March 2008

My Effortless Brilliance (2008, Director: Lynn Shelton): Well, although I haven’t seen it, I think it might be impossible to talk about this film without referencing Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy (2006). Both films feature female directors directing an all-male cast, featuring a musician in a lead role, in stories about lost male friendship and set in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. Except that in the case of My Effortless Brilliance, it’s played mostly (but not only) for laughs.

Sean Nelson is the lead singer of the band Harvey Danger, but he seems born for the screen. In the film he plays Eric Lambert Jones, a semi-successful novelist who is doing readings for his third novel. While in rural eastern Washington, he drives four hours out of his way to drop in on his old friend Dylan (Basil Harris). The film begins two years earlier, with Dylan essentially breaking up with Eric, telling him he’s always been a terrible friend. Eric’s attempt to somehow rekindle the friendship doesn’t go smoothly. He discovers that Dylan is working for a local newspaper and is content living in his cabin in the woods. He also has a new best friend, the laconic Jim (Calvin Reeder) who seems happy to hunt and fish and read nothing more literary than Bukowski. Over the weekend, the trio hang out and drink, with the overeducated city slicker Eric trying his best to fit into this setting. With his round face and wild curls, Sean Nelson plays Eric like the overgrown baby he is, self-absorbed and needy. He is a man who lives mostly in his head and who seems allergic to physical labour. Dylan and his new friend Jim are men of action, who wear plaid workshirts and seem to enjoy splitting wood all day. Just as it looks like Eric has overstayed his welcome, the three get into a drunken conversation that feels remarkably like a real drunken conversation. The end result is the sight of the group of them outside in the middle of the night, hunting a cougar, and then the inevitable hangovers on the morning after.

What I liked about the film was its honesty. Men’s friendships can be pretty difficult to portray. We don’t often have heart to heart conversations and talk about our feelings, but we do express them in oblique ways, and My Effortless Brilliance felt extremely real to me. This is probably due to the fact that Sean Nelson and Basil Harris are real-life friends, and that the script was a collaborative effort between the actors and the director. That is, if there actually was a script. The sense of improvisation is so strong and the film so gorgeously shot that you’ll feel like you’re tagging along on Eric’s weekend in the country.

Official site for the film

(7/10)

Rocket Science (2007, Director: Jeffrey Blitz): This first fictional feature from the director of Oscar-nominated doc Spellbound sounded promising. Fifteen-year-old Hal Hefner (Reece Daniel Thompson) tries to overcome his painful stutter by joining the high school debate squad, spurred by the presence of the lovely but fast-talking Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick). I’m no stranger to the high school nerd makes good comedy, and consider myself a fan, so it’s a little disappointing to have to give this film a so-so review. The problem for me was that I’ve seen this movie done better elsewhere. In fact, the plot is more than a little similar to Thumbsucker (2005), Mike Mills’ feature debut about a teenager who tries to overcome another “handicap” (sucking his thumb) by, among other things, joining the high school debate squad. There’s even a physical resemblance between that film’s star, Lou Taylor Pucci, and the similarly treble-monikered Reece Daniel Thompson. But Thumbsucker was based on a novel by Walter Kirn, and felt more ambitious, not to mention being funnier.

It’s not that Rocket Science isn’t likeable. There is some genuine humour and it’s hard not to root for Hal. But the stuttering isn’t just Hal’s problem. The narrative itself seems to proceed in fits and starts, and by the end, nothing has really happened. Hal has supposedly “found his voice” but he really hasn’t. We’re not really sure whether the debating thing is going to continue, and we’ve never really seen him do his stuff in front of a crowd. The only hint that he’s actually put any work into the research (and his attempts to woo Ginny) are a series of pretty standard montages. I wanted to know what they were talking about. To make things worse, there’s a voiceover that borders on unbearable. It’s not clear whether this is the adult Hal reflecting on his youth, or some all-wise overseer who knows it’s all going to work out. Either way, it was trite and annoying. And while Hal emerges as the most complete character, no one else in the film is fleshed out in any way, with his parents being the most glaring absence. Unfortunately, many of the other characters in the film are nothing more than quirky stereotypes.

Rocket Science is a film that is both familiar and unpredictable, and while this tension could have been a strength, it ended up frustrating me instead. If I recall correctly, the story is a little bit autobiographical, since director Jeffrey Blitz himself suffers from a stutter. I wish that he had trusted more in his own experience and maybe given us a film that didn’t try to play for laughs so much. If he had stripped away a few of the more gimmicky touches and given us a more personal film, I think I would have enjoyed it more.

Buy Rocket Science from Amazon.ca

Buy Rocket Science from Amazon.com

(6/10)