| | Will Oldham, (AKA-ed singer/songwriter Bonnie 'Prince' Billy), and Justin Rice are two among hip indie musicians to star in hip indie movies and turn in solid performances. Part of the charm of Old Joy (featuring Oldham) is its willingness to create space around characters by looking out on the world around them. Part of the problem of the movie is that the out-looking often draws attention to itself. Like Lost In Translation, the movie sets its scope small and focuses on what is essentially one emotion, and builds toward one, almost minor, moment.
Mutual Appreciation (featuring Rice) works sort of similarly, and is overall a better movie. It's semi-hamstrung by the fact that it fits within the "Twenty-Something Slacker" genre, though the movie does not quite deserve the label. (Twenty-somethings agonizing over their directionless-ness in NYC appeal to me less and less the more interesting and fulfilling my life and family in the Northwest become. NYC increasingly seems symbolic of a successful attempt to idolize childless meandering.) Its characters are true to life and lovable in the way that real people are lovable, which is to say all the more so for not being entirely lovable. It fulfills the dramatic dictum to "make an audience care about characters." The second part of that dictum is to then "put those characters in danger." I won't say that there isn't any danger for any of these characters (Old Joy included), but the danger is primarily internal and ordinary.
Now the fact that I enjoyed both of these movies, and Mutual Appreciation in particular, stirs up conflict for me, who oh so recently went on an extended Cormac McCarthy binge. McCarthy, who claims to not understand literature where life is not at stake, does use internal conflict, but only glancingly suggests it in characters threatened by loss of life. Both his drama and the subsequent reflection prompted by it arise out of strong conflict over survival.
Thankfully, there's no reason to really choose between these extremes. I'm of the mind that we ought to take our aesthetic pleasures as they come. However, there's no question that movies like these, light on conflict, tend toward the trite, where big, life-and-death conflicts tend towards grandeur.
Two quick off-shoots:
1) Mutual Appreciation is a story that could never be a novel. Nothing about it would work. It's entirely dependent on the characters as they exist on-screen, which is a great thing for a movie to be.
2) From the Childless NYC thing above: Joyce viewed the Irish Catholic attitude toward birth-control as a "crime against fecundity," by which he ostensibly meant personal and aesthetic fruitfulness. However, I'm more and more convinced of the necessity that artists be reproductively fecund. Of course, I'm not arguing the Catholic approach, but those who've followed Joyce seem to promote crimes against fecund maturity. An artist who hasn't experienced love of his own child and the attending trials, has limited his emotional scope needlessly, and finds little to tie him to the rest of humanity, who bear children prolifically and have for centuries.
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| | Posted 7/27/2007 9:32 AM - 60 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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