THERE THERE (C-minus) - Maybe it's time for a reassessment, to sit back and judge whether Andrew Bujalski has been a good filmmaker all along or if we've cut him too much slack. Has he been treading water until finally producing this bland, empty treatise on relationships? Is he just another fauxteur?
Bujalski splashed 20 years ago with "Funny Ha Ha" and established his Mumblecore cred with "Mutual Appreciation," in which he also co-starred with Justin Rice in a low-key love triangle. It took him a false start and eight years to put together "Computer Chess," his masterful homage to the 1980s computer era. It was understated and keenly observed.
Since then, he managed a "quiet triumph" in 2016 with another love triangle, "Results," blessed with his first major-league cast. But he stumbled two years later with the sloppy and unfocused "Support the Girls." And now, he takes an already stale COVID gimmick -- shooting actors alone and splicing them together via the editing process -- and makes his most unimaginative and annoying movie yet, "There There," a series of six barely connected vignettes.
Here he has another strong cast, in particular TV veteran Lennie James (above) and indie hall-of-famer Lili Taylor (below), but his attempt at slicing and dicing the nuances of relationships comes off as stagey and at times tone-deaf. James and Taylor start us off with two middle-aged adults talking through the aftermath of their first night in the sack, in the harsh daylight, seguing quickly from "that was amazing" to "do we have a shot at making this work?" It's an interesting concept, and both actors are up to the challenge, but Bujalski's script has a few potholes in it, and the visual gimmick becomes too distracting.
Some may not know going in (or care) that Bujalski shot every actor separately, so that in each of the two-person stories, each actor is essentially talking to an iPhone. And the actors are blocked in ways that seem unnatural and which expand and contract distances artificially. And by the end of the movie, you'll find it absolutely bizarre that these characters are sitting in schools, restaurants or bars and yet a third person never materializes, even tangentially.
What synergy Taylor and James manage to concoct in that opening sequence will gradually dissipate as characters come and go throughout the movie. The second piece has Taylor's character riffing over coffee with her AA sponsor, in a conversation that swerves into a shaggy-dog tale about Taylor's previous AA sponsor, who believed in aliens. Believe it or not, this is the second best of the scenarios. But then the AA sponsor takes over in a parent-teacher conference complaining about the teacher allowing her teenage son to download porn while in class. This bitter, angry exchange exudes macho bunk, a sort of tribute to David Mamet or Neil Labute.
And then Bujalski drives this off a cliff. He abandons the thread of having one of the characters continue on to the next scene. Instead, we get Jason Schwartzman (looking puffy) as a lawyer on the phone to his tech-bro client, a rambling excursion into minutiae. But this is high art compared to the next scene, in which Schwartzman is visited in bed one night by his father's ghost. (I mean, really, how do you manage to waste Jason Schwartzman?)
Then, finally, James' lothario reappears for a rap session in the bar he owns with the high school teacher. The dialogue can be sexy at times, but too often -- particularly during the woman's climactic monologue -- the dialogue is over-written. You end up with a 20-something woman talking like a 45-year-old screenwriter, with hints of the worst of late-period Woody Allen.
By that point, it's clear that there isn't a great point being made. And when the camerawork is so uninspired and the visuals so flat, you realize that Bujalski has literally phoned it in. Next time you think you have a good idea, polish the script a little more. That will give you time for the latest COVID surge to subside, and you'll be able to put two actors in a room together, like a proper movie.
BONUS TRACK
Between each scene, Bujalski cleanses the palate with a musical interlude by Jon Natchez from the band War on Drugs. Natchez flashes talent on a bunch of different instruments (and in one instance found objects), producing a lovely ambience that deserves a better movie. I don't see samples online. NPR has a Tiny Desk sampling from his full band here. And here is the next best thing to the "There There" music, some of Natchez's soundtrack work for the film "Luzzu":
No comments:
Post a Comment