2011 (USA)
Director: Lynn Shelton
Viewed: June 27, 2012
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)
The magnificent, cringe-provoking awkwardness on display in writer-director Lynn Shelton’s 2009 comedy Humpday invited comparisons to mainstream “discomfort comedy” works such as The Office, but the film’s secret weapon was the appealing simplicity of its scenario: What if two straight guys talked themselves into making a gay pornographic film, despite the fact that neither one really wanted to do so? Shelton complicated this high-concept premise with doses of unresolved college-age angst and subtle class envy. She also turned a one-on-one battle of wills into a nasty relationship triangle by adding a third major character, a girlfriend who wobbles between hurt, angry, and baffled in the face of such a nonsensical, sexually confused macho dare. It worked phenomenally better than it had any right to, primarily because Shelton and her performers treated the whole enterprise like a tragicomical high-wire act, studding it with unbearably drawn-out moments of unease, panic, and surrealism.
Shelton leans on a variation on this successful formula in her new feature, Your Sister’s Sister, and once again it pays marvelous dividends. The result is one of the most engaging films of the year thus far, a funny and anguished little tale that commands the viewer’s attention in a manner that no hollow spectacle of digital super-heroics can manage. As in Humpday, there are only three characters that really matter: a man, a woman, and her sister. It’s been one year since unemployed, acerbic Seattleite Jack (Mark Duplass) lost his brother. Jack’s best friend Iris (Emily Blunt) correctly discerns that he still needs to come to terms with the loss and sort out his life. Accordingly, she sends him to her family’s remote cabin on a misty, forest-clad island for some mandated Alone Time.
Unfortunately, Iris’ sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt) is also holed up in said cabin, attempting to clear her head after the disintegration of a long-term relationship. Jack and Hannah circle one another warily, but soon they are commiserating, downing tequila shots, and making a Big Mistake of a, um… coital nature. Naturally, the next morning Iris drops by for a surprise visit, resulting in lots of surreptitious glances, uncomfortable meals, and whispered conversations. Did I mention that Iris happens to be Jack’s dead brother’s ex? And that Hannah is a lesbian?
Duplass, Blunt, and especially DeWitt are all at the top of their game here, conveying the humanity of their characters without showily painting them with faux-humanizing detail. Vitally, each of the three characters is sympathetic when viewed from the right angle, and yet the performers permit peeks at their more blinkered and selfish tendencies. (Even sweet, generous Iris can be a clueless jerk, it turns out.) Duplass is, as always, a bit of an conundrum as a performer. His manner is agreeable and relaxed, but he possesses the sort of asshole unctuousness that only white guys from the urban Northwest can really achieve. Watching Duplass’ Jack clumsily talk his way into the sack with Hannah—and thereafter tap-dance as fast as he can to conceal this tryst from Iris—is vaguely unpleasant, just as it was unpleasant to watch his character break the news of his impending on-screen gay encounter to his girlfriend in Humpday. It’s a disagreeable spectacle, but also undeniably authentic, and even mesmerizing in an absurd sort of way.
Ultimately, Duplass proves adept at utilizing his demeanor for black comic effect, and whether it is a conscious effort or not, it works phenomenally well in Your Sister’s Sister, bouncing off of Blunt and DeWitt’s more polished styles to create deliriously agonizing comedic moments. Shelton’s script is lean and wonderfully structured, all rising emotional stakes and mounting anxiety. It finely balances its pathos between whispered intimacies and wailing histrionics, creating an emotional terrain that feels much like that of a tearful, vicious, real-world argument. Shelton’s latest feature ultimately proves to be a shamelessly absorbing story of family, relationships, secrecy, and sacrifice.
B - It’s too much to assert that Nic (Annette Benning) and Jules’ (Julianne Moore) lesbianism is incidental to the emotional vigor of The Kids Are All Right, given that sexual and gender anxiety undergird many of the story’s conflicts, not to mention that the plot depends on it. However, writer-director Cholodenko uses the upheaval generated when Nice and Jules’ teenaged kids seek out their biological father Paul (Mark Ruffalo) for the purposes of highlighting the universal qualities of middle-class, middle-aged families. The message seems to be, contra Anna Karenina (which the film alludes to), unhappy families all share the same gremlins: resentment, frustration, shame, jealousy, and emotional befuddlement. There’s nothing especially cinematic about Cholodenko’s approach here, aside from one long, devastating close-up of Benning during a moment of traumatic revelation. Fortunately, the nuanced performances carry the film, elevating dialogue that sometime strays into clumsy satire. It is Cholodenko’s talent for finding the wry humor in the strangest places that is most endearing, particularly when it comes to human sexuality, which the film acknowledges is rarely explicable or neat. It’s enough to make one forgive the faintly schematic character to the film’s narrative arc, or its mean-spirited racial digs and hippie-bashing.
B+ - The chilly Ozark landscape of Winter’s Bone is a skuzzy nightmare version of backwoods Middle America, where every family is linked through tangled blood relations and everyone cooks crystal meth. This city boy can’t attest to the authenticity of the rural Missouri portrayed in Debra Granik’s film, but the tone of her direction is such that realism takes a back seat to the mythic resonance of seventeen-year-old Ree’s (Jennifer Lawrence) journey. The film’s depiction of Ree’s materially urgent yet emotionally ambivalent search for her bail-bond-skipping father owes much to noir conventions and the chthonic forays of Greek legend. In this tale, however, the Hero wanders in despairing circles, and her dragons are an empty fridge, a corrupt sheriff, and rotten-toothed relations who value secrecy more than kinship. Lawrence shines, and the estimable John Hawkes’ turn as Ree’s reckless uncle provides jolts of wiry menace and righteous wrath. The script is both frank and admirably subtle, and Granick’s bracingly confident hand relies on expressive touches that lend this regional melodrama the feel of real cinema. Certainly, the ending is garish and absurdly tidy, but there is also unease there, as well as a quiet lamentation for a fallen world.
B- - It’s tempting to dismiss Lee Daniels’ Precious as a miserablist ordeal that puts its protagonist—the obese, illiterate teenage mother whose name serves as the title—through the proverbial wringer in order to elicit vague guilt and sanctimonious tongue-clucking from its audience. The film leans heavily on the conventions of ghetto melodrama, but Precious is both too slight and too poetic to permit hasty categorization. There’s a tinge of knowing fatalism to the film’s despair, no doubt derived in part from the real-life experiences woven into Sapphire’s original novel. Daniels flits between a dizzying array of social and cultural issues, but Precious retains an unsettled, even impressionistic tone that prevents it from descending into preachiness. The film’s formalist flourishes—such as Precious’ (Gabourey Sidibe’s) gauzy fantasies of fame and fortune, or the unexpected use of gospel and R&B to add a fresh twist to familiar narrative situations—mute the asphalt horror and lend credence to the film’s fuzzy, humanistic message. While it’s Sidibe that provides the film with its restless, wounded mood, it’s hard to deny that, Oscar-bait or not, there’s something mesmerizing about sassy comedian Mo’Nique portraying one the most blisteringly vile mothers since Shelley Winters in A Patch of Blue.