4/27/14: It Takes a Village to Raise a Curtis

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Aaron Jungels, Adele Parker, awkward kids, based on a true story, bohemian lifestyle, Breakfast with Curtis, cinema, coming of age, Curtis, David A. Parker, dramadies, eccentric people, feuding neighbors, film reviews, films, independent films, indie comedies, Jonah Parker, Laura Colella, Movies, Syd, Theo Green, Virginia Laffey, writer-director-actor, Yvonne Parker

Unless you happen to live atop a flag pole or at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, chances are good that you’ve had neighbors at some point in the past. Whether you tend to fall more on the Flintstones’ side (love thy neighbor) or the Sawyers’ side (brain thy neighbor with a mallet) is completely up to you, of course: personally, I tend to be Team Sawyer, so you’d best have an invite if you come knocking. For many folks, however, interacting with and getting to know their neighbors is an integral part of what it means to be a good citizen, a way of bringing humanity closer while strengthening the necessary social bonds that help us all pull together in times of crises. I get that…I really do. It’s always a good idea to know who lives nearby, especially if you’re the kind of person who relies on the kindness of strangers for things like lawn mowers, cups of sugar and hedge clippers. What if, however, your next-door-neighbors are a bunch of hippy-dippy pains-in-the-asses? In that case, you might very well end up with a situation like Breakfast with Curtis (2012), writer/director/actor Laura Colella’s most recent film.

The film begins “five years ago,” with the inciting incident that touches off the neighborly feud: young Curtis (Gideon Parker) throws a rock at his neighbor’s cat. Said neighbor, Syd (Theo Green) is a bit of a hippy hothead and threatens to crush Curtis’ skull. Needless to say, Curtis’ father, Simon (David A. Parker), isn’t thrilled with this plan and comes around to tell Syd and his wife, Pirate (Adele Parker) to stay the hell away from him and his family. Five years later, Curtis (Jonah Parker) is now 14 and he’s one of those stereotypically unhappy movie kids that never speaks, preferring to communicate by a complicated series of sighs and disappointed glances. He seems to be completely withdrawn from his family (and life in general, it seems) but this all changes (of course) when Syd has a change of heart and decides to try to bring Curtis into the fold via a videography project. As Curtis and Syd begin to spend more and more time together, the boy begins to come out of his shell and even (gasp!) smiles at one point…he’s cured! In the meantime, as Curtis is getting his life on track, Simon and his wife, Sylvie (Virginia Laffey), try to reconcile their former friendship with Syd, Pirate and their quirky housemates, Frenchy (Aaron Jungels), Paola (Colella) and Sadie (Yvonne Parker). Will Curtis be able to navigate the stormy seas of adolescence? Will Simon and Sylvie ever be able to recapture those fabled “Tequila Summers” of yore? Will Syd ever shut up?

Right off the bat, it helps to know a few things about the film. For one thing, the movie was shot in Colella’s own house and the characters are actually based on her own housemates and their (apparently) once contentious relationship with their own next-door neighbors. The cast is made up of a mixture of non-actors and professionals (at least to the extent that they’ve appeared in Colella’s other independent features), although the actual actors are playing different roles than their real-life counterparts. As such, the performances in the film tend to be a mixed-bag. Theo Green is a force of nature as Syd, resembling a slightly older, more disheveled Weird Al Yankovic but he’s pretty inconsistent: there are times when he’s able to bulldoze the audience into submission although, just as frequently, his delivery is awkward and halting. Jonah Parker isn’t given much to do, as Curtis, but there’s nothing particularly wrong with his performance: we’ve seen a hundred characters like this in indie comedies/dramas/dramadies over the past 15 years and Parker does no worse (or necessarily better) than the others. The rest of the cast, including director Colella, acquit themselves just fine, with one glaring exception: Yvonne Parker is absolutely painful as Sadie. Her dialogue tends to be trite and her delivery/performance is irritating and tedious, exemplifying the very worst aspects of non-actors in professional productions. While the other performances may be a bit unpolished, from time to time, Parker is consistently terrible.

Uneven performances notwithstanding, my biggest issue with Breakfast with Curtis tends to be its relative lack of focus and, occasionally, confusing story elements. For much of the film’s running time, it’s exceptionally difficult to get any real sense for who these characters are and how they’re all connected together. It wasn’t made clear until much later in the film, for example, that the people living in Syd’s house are actually several different groups: for a while, I assumed they were all related, which made some of the (assumed) sexual pairings come across as a little confusing, to say the least. I don’t mean to imply that a genealogy chart is required, of course, but the film seems to assume that we’re all on the same page from the jump, when I obviously wasn’t.

There are also story elements that seem rather undeveloped, sometimes to confusing effect. In one instance, a female visitor shows up at Syd’s house, is treated like a long-lost relative and seems to engage in a threesome with Frenchy and Paola, yet is never introduced or affects the film in any noticeable way. There’s also some unnecessary vagueness regarding the nature of Simon and Sylvie’s former friendship with Syd and the others: at one point, there seems to be a strong inference that they were all swingers. Were they? Does that actually have any bearing on the plot? Should it? As someone who not only strives to pay pretty close attention while watching films but also takes notes, I’m particularly confused by my inability to answer these questions. The only conclusion I can reach is that the answers were never provided. Small issues, perhaps, but the more time I spend confused, the less time I spent invested in the actual film.

Which, ultimately, is a bit of a shame, since the movie isn’t bad, even if it is rough. Everything has an amiable, shaggy-dog quality that makes it eminently watchable, even when it begins to come off the wheels. It would have been nice to have Syd say something profound, at some point (at any point, really), but Theo Green is charismatic enough that the character comes across as eccentric rather than haranguing.  Jungels and Colella have good chemistry together and there are plenty of charming scenes to be found (the “ladies-only” birthday party, where Frenchy dresses in drag, is a particular highlight and a really lovely scene, in general). I was also a big fan of the film’s color palette, finding the warm and primary color choices to be good ones, bringing a vibrancy to the proceedings that are sometimes lost in other indie films that favor drab tones and colors.

At no point, however, does the film ever seem to have any real forward momentum: the stakes are consistently low and there never seems to be any sense of “danger” whatsoever. Even the conflict between the neighbors seems to be largely forgotten after the opening: when Curtis’ parents find out that Syd wants him to help with his project, they both think it’s a great idea and encourage him to go for it. The Hatfields and the McCoys, they ain’t. In a cinematic landscape where these kind of coming-of-age dramadies are as numerous as grains of sand on the beach (I must have seen at least two dozen over the past three or four years), Breakfast with Curtis just doesn’t do enough to stand out from the crowd. It’s amiable and easy-going, sure, with a nice message and a good heart. Sometimes, however, that’s just not quite good enough.

2/12/14: We All Write Our Histories

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1940s-era, actor-director, based on a book, based on a true story, Big Night, bohemian lifestyle, character dramas, cinema, drama, Film, film reviews, homeless, Ian Holm, Joe Gould, Joe Gould's Secret, Joe Mitchell, journalist, mental illness, Movies, New York City, New Yorker magazine, oral history, Patricia Clarkson, Professor Seagull, sad, Stanley Tucci, Steve Martin, Susan Sarandon, The Imposters, the Joe Gould Fund

Our impressions of people, as knee-jerk as they may be, often guide our interactions with them. If we perceive someone as somehow powerful, weak, gentle or assertive, we tend to treat them, and react to them, as such. Nowhere is this more evident than with our daily interactions with the homeless and destitute. In many cases, all we have to go on are surface impressions, since most never get close enough (emotionally rather than physically, as it were) to get to know somehow in these situations. If we see an obviously homeless individual dressed in multiple layers, pushing a loaded shopping cart down the road and carrying on both halves of a conversation with themselves…well, we do tend to think that these individuals might have a screw or two loose. This is only a surface impression, of course, but that’s often all that we get.

But what if we actually got to know one of these individuals, to care about them? What if we realized that there’s not a huge chasm that separates us but a small crack, a crack just large enough to fall through? Stanley Tucci’s Joe Gould’s Secret (based on the magazine article and book by Joe Mitchell) takes just such a look at just such a person, in this case the titular Joe Gould (Ian Holm).

Tucci portrays Joe Mitchell, a ’40s-era writer for the New Yorker who has begun to grow tired of “puff-pieces” and yearns to write something weightier, something more impactful. This something, in the form of Joe Gould, wanders into the diner where Joe is eating and proceeds to upend his life in a charmingly whimsical manner. Mitchell gets to know Gould, a neighborhood eccentric who is constantly collecting for the Joe Gould Fund, while in the middle of a lifelong project: an oral history of the world that is several times longer than the bible. In the meantime, Mitchell meets many of the locals who care about (and for) Gould, including a generous gallery owner (Patricia Clarkson) and Alice (Susan Sarandon), a kindly artist who seems to take a special interest in Gould.

Gould can be the life of the party (sometimes literally, as in one scene where he strips to his underwear and sings songs from atop a table) but he is also completely obsessive and prone to nasty mood swings. He latches onto Mitchell with both hands. Mitchell, for his part, is initially very open to Gould: after all, Gould is the source of Mitchell’s extremely popular “Professor Seagull” article and Mitchell genuinely likes him. Once Gould has begun to pop into Mitchell’s office for daily, lengthy b.s. sessions, however, poor Joe has definitely begun to wear out his welcome. Mitchell hangs on through it all, however, his eyes on the (possibly) mythical oral history that Gould dangles just out of reach like a phantom carrot. Will Mitchell be able to keep his cool? Is Joe Gould an eccentric, fractured genius or a kindly madman? Does the oral history, in fact, actually exist?

Aside from being an exceptionally gifted actor, Stanley Tucci has also proven himself to be quite the writer/director. Joe Gould’s Secret is Tucci’s third directorial effort, following his stellar debut Big Night (1996) and the energetic screwball comedy The Imposters (1998), and is just as accomplished, technically, as those films with the added pathos inherent to the film’s subject matter. At its heart, Joe Gould’s Secret is a deeply sad film, even before the truly sad resolution. This is a film about the outcasts of society, those who’ve fallen through the cracks and exist on a fringe that most of us only visit from time to time. The film never gives easy answers to the question of Joe Gould’s sanity (or lack thereof). We certainly see enough evidence to make the assumption that Gould is mentally imbalanced, possibly schizophrenic and maybe a little dangerous. We also see him as a friendly, loud, kindly eccentric, however, so the picture is never as lop-sided as one or the other.

Joe Gould’s Secret is a very quiet, solemn film, which certainly befits this look back into the gauzy past of New York City. Since the film is, essentially, a two-person show (Tucci and Holm), there’s a tendency for the proceedings to occasionally take on the feel of a stage-play. To be honest, this really isn’t to the film’s detriment, since this impression certainly puts the audience’s attention where it belongs: on the excellent performances of Tucci and Holm. Holm is certainly the flashier of the two roles, given to lusty ranting, raving and carrying-on counter-balanced by quietly devastating moments that really drive home the character. The scene where Holm stands naked, in a line to enter a homeless shelter, is so raw and powerful that it nearly grinds the film to a complete stop. When Holm is on (which is most of the film), he’s an awe-inspiring blend of cocksure absurdity and blistered vulnerability. It’s an intense performance that only occasionally veers into the “actorly.”

If Tucci’s performance is quieter and more reserved, however, it’s no less inherently powerful or commanding then Holm’s. Tucci is saddled with the unenviable task of being the guy who has to spoil the party: everyone else gets to deal with Gould’s hijinks on their own timeframe but poor Mitchell has to be the one to show him to the door. Tucci’s perfect combination of sad-sack acceptance (pretty much a Tucci trademark thanks to those bottomless eyes of his), eager interest and gentle sarcasm (there are many points where he seemed to be channeling none other than Mark Twain) are key to the film’s success: if the actor playing Mitchell had been any less genuine or sympathetic, Gould would have come across as insufferable rather than tragic. In a film where not much happens, Holm and Tucci continually find ways to make their interactions kinetic.

The rest of the cast fares well, although no one really gets to hold a candle next to the two leads. Sarandon is excellent in the kind of supportive, slightly bemused role that should probably best be called “Sarandon-esque” from now on. There are few actors working who portray genuine warmth and love in the way that Sarandon does and the film is all the richer for her performance. One of the film’s biggest surprises (and pleasures) is Steve Martin’s cameo as a partner in a publishing house. He only gets one scene, where Mitchell tries to introduce him to the increasingly squirrely Gould but it’s a helluva scene: beginning comically, the scene gradually to seem more and more desperate and sad. Martin’s Charlie Duell honestly likes Gould but realizes, as the conversation continues, that Gould is already a lost soul. The sad, sweet, bemused expression on Martin’s face is testament to the fact that this guy just doesn’t act enough nowadays.

Joe Gould’s Secret is a quiet, sincere film that becomes exceptionally powerful and sad in the final half. There’s a moment, at the end, where Mitchell goes to visit Gould in the Pilgrim State Mental Hospital. He finds Gould to be calmer, obviously saner but much less alive. Even though Mitchell knows that this is, ultimately, better for Gould, the pain and sorrow in his eyes is unmistakable. No matter how infuriating he might be, Mitchell is witnessing the death of his friend’s spirit before his very eyes. The final shot of Gould shuffling away from Mitchell, clad only in a hospital gown, is almost unbearably sad, a real gut-punch.

A postscript at the end of the film informs us that Joe Mitchell published his book, “Joe Gould’s Secret,” in 1964. For the next 32 years, he went into the office everyday but never wrote another article. I don’t mind saying that I just can’t quite shake that thought from my head. It’s to the film’s immense credit that I don’t really want to, either.