The One I Love

THE ONE I LOVE          B+    
USA  (91 mi)  2014  d:  Charlie McDowell 

Mark Duplass and mumblecore have come a long way since THE PUFFY CHAIR (2005), made for a meager $15,000 at the time, and while a decade later he’s still making low-budget indie movies shot on a miniscule budget, but having commercial and critical success with Colin Trevorrow’s Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) and now another Sundance audience favorite, what’s evident is they are expanding the kind of material they can explore, moving on from the el cheapo relationship movies, pointing a camera at two people talking endlessly, adding a touch of sci-fi into the mix simply because they have the technology now to shoot it on the fly without increasing the costs.  The most important thing to say about this film is to see it before word gets out, before you learn anything about it, as one’s appreciation for the film is likely increased the less you know going into the theater.  Reviews have been intentionally vague, as they don’t want to spoil any of the secrets laying in wait for prospective viewers, where one suspects there are more than a few surprises.  Actually there are plenty, as this film delivers what it sets out to do, which is make something of a mind-fuck of a movie that leaves the audience in a state of bewilderment, which is the thrill and enjoyment of watching this movie.  There are several keys to the success, where like Polanski’s Venus in Fur (La Vénus à la fourrure) (2014), this is for the most part another two-person play, written by Justin Lader in his first feature, where the performances by Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass are simply superb, and therein lies the real charm and appeal of the film, as the characters couldn’t be more beautifully developed.  Mumblecore followers tend to have short memories and don’t really have an appreciation for films of yore, where living in the present is their mantra, so this film will feel all the more inventive to them, where the movie intentionally references The Twilight Zone (1959 – 64), likely something few of them have ever actually seen, but only heard about.  The audiences for these films (like the characters onscreen) are notably young, upwardly mobile and slightly wealthy, where poverty is something “other people” have to deal with, as their narcissistic concerns are exclusively about themselves, an extension of the Me Generation, where so many of the mumblecore movies feature inert characters seemingly paralyzed by their inability to make decisions, completely incapable of articulating their thoughts, featuring a heavy use of improvisation, where the naturalistic flair for ambiguity-laden dialogue becomes the artistic centerpiece and takes the place of the movie actually having to be about something meaningful.  Over time, mumblecore scripts have branched out into something more than the inevitable dialogue-heavy Woody Allen style relationship movie, but this remains the inherent focus.  To see what is normally such a flippant attitude from the overly casual mumblecore style take on such deeply complex issues in this film with such stark originality is not only stunning, but revelatory.  It should be stated here and now that this small, low budget American indie film made by a first time director is more enjoyable and possibly even better than most all of the more heavily acclaimed features playing in Competition at Cannes every year. 

The premise of the film is a disintegrating marriage between Ethan (Duplass) and Sophie, Elisabeth Moss, who rose to fame as the President’s daughter Zoey Bartlet in The West Wing (1999-2006) before starring as a thoroughly modern woman in Mad Men (2007 – present), who are initially seen in therapy recalling the night they first met, where there was a rush of excitement when they made a spontaneous decision to jump into a stranger’s pool when they thought nobody was at home, only to receive a tongue-lashing from the incensed owner who angrily kicked them out.  When they sneak into the pool and try to relive that same moment years later, hoping to revive some of that lost magic, this time there really is nobody at home, so while they’re floating in the water waiting for the inevitable to come, it never does, as instead nothing happens.  Realizing they only made fools of themselves, as time has altered the nature of their relationship, they are now seeking help to rebuild shattered trust issues by working with a non-traditional therapist (Ted Danson) who suggests they spend a secluded weekend together in a remote Northern California location where they can get a fresh start on their relationship.  The estate couldn’t be more luxurious, an immense manor, giant swimming pool, and fully equipped guest house set against the elaborate inner gardens with expansive views of the rolling hills of the area.  Immediately they sense a renewed vibe in the air, free from all distractions, where here they can concentrate just on each other, which has an alluring appeal to it, as if under the potent spell of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  As they explore the grounds, their curiosity gets the better of them, where as they visit the guest cottage, there is a sudden surge of romantic energy that feels almost too good to be true.  Even more surprising, Ethan claims none of this ever happened, that he was asleep in the main house the whole time.  After a bit of finger pointing, suggesting bad jokes are in poor taste, they soon realize that each one encounters an “other” version of their partner when visiting the guest house alone, a more idealized version of what they wished their partner would be like.  While this freaks out Ethan, particularly the idea that this “other” Ethan is sleeping with his wife and doing a better job of it, while Sophie is more open to the idea and embraces this “other” version of Ethan, as he’s able to verbally communicate all the things that have been missing in their relationship, becoming fascinated with this new development.  But the more Sophie accepts the idea, the more Ethan feels like the odd man out, developing a claustrophobic rush of low self-esteem and paranoia.

While we have seen this sort of thing before, most recently in François Ozon’s In the House (Dans La Maison) (2012), where a student’s writing exercise conjures up sparks in the imagination of a bored professor reading the composition, where the fiction of the written page suddenly takes on a life of its own, coming alive to the reader, exploring the obsessive nature of the reader himself, literally taking him inside the home of a family he never knew, where suddenly he becomes a passive viewer watching their lives unfold through the meticulous detail of the writer.  This seamless blend of fiction and fantasy has been an Ozon attribute throughout his career.  Perhaps more exactly, it resembles a similar game being played in Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau) (1974), one of the foundations of modern experimental cinema, playfully altering the narrative scope of films where real life intersects with theater, rehearsal, memory, dreams, imagination, time, and even hallucination, each one altering the audience’s perception of what they see onscreen.  While this wonderment in Céline and Julie is expressed through a kind of Alice in Wonderland down the rabbit hole dream fantasia, never knowing what to expect, we follow each character as they enter an old Parisian mansion, finding themselves trapped in one of the roles in a play within a play, an old costume drama that exists in its own continuously repeating sense of time, where each entry into the house produces slightly altered clues and changing events.  In each of these films, this phantasmagoric universe existing side by side with their own lives is a puzzle play that explores a world of liberating possibilities, breaking free of conventionality and often suffocating restrictions from a completely ordered society.  This use of doubles and triples has a way of scrutinizing the existing reality, commenting upon its obvious limitations while playing into fantasies of wish fulfillment, as how much significance should this play in our lives, where we can dream the lives we wish we were living, but how disappointed is it to then discover we’re trapped in another world that fails to live up to that degree of intensity and idealized happiness?  This is a clever means of exploring an existing relationship, where the fantasy world interacts with the real, becoming tainted with the same fears and paranoia, poisoning the waters, so to speak, while also clarifying the extreme degrees of separation.  Like Kubrick’s EYES WIDE SHUT (1999), it often takes a meandering journey into the unknown to offer insight into the world we do live in, where we routinely lose sight of the important values in relationships that end up meaning the most.  People thoughtlessly throw these core principles away all the time in pursuit of quick fixes and false notions of happiness, but holding onto them is the key, not being fooled by the illusion of “fool’s gold,” that there’s always some better world out there just waiting for you, as the curtain closes to the sounds of the Mamas & Papas - Dedicated To The One I Love - YouTube (2:07).

Your Sister's Sister

YOUR SISTER’S SISTER          C+              

USA  (90 mi)  2011  d:  Lynn Shelton 

Think of this as a Mumblecore version of ON GOLDEN POND (1981), where younger twenty-somethings seek out the remote tranquility of the Pacific Northwest region to work out their personal issues, while the most prominent feature of the film is the exquisite use of locations in Seattle’s Puget Sound region, especially the isolation of the nearby islands which is beautifully photographed by Benjamin Kasulke.  Shot very quickly over the course of 12 days, the film is extremely well directed, as the carefully composed shots couldn’t be more intimate, where the changing focus between the three main characters is kept in fluid motion, where the camera is always at the center of attention.  The film is almost completely improvised, where what one hopes for is a certain artistic freshness, a feeling of naturalness and authenticity, which to its credit is certainly there, but the downside is the characters continue to talk in circular motion, continually repeating the same themes, never really getting under the surface of any of the characters.  Often it’s painful to listen to the characters struggle for some semblance of having something important to say, where more often than not they never really find it.  Unlike the Mike Leigh improvisational method, this story does not evolve out of rehearsals, where characters are already comfortable in their skin, instead all remain skittishly uncomfortable, where the main storyline is imposed upon them rather than developed from them.  In this case, it makes all the difference in the world, as the basic outline of the overall narrative structure remains in place, where the characters simply attempt to navigate their way through the emotional issues. 

Mark Duplass from Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) and Shelton’s earlier HUMPDAY (2009) is Jack, the perennial unemployed drifter who remains dissatisfied with the emptiness and moral vacuum of whatever hand he’s dealt, yet who finds others equally as pathetic, even as they tout their successes.  Emily Blunt is Iris, his best friend, never better than in Pawel Pawlikowski’s MY SUMMER OF LOVE (2004), but her European accent and manner feel woefully out of place here, where she ruins the chemistry in nearly every scene, often in the way she uncomfortably needs to be the center of attention, where she obviously needs to work out her own issues, as she couldn’t be more of a sourpuss, draining whatever life or energy is in the air.  Rosemarie DeWitt, from Jonathan Demme’s RACHEL GETTING MARRIED (2008), is the revelation as Iris’s sister Hannah, a last minute fill-in for Rachel Weisz who was forced to drop out due to scheduling delays and ends up being the most appealingly honest of the three characters.  The story begins with an all too familiar example of theater of discomfort, where a small gathering meets to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the death of Jack’s brother, where after the typical laudatory words, Jack’s had enough and sets the record straight, sending a chilling silence through the room.  Iris thinks the best thing he needs is some space to clear his head and recommends her family’s lakeside cabin on a nearby island, just a bike ride and ferry boat crossing away.  The idyllic, heavily forested island location couldn’t be more picture perfect, including the glass widows overlooking the lake, where the musical score by Vince Smith elegantly underscores the captivating beauty, but Jack’s arrival in the middle of the night is more than a little awkward, as someone’s already there.  It turns out to be Hannah, where both appear to be more pissed off than annoyed at the unexpected arrival of someone else, as each seemed to be looking forward to a little soul searching in the solitude of the moment.

Nonetheless, Hannah’s outspoken nature is immediately appealing, where she’s made some major, life-altering decisions of late, yet she doesn’t wallow in her misfortunes and whine and bitch, like Iris, instead she brings out a bottle of tequila and starts downing shots.  She and Jack are instant chemistry, where alcohol and inappropriate sex make perfect sense to these characters, only to regret it in the morning when Emily arrives.  While Jack is for hiding the obvious, Hannah is not so sure, as keeping secrets from sisters is usually not advisable.  The different accents between sisters needs to be narratively explained, as Blunt’s British accent as well as her overly needy, self-centeredness takes some getting used to, as her presence instantly changes the dynamic for the worse.  The refreshing openness of the first night spontaneity is immediately evaporated, replaced by Iris’s indulgent inclination to dramatically overact, showing no sense of humor whatsoever, taking herself so seriously, altering the previously understated, often comical balance.  By the time she finds out what happened, she mopes around in an extended pout, feeling sorry for herself, basically unable to speak, perhaps most upset that she was actually upstaged by her older sister.  Despite the casting imbalance issue and the improvisational meandering, the fluid pace never wavers, even as the characters occasionally flounder in their self-imposed misery.  The ultimate irony in these misery-loves-company movies is the stunning absence of work, where these characters have all the time in the world to live in such an idyllic natural paradise, and then have the nerve to grumble and moan about their lives, usually starting with each other.  The structure of the filming couldn’t be more solid, as each sequence progresses naturally into the next, weaving in and out of each others pitiful lives, where the stillness of the gorgeous landscape stands in stark contrast to the muddled lives of small-minded humans.  

Safety Not Guaranteed

SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED         B                     

USA  (86 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Colin Trevorrow                    Official site

Another example of what you can do with a sense of humor and a bare-bones budget, this is a Sundance film released with very little fanfare, so little was expected out of this surprisingly obscure film, playing in very few theater outlets.  Set in the Pacific Northwest, editors for Seattle magazine are taken aback by the near absent response for story ideas from new interns, so one of the writers pitches his idea.  Jeff (Jake M. Johnson) suggests checking out the guy who ran a classified ad searching for a possibly armed time traveling partner, claiming he’s done it once before, but “safety not guaranteed.”  Grabbing two new interns, “the lesbian and the Indian,” Darius (Aubrey Plaza) and Arnau (Karan Soni), they’re off on a road journey examining the implications of the existence of time travel, while really undergoing potential shifts in their own cosmic existence.  As is, Jeff is an obnoxious, overbearing frat boy guy, Arnau is a geek never without his laptop, while Darius is an internally damaged Goth girl where morose and downbeat are her regular moods.  Their destination is an oceanside town halfway to the Oregon border (actually shot in Ocean Shores, Washington), a sleepy community that thrives on an equal balance of timeshare condos and endless miles of commercially undeveloped beach, a place with enough sand that you’re allowed to drive your car on the beach.  Staking out the post office box (where the first man to enter the Post Office is the actual man who originally placed the ad), it’s here they track down Kenneth, Mark Duplass, actor and producer of Mumblecore films, known for playing less than fully mature characters, which suits him just fine here, as he’s an ordinary grocery store clerk hiding the fact that he’s really a paranoid recluse who believes the government is always after him.  After Jeff makes an ass of himself trying to convey a feigned interest in the ad, it’s clear he’s really just an ass, so Kenneth tells him to take a hike.  As Arnau needs constant guidance and instruction and is incapable of doing anything on his own, it should have been obvious that Darius was the right choice all along, as clearly her edgy sneer towards anything mainstream suggests she’s more inclined to accept someone off the fringe.     

 

Darius’s uncanny, laser beam focus on the mission at hand not only grabs Kenneth’s attention Safety Not Guaranteed - film clip "Grocery store ... YouTube (1:21), but establishes the gutsy, somewhat off the wall tone of the film, where the viewer doesn’t really know what to expect.  What is evident is Jeff’s intention to let the interns do all the work while he scopes out an old high school flame (Jenica Bergere) living in the vicinity, where he lets slip that his idea behind this trip is more a vacation than a work assignment, as he’s never once seen writing anything.  This opens the door for side trips, where each character ends up chasing some ambiguous, still undefined dream, perhaps overcoming some past regret that has remained stuck, frozen in time, forever locked in adolescent secrecy due to the complications of adulthood.  For Jeff, his misogynist, womanizing behavior brings him quickies but no real satisfaction, where he secretly dreams of more than just a short term relationship.  To this end, he’s bound and determined to pry that laptop out of Arnau’s hands and get him laid, as that’s the first step to adulthood.  The magic cure?—ply the poor bastard with plenty of alcohol to get his nerve up, as that’s apparently the American way if you follow the drunken misadventures of the HANGOVER movies, where the collective IQ of the American male is continually plunging lower and lower.  But in the La-La Land of movies, there’s always women game for this kind of fun, where sure enough, Jeff and Arnau find some underage girls standing outside the liquor store, apparently all that’s needed, that and a few recreation drugs on hand, to put all of them together in a trippy montage through an amusement park, where life is a fun-filled adventure, culminating with first-time sex where Arnau is likely too blitzed to even remember anything.   

Darius, meanwhile, stays on point, taking an interest in both Kenneth and his wild-eyed project, where he continually gets sidetracked and takes a strangely meandering route to an ever-elusive dream of his own that seems fragile, tentative, hindering on so many undisclosed tangibles that it could just as easily be slipping away. Aubrey Plaza played a minor role as Depressed Debbie, the girl in tap dancing therapy for suicide intervention in Damsels in Distress (2011), but here she carries this picture as the most interesting character in the film, which doesn’t become apparent right away.  First, Darius and Kenneth have to undergo serious time traveling basic training, which resembles a visit to a paintball arcade, but they practice shooting and stamina techniques, becoming more in synch with one another, until lo and behold, to her surprise she quickly discovers there really are government agent guys following Kenneth.  While the boys are convinced the guy is delusional, cut and dry, she begins seeing certain truths about him that lead to a bigger picture, where what he really keeps so hidden away from others is his friendly nature and overall likeability, as he’s a sweet guy that appears to take great pains not to place her or anybody else in harm’s way.  Because that’s so difficult, as people get hurt so easily, he tends to shy away into a reclusive world.  For a girl that tends to believe in the worst, having been let down so often in her life, Kenneth seems much the same way, where the whole idea behind this mission all along was perhaps to fix something that might have made a difference, where really his intentions are motivated by the best in human nature, where feelings of faith take on a science fiction aspect, as they are so foreign to how some human beings operate.  What it really comes down to is the capacity to trust someone, something neither have never been able to feel in their short lifetimes, for good reasons apparently, but the conditions are never ideal or perfect, just like a time travel liftoff, where the question becomes:  are they ready for it now?  This clever narrative written by Derrek Connolly delves into the insecurities that both keep people apart and also join them together, as they’re part and parcel of the same thing, where in this film time traveling becomes the integral part of taking that leap of faith in being human.   

Note – the original ad ran exactly as is in a survivalist magazine Backwoods Home in the mid 1990’s, eventually discovered on the Internet, giving rise to parodies and jokes.  Screenwriter Derek Connolly is a former intern on Saturday Night Live, where he discovered the ad in 2007, growing curious ever since about what kind of person would place such an ad, and also who would answer it?