Don't Know Much
Me and You and Everyone We Know
If I had never seen a film by D.W. Griffith, Antonioni, Ozu, John Ford, Vincente Minnelli or Prince, I might have been impressed by performance artist Miranda July's Cannes award-winning directorial debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know. It's contemporary high art, made as though no cinema about human experience had ever existed-as if being wimpy and sweet about this thing called life was justified by the "indie" filmmaking label. Admittedly, July's simplified comedy-drama-a cine-cartoon-is not offensive like Jonathan Carouette's neurotic exhibitionism in Tarnation. But there's a similar amateur's arrogance in both; they threaten to drag the cinema back to an emotional naivete that sophisticated filmmakers usually transcend.
Starting with a marital dispute that turns grotesque when a father asks his pre-teen sons to witness his petulant-horrific act of self-mutilation, it's clear that July is going after standard Downtown shock and poignancy. She transfers from art and video galleries that category of performance art that prizes its own banality, as if the emphasis on dry, typical behavior (and calculated outrage) somehow was a subversion of bourgeois awareness. She uses obvious, self-conscious gimmicks such as repeated phrases ("Are you following us?" "I'm not following you"), doubled motifs (a hope-chest washcloth, an after-sex washcloth), and rhyming incidents (signs in windows, codes on the internet), yet July's depiction of mundane living is never surprising. She combines Gee-Whiz! with Durn-It! After 100 years of less precious but revelatory filmmaking, this alt-cinema is inane.
July imagines a neighborhood patchwork of lonely kids and adults who are venturesome yet awkward about their need for affection. That scarred father is Richard (John Hawkes), raising his sons in suburbia. Young Robby (Brandon Ratcliff) surfs adult chat rooms on the web while his brother Peter (Miles Thompson) submits to two teenage teases (Natasha Slayton, Najarra Townsend). Another lonely teen, Sylvie (Carlie Westerman), obsessively collects household products to build her trousseau. Presentation of these bland, pathetic sub?Todd Solondz anxieties is typified by the scene where July herself (playing a video-performance artist who also works as a senior-citizens chauffeur) flubs a flirtation with Richard. She retreats to her car, where she scrawls the F-word on her own windshield. It's not so much a reflex as an italicized perception of oddly recognizable embarrassment. But that's as deep as July gets. And it's never bewilderingly deep like Napoleon Dynamite. Besides, piquant humility isn't far from self-pity. July's character, Christine Jesperson, is named to represent a superficially Christian notion of Everyman. This is why people avoid performance art.
The idea that every conflicted soul is a performance artist isn't really democratic, just self-congratulatory. July's feature debut lacks the strenuous creativity of Laurie Anderson's stage-to-screen Home of the Brave (1987), a vivacious concert movie and pop rumination buoyed by songs. The only evidence of July's musical background is Richard and Christine's courtship conversation about strolling toward destiny. Its dialog would make a lyrical duet but July wants arty realism-like the scene where she clumsily models two pink shoes marked "You" and "Me."
A couple scenes show July is hip to herself: Christine applies to a local museum for inclusion in an exhibit called Shock and Awe: Images of War 1965-2005. She sharply satirizes grant-world mentality when two curators peruse the video submissions. ("Let me guess, this one's about AIDS?") Yet July herself is formulaic. An intricate montage of anonymous sad sacks driving down a road, helpless while a goldfish in a plastic bag bounces from car to car to oblivion, winds up more serious than deadpan. ("These are its last moments of life. Maybe we should say something.") It's calculated naivete. So is the framed painting of a bird that Richard first stashes among bushes, then in a tree-Art plus.
Nature with an image of a child reflected in the glass. To invoke David Lynch as a description of this manufactured eccentricity is to demolish July's brightest ideas as secondhand.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Directed by Mary McGuckian
Unfortunately, no Cannes fanfare greeted Mary McGuckian's film version of Thornton Wilder's great novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It's a cumbersome fusion of modern spiritual anxiety with the now-unfashionable tropes of epic and literary tact. Nobody knows how to make such movies anymore, but at least McGuckian's use of a classic avoids wimpy indie sentimentality. Easy as it is to scoff at DeNiro and Keitel and a grandly tragic Kathy Bates impersonating 18th-century Peruvians, the reason for their effort is undeniable. Wilder's story examines an existential catastrophe whose 9/11 parallels make July's debut seem solipsistic (that is, Sundancey). McGuckian's flashback structure seems intoxicated with cinematic narration, the great tradition of which July seems ignorant. McGuckian preserves Wilder's vision, even if only by illustrating his text: "Now he discovered the secret from which one never recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other."
That's real wisdom. Just hearing it rattles me and you and everyone we know.
Heights
directed By Chris Terrio
Director Chris Terrio gives a guided tour of Chelsea throughout Heights: views from the top of the Maritime Hotel, Rufus Wainwright at the Big Cup, a subway mugging, even a contemplation of the diety via a London Terrace water tower. But this drama of theater folk and artists interacting with journalists is actually set in Coincidence City. Glenn Close stars as a Shakespearean diva whose daughter (Elizabeth Banks) is married to a young Wall Streeter (James Marsden) hiding both his gay past and his current gay philandering with a cater-waiter neighbor (Jesse Bradford), who is also auditioning to be Close's boy toy. Call it an East Coast Crash for the selfish maneuvers of faithless urbanites. Terrio's theme is sex, not race. Adapting a play by Amy Fox, he surveys the opportunistic ways middle-class white New Yorkers use sex to social climb, deceive others or anesthetize their loneliness. But it's unclear if Terrio is exposing the duplicity of the freaky art set or merely enjoying/exploiting its bisexual dishonesty as farce. La Close opens the film declaring "We're tepid voyeurs! We can't remember what it's like to be consumed with desire." That's a precept-and a pretense-for a soap opera that's only credible as illicit tourism.