of-fact conclusion may leave viewers in a sort of blue-balls state, surprised or even baffled by the film’s final refusal to provide any twist on such a grounded scenario, but it’s fairly clear that, on a narrative level, Locke doesn’t overstep its boundaries. With so many spring releases at the multiplexes trying to ingratiate their audiences with razzle-dazzle (convoluted plot mechanics, robust special effects or state-of-the-art technology), this unexpected storytelling economy is worth recognizing and applauding.

Laid out by screenwriter/director Steven Knight, the parameters of Locke’s modest setup are not (nor do they need to be) terribly intriguing on paper: a Welsh construction worker skips town one night without warning, ditching a crucial concrete pour to be in London for the birth of a baby he seeded during an extramarital affair, all while he struggles to assuage the explosive frustrations and uncertainties of his newly informed wife back home. It’s an Everyman crisis, the sort of accumulation of mistakes and sacrifices that every once in a while clogs the complacent flow of daily life. Knight’s borderline-paranoid-thriller visual vocabulary – a plethora of close-ups of a man in a constricted space, often offset in the frame as if implying unseen onlookers and surrounded by the dancing lights of an anonymous outside world – is prone to giving the impression (problematically, I think) of a conspiratorial subplot just waiting to break through the small-scale edges of the central storyline, but none ever comes. For better or worse, every detail of Locke’s dilemma is made clear. It’s also clear that that any resolution (or lack thereof) to this dilemma will be due to his actions alone. There are no impediments. There’s not even any traffic.

Issues start to arise when Knight’s direction shows traces of wavering commitment to the cinematic potential of the chosen material. Repeated glances at flashing police cars raise suspicion about a potential criminal edge to Locke’s backstory, and intimations of a rapidly worsening sickness (complete with ominous swigs of Nyquil) become irrelevant once Locke’s symptoms suddenly and miraculously vanish—both are temporarily labored-over, tension-heightening non-sequiturs for which productive use is never found and which are therefore dispensed with on the fly. The most misguided peripheral bit is Locke’s embittered running commentary to his empty backseat, where he imagines his deceased failure of a father to be smugly looking on. Break up the monotony of the film’s otherwise entirely phone-based dialogue though these scenes may, they nonetheless offer up an authorial point-of-view on Locke’s steadfast dedication to staying calm where the rest of the film smartly withholds one. Knight’s incorporation of this dime store psychoanalytic self-therapy actually trivializes the gravity of the situation rather than deepening it.



This is, after all, a film whose greatest source of success lies in its attempt to distill human experience down to actions and reactions. Save for some corny montages set to Dickon Hinchliffe’s uninspired score (Explosions in the Sky-like jams that could have been excavated with a “melancholy” search on Audio Jungle), Locke is basically an end-to-end succession of phone calls, a blunt approach that allows Ivan (and, by extension, Hardy; the film was allegedly shot in one go) little time for reflection. Hardy, for his part, injects plausible human rhythms into Knight’s fairly graceless dramatic formula, only rarely resorting to actorly shorthand (slamming or leaning onto the wheel to signal Frustration, ruffling his beard to telegraph Uncertainty). What results is an unrelenting study of poise under pressure that is itself quite poised, as well as a dissection of uniquely masculine psychological habits and codes of behavior: selective avoidance of truth-telling in instances when spilling the beans would have predictable negative effects; a certain bluntness (Locke may avoid confronting his marital mistake verbally for a while, but when he does his confession comes swiftly and without any beating around the bush, a tactic that could be construed as a lack of empathy); an unwillingness to dwell on the past and a failure to assess the likely future. At its best, the film is quite despairing; it subtly ponders whether firm, diplomatic actions in the present can ever fully correct errors in the past.

Still, coming away from Locke I’m left with a nagging impression of fundamental banality. At one point, Bethan, Locke’s defiantly one-time mistress/mother of his baby, jokingly remarks in reference to his impending arrival, “it’s like waiting for God,” only to swiftly correct herself: “Godot.” Her offhand Beckettian call-out doubles as Knight’s most officious announcement of the existential terrain he aspires to, but considering Beckett as a particularly useful reference point would be misleading. Locke’s existentialism is general and accessible, relying on familiar storytelling strategies and motifs: a single location, a dark night (of the soul), and the open road. The film’s incessant nocturnal bokeh is less an inspired aesthetic imposition than a near-inevitability under the on-location circumstances (low light means wide aperture, and single seated subject surrounded by horrible places to fit a camera means no wide shots) opportunistically recruited as “style.” It therefore becomes a stretch to see the blurred highway movement as any specific thematic idea beyond a vague notion of the road as a symbol for the unstoppable, often chaotic forward motion of life. All of which is fine, but it does little to carve out an original identity for a film that so comfortably embraces such a prosaic narrative.

Apocalypse: A Bill Callahan Tour Film (2012) A Film by Hanly Banks

If you like Bill Callahan, particularly his excellent 2011 album Apocalypse, you'll probably like Hanly Banks' new tour documentary. I discussed its merits at In Review Online.

Stranger on Horseback (1955) A Film by Jacques Tourneur

“There’s right and there’s wrong, and when you see wrong, you just gotta speak up,” reasons one character in Jacques Tourneur's small-scale parable, but obviously nothing's quite that simple in the wild west, where Joel McCrea's stern traveling judge learns to abandon his law book. Portending the narrative backbone of Joseph H. Lewis’ Terror in a Texas Town (1958), Stranger on Horseback pits a rational outsider against a delusional community, chronicling the attempts made by the outsider to shake the town out of their groupthink. In this case, the snotty son of the Bannerman family (the town’s alpha surname) has committed a murder, but everyone, including the local lawyer, recycles the unexamined justification that it was in the name of “self-defense.” Introducing a layer of political allegory, the members of the community, it seems, have become locked in a groove by which they are able to comfortably repress crimes in their own backyard—in so doing, they are merely perpetuating an unfair society and clearing the path for future corruptions.

In this context, Judge Thorne’s (McCrea) arrival out of nowhere—the film’s opening image shows him materializing in the far distance of a parched landscape, and subsequent narration provides only the barest of an origin story—initially registers as something heroic, almost Biblical. But he is no saint either. He is, after all, one of only a few seen shooting anyone in the film, and several other offhand instances point to his compromised character: he first quells a feisty member of the Bannerman brigade by publicly administering a bloody nose; he swiftly responds to a blowhard’s bullying by socking him in the face and dunking his head in a conveniently placed tub of water, to which the lawyer teasingly remarks, "highly unusual judge, sir"; and later, he throws down Bannerman's daughter (Miroslava Stern) against a table during an argument. Tourneur portrays each side of the law as equally brutally inclined, just as susceptible to violent human impulses; one quick shot of Stern firing a gun at a wine bottle and breaking loose the red liquid across the Earth underneath is pithy visual symbolism. If this is accepted as the foundation upon which this society must grow, the question, then, is not why but matters of how: how to introduce an ethical, just system while also minimizing conflict between parties.

A founding concern in Tourneur’s career was reconciliation and compromise, be it between the real and the surreal, the living and the dead, pragmatism and mysticism, the human and the animal, or the old and the new. This thematic bloodline fits the western genre like a glove, seeing as it's so historically preoccupied with the clash between tradition and modernity, particularly in terms of law and order. Though not exactly an outright optimist, Tourneur makes films that are defined by a frictional grasp towards optimism, and that grasp plays out beautifully in the denouement of Stranger on Horseback. Guns are fired, people are killed, bitter words are exchanged, and hesitant departures are made, but the final sense is that some common ground has been found and a way forward has been agreed upon.

Mistaken for Strangers (2014) A Film by Tom Berninger

I'm way late on this update, but this past Friday I reviewed Mistaken for Strangers – a new documentary ostensibly about Brooklyn-based rock band The National's recent global tour but actually more about singer Matt Berninger's attention-whoring brother (well, that's a little insensitive, but seriously) – for In Review Online. Read my skeptical take here.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) A Film by Wes Anderson

(Note: This is more a series of somewhat disconnected notes and observations around The Grand Budapest Hotel than it is a formal review with plot synopsis and comprehensive coverage. It's best read after viewing the film—if at all, of course.)

I:

Cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai wrote about a concept he called “nostalgia without memory,” which he defined as a new phenomenon of globalization in which the markers of one culture escape from their historical, geographical context and become another culture’s past, resulting in a vague nostalgic longing for an experience that the participants of that culture have not directly accessed. His point was made in a specifically post-colonial context (the flaunting of American symbols by Filipinos), but the human core of his argument – an indefinable feeling of longing for a past that you never experienced and which can only be witnessed through cultural detritus – is something that haunts The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Here, Anderson’s nostalgia is for a world prior to a descent into fascist homogenization—specifically a decadent early 20th century sensibility when institutions still could have a measure of flamboyance and style. His titular hotel becomes the embodiment of this utopia, a fleeting vision of cultural excellence tucked away, at least at first, from the corrupting forces of the outside world. Gustave H., who presides over the alpine institution with a punctilious attention to detail, is an obvious director surrogate, and, in a generous touch, all of Anderson’s most notable regulars (Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzmann and Bill Murray) appear in minor roles as the concierges across the film’s several timelines. Having crafted elaborate mini-universes in film after film, the hotel represents simultaneously the most idealistic and most self-conscious expression of the pure, untainted world Anderson’s films and characters have strived for.

What gives the film such poignancy is that its utopia is acknowledged as something elusive and illusory. Anderson erects four layers of temporal and psychological remove – girl in the park (modern times?), novelist (80s?), his younger self (60s?), and the older incarnation of lobby boy Zero Moustafa – to separate himself from the story proper, which takes place in the fake northern European region of Zubrowka just before the onset of WWII. He also peppers his script with reminders of the impermanence of life: the film’s final line, narrated by the novelist who wrote the tale of meeting the hotel proprietor, is devastatingly concise: “it was a charming old relic, but he never did see it again” (paraphrased). Compromised by the rise of evil in Europe – here manifested as a fascist police state that ends the film festooned with logos landing somewhere in between the Zissou emblem and the swastika – the hotel can’t maintain its fanciful identity. Grim historical realities (real or imagined) have hovered just beyond the contained, bittersweet surfaces of Anderson’s cinema before; here they are shown protruding into the plot.

Described as “too decadent for modern tastes” by Zero in his old age, the hotel of the 1930s is an elegant getaway carefully decorated in welcoming shades of pink, purple and red. By contrast, the 60s iteration is a crumbling, orange-hued downgrade more in line with brutalist design tendencies than the Victorian qualities of the original (a sly visual joke shows “Boy with Apple” – the fictional artistic masterpiece that is so valued in the 30s and plays a key role in the plot – askew on the wall behind the concierge desk). That even this renovation looks opulent by today’s institutional standards points to Anderson’s fundamental idea about the aesthetic sterilization and increasing cultural neglect that runs alongside supposed historical “progress.”



II:

The Grand Budapest Hotel represents the logical, highly advanced live-action extension of the frame-by-frame thinking of Fantastic Mr. Fox. Animation seemed to really get Anderson’s gears churning, forcing him to think on an atomic level more than ever before; every frame counted in the film’s mathematical design. If Moonrise Kingdom, aesthetically Anderson’s loosest movie since Bottle Rocket, was a slight move away from that level of control, TGBH finds him back on that wavelength in an extravagant big-budget context. Anderson may be orchestrating the movement of bodies and objects rather than miniatures, but the dexterity of his direction is no less staggering; this is a film that feels timed to a metronome. (I kept thinking of a Kevin Barnes lyric: “We've got to keep our little click clicking at 130 B.P.M., it's not too slow.”) Scenes pile atop one another, details accrue, and comic motifs weave in and out, all set to the near-constant time-keeping pulse of Alexandre Desplat’s score. Perfume sprays and cable car squeaks witnessed in the diegesis become part of the symphony, which is only the most conspicuous example of the harmonious fusion of music and drama here. The less tangible impression is of long stretches of verbose dialogue timed to a stopwatch. I wouldn’t be surprised if each shot has at least 30 alternate lives sitting on the cutting room floor due to being a few frames out of pace.

The result of this rhythmic command is a mode of comedy that’s heavily reliant on pacing. Some of the film’s most clever details emerge out of slight disruptions to an established tempo. When the police arrive at the hotel to charge Gustave H. with murder, the camera stays for an extended moment in the room he and Zero leave in order to catch the seemingly inconsequential detail of the lobby boy briefly returning to hang something up. Later, during a hysterical prison escape, there’s a visual gag regarding exceedingly long ladders; in each case, Anderson waits until the ladder passes fully through frame to cut to the next shot. Then there’s the tall prison inmate whose torso blocks our vision every time he approaches, forcing a framing adjustment that throws off the balance of the scene. If these moments achieve their humor through a sudden lag in cadence, the film’s climactic alpine chase sequence is hilarious for the opposite reason: it’s impossibly fast, sending an otherwise speedy movie into comical overdrive.

All of which is to say that Anderson’s sense of rhythm and tempo now matches the great purveyors of silent comedy.

III:

A minor note: Saoirse Ronan’s quiet presence is extraordinary. That fourth-wall breaking close-up of her on a merry-go-round, carnival bulbs swirling behind her and sending ripples of reflected light across her face, nearly stops the film dead in its tracks. It’s TBGH’s equivalent of Margot Tenenbaum arriving off the train in slow-motion.

IV:

After several years of relative indifference, I’m excited again by Wes Anderson.

The Master Discussion

When Phillip Seymour Hoffman passed away unexpectedly nearly two months ago, my immediate mental image of the actor was as Lancaster Dodd, aka "Master," in Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master. There's a good chance it's because it's the most recent film in which I've seen Hoffman, but I also believe it to be his most impressive role. As a way of paying tribute to this towering screen icon, Kenji Fujishima and I decided to make Anderson's latest movie the focus of our second Passing Notes feature at In Review Online (following our January discussion of Mean Streets). I'd already written about The Master at length upon its release, but this discussion burrows into far more specific nooks and crannies of what I still consider to be a slightly overlooked achievement. If you're up for a long, long read, the results can be found here.

Douglas's Dissolves

It's been a while since I've written for MUBI's Notebook (a week short of being exactly a year, actually), but I'm happy to announce a new piece on Douglas Sirk's crafty use of dissolves in his lovely suburban melodrama All That Heaven Allows (1955). The post syncs up, quite serendipitously (at least on my end), with Criterion's announcement of a Blu Ray/DVD reissue of the film this spring, the cover art of which looks typically exceptional. In that sense, I guess there's no better time to acquaint oneself with this work of art, an impeccably constructed indictment of repressive social mores in 1950s small-town America.

The Island of St. Matthews (2013) A Film by Kevin Jerome Everson

I'm not so keen on The Island of St. Matthews, currently in a week-long run at Anthology Film Archives in New York. This documentary/film poem was captured more than directed by Kevin Jerome Everson, and, frankly, doesn't provide the visual interest to warrant its exceptionally sleepy pacing. I wrote it about it for In Review Online here.

A First Exposure to the Films of Timoleon Wilkins...

As subjects, roiling water surfaces and bokeh are fairly played out in lyrical/personal/diaristic 16mm Bolex filmmaking. That Timoleon Wilkins manages something like a fresh take on them says a great deal about the level of his sensitivity. Among other things, Los Caudales (2005) features dozens of seagull’s-eye view close-ups of lapping water on high-contrast black-and-white reversal stock, the resultant image a defamiliarizing dance of bright white dots and squiggles on a jet-black surface. Parts of Quartet (In Camera) (2009) study permutations of light photographed through telephoto lenses, and instead of an anarchic sprawl of light blobs, Wilkins achieves something closer to the balletic choreography of Len Lye’s films, albeit in a far more muted and unpredictable register. It bears mentioning that this is only a fragment of the material Wilkins finds fit to turn his camera toward.

Educated under the tutelage of Stan Brakhage at the University of Colorado and far from quiet about his admiration for and familiarity with filmmakers like Nathaniel Dorsky, Bruce Baillie, and Bruce Conner, Wilkins sits pretty squarely in the romantic tradition of avant-garde cinema, the strand of underground filmmaking that valorizes the cameraman as a soloist with a unique ability to imprint his or her own subjectivity on the camera eye. Up to a point, Wilkins benefits from the acknowledgment of such ancestry. For one, it’s part of what brought him to Boston in the first place, Dorsky being the relatively fashionable commodity that he is, at least in the bone-dry marketplace of contemporary experimental cinema. (Rob Todd’s continuing obscurity, on the other hand, needs to be corrected.)



Still, Wilkins’ work creates distinct impressions. The most conspicuous of these is tied to his status as a lifelong citizen of the West (Colorado, Mexico, and Los Angeles are the touch points I’m aware of), the landscapes of which inflect his films to a significant degree. If Peter Hutton’s New York Portraits, sublime as they can be, are quintessential expressions of the cramped geography of the East Coast, Wilkins’ films achieve something similarly archetypal with regards to the openness of the West. Big skies, sacred-seeming cloud formations, vast plains, elongated highways, wandering cattle, and vast beaches are all subject to scrutiny. Land merges into sky, thunderstorms erupt (or are merely implied to erupt through inspired aperture futzing), and Wilkins’ camera follows telephone lines along the highway as if to celebrate the freedom of movement afforded by the landscape. In my own experiences out West, such ample space means feeling liberated from staying too long in one place; movement becomes a texture of life.

Made between 1998 and 2010, Lake of the Spirits, Los Caudales, The Crossing, Quarter, and, especially, Drifter—all of which were shown at the Harvard Film Archive’s recent tribute to Wilkins—evoke this restlessness. Four of them are silent, yet the dynamism of their montage and the diversity of their images generates a tone more exploratory than contemplative. Intermittent flashes of bright light (or perhaps merely blank leader, it’s hard to tell) act as optical refreshment as well as ways to transition between rushes of abstraction (bokeh, light leaks, water surfaces, objects photographed and/or processed in such a way that they become unidentifiable) and sections of documentary-like observation (flowers, landscapes, sparingly used human faces). In posing these two representational extremes side by side, Wilkins is constantly seeking their points of intersection, the moments where the banal turns into something magical. Edited largely in-camera—that is, conceived as a linear flow of images in conjunction with the filming stage—these films are therefore documents of Wilkins’ thought processes while shooting them—the flickering of his consciousness, if you will. And they are unbelievably beautiful.

Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) A Film by John Huston

(Disclaimer: Reflections in a Golden Eye was originally released with a sepia cast applied, but from what I understand a large portion of surviving circulating prints feature the film's original, more neutral color grading. Strangely, most of the images online for the film are sepia-toned, so although I've used these images, this review reflects the alternate version that I saw.)

“Economize! Turn the lights off!” So goes the instruction on a poster pinned to an office wall at a southern military outpost in John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye. By no means is this quirky bit of set decoration a focal point—it’s centered in a master shot between two officers, but it’s so small in the frame that it would be hard to read outside of a movie theater—yet for some reason it caught my eye, and Huston, symbolist that he is, probably didn’t put it there randomly. Reflections, an almost coming-out melodrama that plays out in a regimented, heteronormative milieu, puts a fair amount of emphasis on lights. On his nightly peeping tom rounds, a laconic private waits outside his major’s house for the last remaining bedroom lights to be switched off before infiltrating the home to ogle its snoozing matron. Later, he will be discovered when someone enters the room and flicks on the switch before leaving in horror without flipping it back. Most dramatic of all, the climactic finale occurs during an exaggerated lightning storm—nature’s own way of violently flickering on and off the lights.

In this context, this peculiar wall adornment registers as a detail of some significance. Residing as it does in a major’s office and thus intended, however subtly, as “official” advice, the poster makes a basic enough request: turn off unneeded bulbs to conserve energy and lower costs. When separated, however, from that utilitarian plea and placed into the larger atmosphere of social repression in which the story circulates, the exclamation-pointed advice may subliminally take on the tone of a threat: play by the rules, or else. If cost-cutting is a way of preemptively avoiding the possibility of an economic meltdown, so turning the metaphorical lights out is code for keeping transgressive behavior at bay; in both cases, the preservation of social order is the goal.

Major Weldon Penderton (Marlon Brando) knows only order. In his role of authority, he regularly spits received wisdom regarding military duty to a classroom full of recruits and assigns groundskeeping duties that will tidy up the post. In his free time, he pumps iron in front of a mirror, sweating to maintain the expected image of an army chief. All around him are the pillars of a respectable life in the military: a buxom wife named Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor) who acts as a sort of empress of the training community, cooking meals for evening functions and socializing all around the post; a large home, suitably overwhelming the unglamorous barracks of the trainees; and a cornucopia of patriotic pins lining the lapels of his expertly tailored beige uniform.



The “problem,” construed as such by his own conscience as much as by the implicit behavioral codes of the military system, is that Weldon harbors an unexplainable urge toward a younger, chiseled private (Robert Forster)—coincidentally, the same man who, unbeknownst to him, has eyes for his wife. Weldon's is an interest that goes beyond platonic respect or macho concern; it’s a magnetic attraction of implied but never explicitly stated homosexual nature. But it’s also an attraction that Weldon would never be able to articulate or admit to himself. Submerging himself in this conflicted interiority, Brando is a bundle of gestural tensions. He mechanically repeats normalized behavior—stoically tugging his beret down over his eyes, raising his chin up, straightening his suit—but within these stiff mannerisms, his eyes dart around nervously, his syllables trail off into mumbles, and a glossy layer of sweat sits perpetually on his skin. When his beret is blown off in one key scene, it’s a much more profound disruption that it seems on the surface.

Weldon’s arc moves from external to internal rejection. Initial jealousy regarding Leonora’s adulterous behavior with lieutenant peer and neighbor Morris (Brian Keith) culminates in a convulsive beating of her angelic white stallion, an eruption that can easily be read as an act of violence against his wife given Huston’s obsessive linking of the woman and her animal. Burnt out on this ineffectual revolt, Weldon begins to timidly pursue his object of desire, meanwhile all but handing his wife over to Morris. Unable to reconcile his new longing with his duty as an impartial major, self-hatred sets in, and Reflections closes on Weldon’s violent, misguided attempt to do away with the impulses that his rational brain rejects. Repression guards. Awareness disgusts.

Morris’ wife, Alison (Julie Harris), is an embodiment of Weldon several stages developed. A common target of gossip for slicing her nipples with garden shears after the death of her newborn, she is at least comfortable in her own abnormality. Her transgressive self-abuse, which effectively cuts her off from her assumed womanly duty, is nothing if not committed. With this assertive display of individuality, Alison is free to indulge unconventional relationships, such as the one she shares with her flamboyant Asian houseboy (Zorro David, a fairly obnoxious role), who’s the most liberated character in the movie and therefore the one who delivers the titular nugget of wisdom. Still, the price she pays is to be a perceived nut, and her offscreen fate comes in a home for the ill.



Reflections in a Golden Eye’s opening sequence shows Weldon’s object of desire passing through the hazy dawn landscape and saluting the horses in their stable, a series of images that immediately bonds him to the natural world. Soon, he will be revealed as something of a pervert; his trips to Leonora’s room find him sniffing her lingerie, and he also frequents the forest for jaunts in the nude. But one thing is clear: he’s a man at one with his environment, his body, his sexuality, and his identity. Weldon, who’s acknowledged around the post as a klutz on horseback, seems to long for that sense of internal stability as much as he longs for the man himself.

Framed in widescreen, obscured by a great deal of shadow or forest haze, and scored to a creeping, tension-filled medley of flutes, clarinets, strings, and glockenspiels by Toshirô Mayuzumi (the composer for several key films by Mizoguchi, Oshima, and Imamura), Reflections drifts along like a dream, with many muggy lulls punctuated by sudden bursts of heightened emotion. Multiple scenes between Brando and Taylor, likely intended by the studio as the film’s real selling point, have an awkward, stumbling pace that suits this atmosphere (though a definite lack of on-set chemistry is felt, it couldn’t be more appropriate given the nature of the couple’s waning marriage). Weldon’s presence—and this is the brilliance of Brando’s performance—has a palpable impression of sleepwalking, a quality that Huston maps onto the film’s rhythms. A highlight scene features nothing more than Weldon navigating a post-boxing match crowd at night in pursuit of the solitary private, trailing him down the street and then picking up his dropped Baby Ruth wrapper as if hoping to find some clandestine love note. The whole thing has the surreal tension of an out-of-body experience.

As Weldon's inner and outer selves start to collide in the final scene, Huston appropriately inflicts the shock on the environment. For the first time, Weldon spots the private tip-toeing around his house. As he impulsively fixes his hair for a possible meeting, the environment shudders and a thunderstorm elevates in intensity. The light of everyday ritual and the darkness of bottled up desires infringe upon one another in the form of lightning. Flicking on the light switch as the man enters his wife's room, Weldon makes a desperate attempt to introduce his latent identity into the realm of the visible, but undergoes a spasm of denial as a result. Huston's final shot—a continuous panning movement between Weldon, his shrieking, just awoken wife, and his fallen object of desire that suggests the cameraman frozen in a robotic loop—could hardly be more perfect: Weldon's is an unresolvable turmoil.

Mean Streets Discussion

When watching The Wolf of Wall Street for the first time, one of the earlier Scorsese films that came to my mind most assertively was Mean Streets, Marty's gritty NYC gangster movie from 1973. I found the resemblances less apparent on my second viewing of Scorsese's latest, but my passing mention of it in my initial review of Wolf was thankfully enough to send Kenji Fujishima down memory lane. He and I had been loosely discussing a possible conversation-style column for In Review Online for a while, so we jumped at the opportunity to further flesh out the deeper connections between the films as well as the special importance of Mean Streets in Scorsese's body of work. We've been cooking up this correspondence for a while now, and if you have time to spare for a long article, you can read the proud results here.

Breakdown (1997) A Film by Jonathan Mostow

The scant exposition bestowed by Jonathan Mostow's ruthless all-action action-thriller Breakdown comes in a brief dialogue scene between hero Jeffrey Taylor (Kurt Russell) and his wife Amy (Kathleen Quinlan) in the first ten minutes. Quasi-bourgie travelers from Beantown on a pilgrimage to start a new life out west, the couple offhandedly reveals the relative financial hole they're in, perhaps partly created by the shining red Jeep they're using to power through an imposing southwestern America. While eagerly escaping this void of dust, rock, and cement, Jeff's new engine is tripped by a mysterious gas station passerby, which ultimately causes the titular breakdown and traps him and his wife in the squalid emptiness they're seeking to outrun. Beautifully economical, this setup establishes everything the viewer needs to know in order to go along with the escalating paranoia of the subsequent plot: these are clearly privileged white people in a bind navigating an unknown desert where threat is perceived from every possible direction.

When a dubiously benevolent trucker arrives as if by divine intervention and offers to take Amy to a nearby diner to call for automotive assistance, Jeff's frightened interiority starts to be reflected by an actively malicious environment. He get his car back in order shortly after he sacrifices Amy to this perfectly reasonable sign of relief, but when he tracks down the diner to retrieve his wife she's not there. No one is aware of her ever setting foot on the premises, nor are they remotely concerned about her disappearance. On the surface, the premise is reminiscent of that which kicks off The Vanishing (1988), a darkly existential gut punch from French director George Sluizer that was inexplicably remade with American stars and for "American" audiences by Sluizer himself five years later. But where Sluizer's admirably hopeless original struck a deeply nihilistic tone, revealing the world as essentially cruel and its mysteries unsolvable, Mostow's film is pitched at a more absurd register, the machinations of its wronged-man plot indistinguishably perched between actual peril and the workings of a delusional imagination. It's significant that the villain here is not a single warped mind but rather the entire town, a mustachioed and mob-like mass seemingly conspiring to drain Jeff of his remaining finances and brutalize his life partner.



In exchange for the $90,000 Jeff purports to have left in his bank account, the exceptionally nasty men (the amoral head honcho of which is played with chilling solemnity by J.T. Walsh) who kidnap Amy offer the empty promise of her survival. That the assumed financial reward is so measly in the larger scope of movie theft ($90,000 is hardly the sort of amount that would completely rebuild the dust-caked town) only augments the sense that Jeff's victimhood is subjective rather than circumstantial, the pervasive evil of the world around him a manifestation of his anxieties more than a tangible force. At the same time, the achievement of the film is in making those anxieties ferociously tangible. Mostow's project is not to ridicule or punish Jeff for his endangerment, but rather to cling intimately to his perspective as he pursues the rehabilitation of order in his now lopsided universe—as such, Breakdown is one of Hollywood's most skillful exercises in empathetic engagement. Great portions of the film, particularly in the second act when Jeff's confusion is at its peak, are shot at wide angles and in deep focus, visualizing the floating fear of 360 degree threat. By the film's third act, the alignment of the audience with Jeff is absolute; we share his nervous perspective in voyeuristic telephoto shots, culminating in a garage peeping scene in which the camera is literally placed on a different level than the villains, with Jeff observing their transgressions from a loft above.

The resolution to this inner battle writ large is of the demon-conquering variety in which Hollywood cinema is bound to trade (in this case, The Vanishing's nihilism would spoil the very ideology of self-growth upon which the narrative machine is founded). But give credit to Mostow for rendering this nightmare of personal collapse, however temporary, with such vivid, scraping intensity. The film's most acute lasting impression is of sparks flying and sweaty faces coiled in nerve-popping adrenaline. Furthermore, Spielberg's Duel (1971) is an apparent precedent, but rarely since Two Lane Blacktop (also 1971) have automobiles had such a decidedly weighty presence, here made deadly through their constant high-speed entangling. It's also worth applauding the way in which the audience is finally left hanging (almost literally) after a near-death experience at the precipice of a bridge. Mostow's bow-tying is curt and efficient, hardly cathartic: Jeff and Amy's final embrace is only dwelled upon for seconds before the camera lurches upward to survey the wreckage beneath, the swells of a minor-key orchestra reaching their crescendo. Miles of road still lie ahead.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) A Film by Martin Scorsese

Tomorrow's real Christmas miracle will be the release of Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that's such a vile affront to good taste that it's amazing it's getting nationwide exposure on one of the holiest days of the year. It's also fantastic, one of Scorsese's funniest and craziest movies in a long time and one that revives the antic spirit of his earlier directorial self. My full review is up now at In Review Online.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (2013) A Film by Adam McKay

Even if the results are unmistakably "messy" and, to some eyes, just plain bad, the improvisational bombast of Adam McKay's filmmaking intrigues me. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is the director's zaniest achievement since Step Brothers, similarly baffling in its narrative logic and tonal dexterity as well as equally magnetic in its pull of weirdness. McKay and star Will Ferrell routinely push scenes past their seeming breaking point*, which, to me at least, is the domain of hesitation, verbal vomit, and physical awkwardness in which the film really enters a zone of inspired idiocy. My full review is up at In Review Online.

*Of note is McKay's directorial technique, which is described in a stellar review by R. Emmet Sweeney at Film Comment.

Screening Notes #23 (Year-End Catch-Up Blurbs)

Nebraska: The above image gets at the heart of Alexander Payne's latest. From the perspective of a television set beaming a Detroit vs. Chicago NFL game (is there a more classic, long-standing matchup?), we see pale, wrinkled, defeated men, eyes frozen by the familiar spectacle before them even as their investment seems less a product of genuine excitement than numbing routine. A common critique lobbed at Nebraska, and at Payne in general, is that the director creates grotesque caricatures only to belittle them. I feel Payne recognizes these Midwestern bumpkins waiting to die in their sunken sofas as tragic manifestations of accumulated repression and resignation to life's shortcomings and disappointments, and the resulting sense of dark humor comes, at least in this case, not from smug superiority but from a heavyhearted acknowledgment of the ways in which life wears on everyone. Seeking to replace lost pleasures, the film's characters resort to materialistic desires, illusory as they are; a father's (Bruce Dern) misguided pilgrimage to claim his transparently phony million dollar reward becomes the central narrative and thematic thrust, but the falseness of the promise only exacerbates the breakdown of trust and support within his estranged family. "I just want one," grumbles a perpetually hungover and out-of-it Dern of his desire for a new pickup truck, crystallizing the prevailing attitude of the ensemble: when life no longer seems to offer joy, wealth and belongings are assumed to be the corrective. Nebraska's resonant monochrome widescreen images are in the vein of the predominantly gray, sparsely populated Midwestern landscape photography of Stranger than Paradise (1984), another film which regards the stubborn commitment to a fading lifestyle with a tarnished romanticism. But Payne's film offers another level specific to today's America; in the deceptively schmaltzy denouement, we're not quite watching a man's triumphant re-discovery of himself, but rather the full emergence of a new, more dispiriting form of father-son bonding predicated on the temporary relegation of real problems to shiny distractions.


Dallas Buyers Club: On this one, I'm mostly in agreement with R. Kurt Osenlund, whose politically charged piece intones with a sense of fed-up finality: Why must we continue to not only accept but elevate this sort of myopic message-mongering? As a heterosexual, I can't speak with the same authority, but I nonetheless found the film's portrayal of LGBTQ culture to be staggeringly one-note and its bid for queer awareness to be almost pathetically flawed. Matthew McConaughey's portrayal of Ron Woodroof as a vitriolic homophobic redneck-turned-gay-hugging-survivalist has a definite exhibitionist force (the actor lost considerable weight for the role, and sinks into his despicable identity with great conviction), but it's squelched by what he represents: a hateful prick being implausibly sheohorned into the dominant Hollywood narrative of redemption. What results is a classic case of eggs-in-the-wrong-basket storytelling. Director Jean-Marc Vallée strains to render Woodroof a tragic hero at the expense of showing any logical demonstration of how he traverses the vast ideological ground that takes him from regarding "faggots" as the bane of the Earth to getting into fistfights over them in grocery stores. In the meantime, the struggles of an entire people – represented here as only the most radically marginalized personalities, the folks most likely to stir homophobic fire – becomes a mere footnote, the vehicle for Woodroof's character arc but rarely a palpable large-scale tragedy. A late-stage shift into hetero melodrama (Jennifer Garner's flimsy doctor never confronting Woodroof's greatest human failings even as she initially expresses disgust towards him) starts to feel in this context like an insult.


The Last Time I Saw Macao: Unclassifiable and unpredictable, João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata's utterly unique documentary-fiction hybrid (I realize that in today's festival landscape such a characterization might sound contradictory) begins as a fairly straightforward visual travelogue of Macao (a "Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China" that was once a longtime Portuguese colony), then lays over the top of it an entirely invisible narrative with campy shadings of noir and sci-fi before ultimately surrendering the film to some uncanny conspiratorial force that enshrouds the movie's final passage in a cryptic, wordless, vaguely apocalyptic fog. Prior to watching this, I had only seen Rodrigues' short Morning of Saint Anthony's Day, which shares with Macao a cash-strapped inventiveness; the director and his screenwriting partner conjure up their enigmatic atmosphere via mostly static documentary images of contemporary Macao and the latter's paranoid narration alone. While Mata guides the viewer in his quest through his old hometown for a stripper in trouble named "Candy," the camera seems to adopt his perspective (one that's prone to Pedro Costa-like urban tableaux) but is equally likely to "construct" suggestive details through nifty compositional tactics. For instance, Candy's supposed murder at the hands of gangsters occurs at a shadowy dock where construction equipment and nautical structures obscure the line of sight, leaving us to speculate upon the source of bone-chilling screeches that could either be the menace that Mata speaks of or mere industrial clamor. The film is tantalizingly drawn to the disconnect between what we see and what we hear, a dissociative spell it seems to link to the post-colonialist mindset (Mata, after all, plays a Portuguese filmmaker returning as if by some magnetic pull to his old colony). Moreover, street animals – specifically cats – are omnipresent throughout as bizarre escorts, suggesting Rodrigues and Mata are consciously working in the lineage of Chris Marker.

Screening Notes #22 (Year-End Catch-Up Blurbs)

Stories We Tell: A very pleasurable experience less because of Polley's meta-fictional Investigation into Memory and The Human Condition and more because of the film's loving portrait of an eccentric family/"family," but I'm less interested in talking about how her father resembles Einstein and her brother has some awkward laughing fits than I am in questioning the film's strategies. At its core, Polley's decision to angle her memoir towards a third act twist that reveals the constructed nature of the film's 8mm home-movie flashbacks (it's pretty obvious this is the case right off the bat, as every shot is so conveniently complementary to what's being said) does her no favors. Why not either be forward about concerns of narrative and cognitive reconstruction from the get-go or not spill the beans at all? I can't help but think that in trying to pull the rug out from under the audience, Polley's only dodging the real investigative work that she could have spent over an hour doing. Instead, we get a didactic section in which she deceptively spells out her intentions of highlighting the discrepancies between recollection and fact (obviously unrealized ones unreflected in the film's montage), which winds up having a reverse effect of revealing what the film is actually doing: not studying the cognition of the interviewees' but rather making clear the self-discovery process of Sarah Polley. She's using the duplicitous act of filmmaking in an attempt to understand her parents' history and how it relates to her. All of this is to say the film is more of an exploratory process than a fully realized, internally coherent object, a truth that would go down easier were it not for Polley's muddled but emphatically telegraphed intellectual aims.


Inside Llewyn Davis: Initial impulse is that the Coens' latest nails a series of frustrations particular to independent musicians: 1) the feeling that for whatever reason the zeitgeist has passed you by, that the general consensus is slightly out of step with your creations; 2) the resulting sense of diffused irritation, simultaneously pointed at everyone and no one in particular; 3) a tendency to then retreat inward, convinced of your authenticity within a landscape of phoniness. In a sort of masochistic way (I'm a musician myself that has felt like Llewyn more times than I'd like to admit), I enjoyed the hell out of the film for these reasons, even against my better judgment. In retrospect, I feel skeptical about the film's perhaps too-easy design, which involves trotting out an ensemble that skews a little too neatly towards one-dimensional hostility (Cary Mulligan's sour impregnated careerist the most conspicuous offender, John Goodman's declining jazz-head a more charismatic simpleton). When a character's not expressly designed to belittle Llewyn, they're usually some varying shade of cheaply presented pandering conventionality; thus Justin Timberlake's thoroughly white-bread pop performer, a role that functions at least partly as the actor's winking autocritique. It's clear to me that the film's not working on the level of realism (its best scenes, both set on a snowy highway, have intriguing mystical overtones enhanced by Bruno Delbonnel's death-shrouded cinematography), that its outsized archetypes are more a product of Llewyn's downtrodden subjective filter than they are of the Coens' alleged misanthropy, but there's still something simpleminded about the way the film wipes away any sense of a persuasive human argument against its protagonist's all-consuming pessimism. Already dying to watch this again though, so I have hope that some of my reservations are somewhat negligible.

They Live (1988) A Film by John Carpenter

While everybody rabidly chews up the year's releases in a mad dash for year-end lists (I'm doing some of that too, to be fair), my viewing highlight of the past month is most certainly a 25-year-old film that will get an IFC Center revival starting tomorrow: John Carpenter's exuberantly alive sci-fi satire They Live. The movie features a pro wrestler marching the streets of LA mouthing off to and pulverizing heinously deformed 9-5'ers; in the premise alone, there's basically nothing to object to. I get into some of the film's more complicated achievements, including why it remains one of Hollywood's most intelligent consumer culture takedowns, over at In Review Online.

Brief Thoughts and Rebuttals Towards 12 Years a Slave

To bookend its dutifully merciless tour of America's darkest hour, Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave begins and ends in relative comfort. Its first twenty minutes involve enigmatic intercutting between the wealthy Washington lifestyle and subsequent enslaved drudgery of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and the dreamlike way in which it transitions between these two existences – some of the shifts are actually prompted by shots of Ejiofor lying down in the dark – establishes a feeling of vertigo, of disbelief at what's happening. Two hours later, the film concludes on a sudden, miraculous return to normalcy and a parting image of harmony and reunification—with a family, with a lifestyle, and with an identity. With this structure alone, the film gives off a sense of the evils of slavery merely being a bad dream out of which moneyed connections can be a dependable savior.

These two sections probably only make up thirty cumulative minutes of this bloated historical saga, but I think it’s a crucial span of time. It builds a framework with which to view the events contained within and demonstrates McQueen’s outsider's view of American history. Though the director's tonal extremity and emphasis on the tested body bode well for hurling the savagery of antebellum plantation life at the audience, McQueen can't quite escape the lure of a simplified Hollywood narrative, a reality that results in unfortunate soft-peddling, be it in the form of digestible good-bad dichotomies (Michael Fassbender's amoral slaver vs. Lupita Nyong'o's virtuous and quiet dissident, for instance), a barrage of big-name actors, or the distractingly emphatic speaker-busting of Hans Zimmer's orchestra, which by now has a built-in blood-boiling factor. Given the circumstances as McQueen crosses over from arthouse aesthete to prestigious A-lister, some of these irritations are more forgivable than others. What's really problematic is the way 12 Years a Slave's use of a self-controlled, compliant protagonist as a merely temporary eyewitness to history ultimately gestures towards the closure of a larger narrative (racial tensions within the country) that remains anything but sealed off.

At Grantland, Wesley Morris, one of the film's biggest champs, goes long on the movie, which he exalts as a cultural milestone in the representation of national race issues. The crux of his discussion lies in this statement:

“You have to stop accepting apologies, accepting, say, The Help, and start demanding correctives, films that don't glorify whiteness and pity blackness, movies — serious ones — that avoid leading an audience to believe that black stories are nothing without a white voice to tell them that black people can't live without the aid of white ones.”

As passionately articulated and polemically charged as Morris’ ultimate thesis is, I would argue that 12 Years a Slave doesn’t go quite as far as he seems to imagine it does. After all, it is not a black man’s determination or anger that finally fuels his discharge from enslavement, but rather an exaggeratedly benevolent, egalitarian Brad Pitt—in a role that’s a shameless reminder of the Good Samaritan sensibility that brought about the celebrity’s well-documented financial efforts in Third World countries. The lasting impression is of a compromised wealthy patriarch saved from obsolescence by a noble white man, and in his dust are hundreds of more fiercely rebellious individuals, most notably Nyong'o's character. The film comes awfully close to implying that it was Solomon’s bred-from-money stoicism, his ability to put his head down and turn the other cheek to acts of brutality towards his brethren, that ultimately enabled his return to freedom, while the less “sophisticated” of the slaves were left to endure brutal beatings until death. That Solomon's outrage ultimately wound up in a belated book only compounds the sense of a neat, detached narrativization of a messy history, an angle that relegates the peripheral slaves to mere catalysts in Solomon's riches-to-rags-to-riches arc.

Guiding the bold, audience-reassuring turn of fate that concludes 12 Years a Slave is a privileged worldview, a perspective from which the horrors of slavery can only be rendered in full, grisly detail if there’s a guarantee of hope, however hard-won or downright unrealistic, on the other side. (No wonder McQueen sees "white people looking at Solomon and seeing themselves.") Despite the grim verisimilitude of McQueen’s achievement, there’s a scrubbed-down softness in its ultimate trajectory. Any attempt to funnel history through a single point of view must be dealt with via a carefully selective process of inclusion and omission, but what these heinous and far-reaching crimes really require is anything but the kind of roundness and schematism occasionally applied here. While Morris skewers pre-existing films about slavery that “pad a cozy nest for white audiences,” I’m not sure McQueen’s film does anything different beyond exerting healthy doses of sweat and gore in scenes of racial injustice that, historically, have received their fair share of watering-down. These troubling images may dominate the film, but they're contained in a package that nearly trivializes them, nearly categorizes them as visions of an exotic nightmare rather than something that truly happened and continues to happen in less violent forms today. There’s plenty to appreciate about the film's brave acts of representation on their own, but I nonetheless find myself disappointed by the few damning bids for audience comfort that prevent 12 Years a Slave from seeing the gut-punching brutality that comprises its stuffed middle section to its most productively unfathomable end.

I Used to be Darker (2013) A Film by Matt Porterfield

Like Richard Linklater, Charles Burnett, and Kelly Reichardt, among others, Matt Porterfield has emerged as a key American regional filmmaker. These directors, at one point or another – Linklater in the early stages of his career and on and off since, Burnett for only a few shining moments, Reichardt for her Oregon trilogy – have been notable for their obsessive cataloging of the small-scale dramas of the nation's less represented alcoves. I Used to be Darker is Porterfield's third feature, and his third in a row to be set in the lower to middle class suburban neighborhoods of Baltimore. In each of these films, Porterfield examines a tight-knit group of townsfolk and a collection of unremarkable, lived-in locales through loose narratives that put a greater emphasis on family, community, and atmosphere than plot. For the tourist-spectator, the result is a veneer of intimacy and authenticity, the impression of being privy to the most accurate firsthand representation of a particular way of life.

Of course, Porterfield interrogated the very notion of this authenticity with Putty Hill through that film's uncanny meshing of observational drama and direct address interviews with cast members. With I Used to be Darker, Porterfield has taken another measure to distance his work from the impression of unvarnished, documentary-like truth: the film is his first fully scripted undertaking. Yet even as Porterfield has moved away from outright improvisation, his latest exhibits the same casual rhythms and miniaturized focus that have defined his cinema so far. The lessons learned from Putty Hill's inspired if decidedly messy blurring of documentary and fiction tendencies – namely, that "realness" is futile if emotional content is pure – have been carefully put into practice in I Used to be Darker, which approximates the texture of daily life in Baltimore while also taking dramatic liberties to pursue with greater precision a specific emotional upheaval.

Like Putty Hill, I Used to be Darker takes on the sort of universally damaging subject that is likely to divide a group of people before bringing them hesitantly back together. In the prior film, that topic was the death of a close friend. Here, Porterfield hones in on a subject he and his co-writer Amy Belk allegedly know well: divorce and its repercussions. One gets the sense that Porterfield is drawn to these agitated in-between states because they simultaneously test the limits of a community's (or in this case, a family's) internal bond and raise the unsettling question of how to carry over a prior stability in a new, uncertain future. This is the central dilemma experienced by Bill (Ned Oldham) and Kim (Kim Taylor) – parents enduring a bitter legal separation – and their daughter Abby (Hannah Gross). To complicate things further, their Irish niece Taryn (Deragh Campbell), who has escaped to America against her parents' knowledge, has arrived with her own set of pending issues: an unwanted pregnancy, a growing alienation from her lewd peers, and a rocky relationship with her mother.



With this scenario alone, Porterfield establishes the ingredients for a hot-blooded domestic melodrama, but I Used to be Darker is less invested in the collisions of conflict embedded within its circumstances than it is in the drawn-out pockets of uncertainty occurring between the respective emotional spikes, the laze-about afternoons and evenings when frustrations simmer beneath a mundane surface. Indeed, in the few instances when the film does indulge in dramatic skirmishes, its weakest tendencies are illuminated: particularly the thespian shortcomings of non-actors and real-life musicians Oldham and Taylor, who struggle with selling the script's more darting emotional pivot points, but also a few grand gestures – Bill beating his guitar like Kurt Cobain against a pole in his basement after the camera watches the entirety of his impromptu ballad performance – that tip the scales towards melodrama. In nearly every other case, Porterfield shows a gift for imbuing seemingly arbitrary details or moments with a wealth of character information. For instance, a feverish jazz record reverberates throughout Bill's house while the camera follows Abby through it, suggesting either her father's loss of a stable center or his nostalgic desire for youthful pleasures. In another scene, Abby is shown performing a subpar monologue at school, a one-off moment that doesn't cohere until later when she mentions an unsuccessful audition in New York; her vague urge to become an actress registers as a compulsion to circumvent the reality of her fractured family life, a form of escape less drastic than Taryn's literal relocation.

Meanwhile, the rest of the characters audition their own potential future paths. Kim's musical aspirations take center stage, culminating in an extended live performance (of Taylor's actual song "American Child") with its own hints of a much-needed getaway. While assuming Kim is sleeping with her male band members, Bill mostly sinks into a depressingly introspective version of middle-aged bachelorhood made up of unproductive mid-day lounging and aforementioned bouts of aggressive despair. Ironically, Taryn, perhaps seeking a surrogate for the airhead who impregnated her and ditched, ends up being the flirt Bill expects of Kim, impulsively hooking up with one of her musician friends in an abandoned camper van in a nocturnal sequence reminiscent of Putty Hill's final scene of empty house loitering. As much as these characters seek alternate realities, though, Porterfield is too pragmatic a filmmaker to let them off easy. The very title of I Used to be Darker implies the tentative healing of past wounds, and fittingly the film concludes on an impression of difficult rectification tinged with the stoic acknowledgment that nothing's ever permanent.



Elevating I Used to be Darker beyond its subtle articulation of family anxieties is its delicate evocation of a particular place and subculture, a trait that, in rooting its characters to something convincingly lived-in, only further validates the emotional dynamics of the narrative. Porterfield's continuing aversion to cinematic glossiness – natural light is favored, regardless of whether or not it provides flattering illumination, and shooting locations appear to have been kept the way they were when found – results in an intimate panorama of suburban banality, the textures of which feel at once specific to this Baltimore district and true to any middle-class neighborhood anywhere in the country in the past decade. More esoteric but no less palpable are the film's sojourns into the city's independent music scene. In this regard, Abby and Taryn's journey into a murky, sweat-and-beer-soaked thrash metal show provides the film's most striking scene, captured in one long take that adopts the perspective of a roaming crowd member.

The virtue of Porterfield's regional filmmaking is precisely this balance of atmospheric immersion and emotional directness. His work refuses to deal in platitudes even as it adopts narrative content that relies on generality. I Used to be Darker easily could have fallen into the shape of a conventional dark comedy of dysfunction, systematically limiting its characterizations for the sake of simplistic dramatic equations. Instead, it projects the sense of having no clear end goal, patiently waiting with its casual, observational mise-en-scène for possibilities of harmony amongst characters who seem, at first, so hopelessly combative. I Used to be Darker does end up gesturing towards a few displays of tenderness – specifically, Abby placing her head on Taryn's shoulder – but the bitterness and unpredictability that hangs over its edges are suitably encapsulated by Kim's exit song:

Days like this.
Yeah you think about the ones that went before you.
Have you ever seen the sky such a clear blue?
And all I wanna do is live my life honestly.

A Teacher (2013) A Film by Hannah Fidell

A little delayed, but here's my 5-day-old review of Hannah Fidell's A Teacher (2013), a character-focused indie that desperately implies meaning and significance without actually delivering any. I briefly compare the film to Steve McQueen's Shame and Markus Schleinzer’s Michael, which gives a sense of the league of Ambiguity and Vagueness in which Fidell is stubbornly working.