At the beginning of Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig's film Frances Ha, Frances is in bed with her roommate and first love, Sophie. Frances says, "Tell me the story of us." Sophie replies, "Again?"
Anyone who's had or lived with children knows how much they need to have family stories told again and again. Stories are our way of affirming our roots, our connections, and in doing so, they soothe and comfort us. Stories are how we make sense of ourselves in the world and among other people. Stories are rituals, and rituals make us feel safe. Psychology 101.
But then there are some stories we tell because we are compelled to, not out of joy, but perhaps out of pain and wonder. This is the stuff of Sarah Polley's genre-bending documentary, Stories We Tell. Genre-bending because it's not strictly a documentary. 40-50% of the footage is real, Polley reported in a post-screening Q & A at LACMA on May 2. Some is shot in the present, some is vintage Super-8, and some is faux Super-8 reconstructions. The documentary includes her siblings' stories as well as a memoir written by her father. And the stories of other players in her mother's life.
The film is essentially about Polley's search to find out the truth of her paternity, and it is also an hommage to the lively spirit of her mother, who died of cancer when Polley was about 11 years old. Polley asserts that the film was not undertaken as a form of therapy, although clearly it was a painful and a therapeutic journey--she described the process as not only unenjoyable, but "tortured." In fact, the process was so intense that Polley had to leave it for a while, and went on to make Take This Waltz (click here for my post on that movie). I can't help but remember a scene from that now, in which the Michelle Williams character meets the Luke Kirby character for a drink and asks him to tell her [the story of] what he would do to her--perhaps one of the sexiest narratives ever on film.)
Stories We Tell works on a personal as well as a universal level, because Polley is, above all, a storyteller herself, and a smart one at that. Her film asserts that all of the characters' perspectives are "subjective and legitimate," to use Polley's words. "It's amazing," she said, "what you find out if you manage to be quiet." She was referring to her need to bite her tongue when siblings were telling their versions of events on camera, when her natural inclination would have been to interrupt and correct with her version. (What a perfect description of family or couples therapy! Inviting family members to listen, reflect.)
Polley's dad's memoir comes out of the paternity revelation, and ironically makes him the writer that his deceased wife had always wanted him to be. Polley confronts the "chaotic, bewildering mess that we try to make sense of" by, ironically, constructing a film that is a refracted melange of past, present, real, and imagined. Structurally, the film is a wondrous mess--an editorial tour de force (kudos to editor Mike Munn). And Polley has managed to tell her own story while making a movie about the act of remembering and storytelling. (Interesting, isn't it, that Polley's first film, Away from Her, was about a woman who had lost her memory to Alzheimer's?) "The story itself was changing because of our telling," Polley told the audience. And so were the storytellers, I would argue.
The process was also interesting because, as the filmmaker, Polley took a stance largely outside of the family players, echoing her childhood role as the youngest (unplanned and almost aborted) and the outsider--her family members had always openly joked about how she didn't resemble any of them. This is most poignant when Polley is sitting alone at a recording engineer's control panel in a studio where her father is reading his memoir on the other side of the glass. She occasionally stops him, asking him to repeat a line here and there (her father, like her mother, was an actor--or at least an aspiring one). It's not clear if she wants a better reading or wants to hear the line again in order to savor it or to process it--likely all of those things. Polley has herself filmed listening to him; she's shaking her leg anxiously. And yet even though Polley distances herself from her clan by directing them, the film ultimately reveals how the experience has brought everyone closer. How much affection there has always been among them. And how much of that was due to the glue of shared love, admiration, and grieving for her mother, who was
neither quiet nor apparently reflective, or who more likely managed to camouflage that side of herself along with her disappointments and her own grief (her first husband had gotten custody of their children after they divorced) with a manic energy, big personality, and joie de vivre.
As Sly sang, "Blood's thicker than mud." And stories are muddy, yet always, in their messy refracted ways, true. Because the truth is always, well, relative....
Be sure to stay for the hilarious coda!
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I saw this wonderful film at a screening last night followed by a Q & A with its director Noah Baumbach, co-writer and star Greta Gerwig (above), and Mickey Sumner (daughter of Sting and Trudie Styler who plays Greta's BFF and her first love), below.
Frances (Gerwig) and Sophie (Sumner) went to Vassar together and now share an apartment in the city. They're like an old married couple. But a fun one. They do everything together except have sex--because they're straight. Frances is, as Gerwig explained, "hopelessly in love with her best friend." As one might imagine, conflict (in terms of plot, anyway) arises when Frances turns down her boyfriend's plea to move in with him, only to have Sophie later move in with her guy, Patch. This isn't exactly a spoiler, because it's at this point that the movie really begins.
Baumbach described the film as "the road movie where nobody went anywhere." He's speaking metaphorically. The film is structured in chapters or segments marked by the various places Frances comes to reside or visit post Sophie. I guess one could call this a coming-of-age story, but somehow coming to age (or Frances' making her ultimate move on her own terms) seems more to the point.
It's hard to not compare the movie to Lena Dunham's series Girls, as the film depicts twenty-somethings (Frances is 27) in New York City navigating relationships and contemporary mores and potential careers. Not to mention that Girls' Adam Driver has a small role in it as one of Frances' roommates over the course of the movie.
Frances' other roommate, Benji (Michael Zegen), describes the two of them as the "undateables." Indeed, the lovely and spirited Frances even manages a weekend in Paris without one French man approaching her. She spends most of the time on her phone, as I once did when I took a trip to Cabo by myself. So her trip resonated for me, even though I had the exact opposite experience alone in Paris in my twenties. Frances exuded the douleur of divorce, after all. Her attempts to connect were in vain, her timing completely off, despite the ecstatic hopefulness (I didn't see it as desperateness) of her impulsivity.
The film has the feel of improvisation, but that was not the case. Gerwig asserted, "There was no playing." Baumbach (below) countered, "There's a lot of room for playing; you just
have to do it with the lines as written." He added, "It was a seriously controlled environment that was set up to make it as free as possible." The average number of takes for each scene was 38!
Baumbach and Gerwig wrote the script together, each writing alternate "chapters" and then trading them.
The film is in black and white. Baumbach said he didn't want it distracted by color, that black and white feels more "immovable." Then he shrugged and admitted, "I just wanted to make a movie in black and white."
And Frances is a seriously free spirit, caught in that awkward transition into what William Blake called Experience (from Innocence), but which we call adulthood. She's not dependent upon her parents; she's full of life and even ambition with regard to her dancing; but that first big love has a way of, well, throwing us off course. Look at Gatsby, the new version of whose story opens next weekend.
In any case, when Frances is good and ready, she dons her pencil skirt and...well, go see for yourself. As Frances puts it, "Sometimes it's good to do what you're supposed to do when you're supposed to do it." (That applies to everything she does in the film, including the impulsive flight to Paris.)
The film is worth just the scene in which Frances sprints to David Bowie. Trust me on this one. Neither Baumbach nor Gerwig has ever been this good, at least in what I've seen so far. They and their movie are eminently dateable!
Here's the trailer (by the way, that's Meryl Streep's daughter Grace Gummer with the long hair):
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Pretty much everyone I've ever mentioned Matthew McConaughey's name to responds that they're not a fan of his. I have to confess that I've felt the same way. But I liked him a lot in Magic Mike (see my piece on that here), and he's even more perfectly cast in Jeff Nichols' third feature, Mud, in which the actor is outstanding. The plot is like a Flannery O'Connor version of Stand By Me crossed with a reverse Fitzcarraldo (by which I mean a boat has to be hauled down from a high place). The cast includes Reese Witherspoon (in a smaller part than you would imagine), Sam Shepard (in a juicy little role), and Nichols regular Michael Shannon. Nichols said that he told the stars, McConaughey and Witherspoon, that their characters would have to bleed outside the scenes that they possessed. And they do, they do. Through the eyes of the astonishing character of Ellis.
Ellis is the shining star of this coming-of-age film; he's full of yearning and a true believer in love. He's played by Tye Sheridan, who was in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. At only age 14, he already has a smoldering intensity. (His father is played by Ray McKinnon, who is the creator of the terrific Sundance series "Rectify.") According to Nichols, who spoke after a screening of the film at LACMA, the film is about love--and I would add also about obsession and delusion. And redemption.
The movie has a gradual build, as Nichols himself (below) admits, because he lets his characters dictate the plotting. He said he wanted the film to be "slow, fluid, elegant." "All of it was supposed to move like a river"--which is its setting. And it does, gracefully, although I have to admit that I had to fight nodding off a few times in the first act--it was a school night, after all. But that slow build ultimately flows to a surprising and satisfying action sequence with a beautiful payoff. (Spoilers ahead!)
"Mud" is McConaughey's character's name, inspired by the Mississippi mud that the film crew was mired in. McConaughey's Mud exemplifies John Irving's Iowa Bob character in The Hotel New Hampshire, who was known for saying, "You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed." Mud's obsession is Juniper (Witherspoon), for the love of whom he's spent most of his life getting into trouble. But now he's killed a man on her account, and he's got to lie low. And so he's camping out in an abandoned boat stuck at the top of a tree. Ellis and his friend Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) encounter and befriend Mud when they attempt to make the boat their own secret hangout.
I haven't seen Nichol's first film, Shotgun Stories, but I did see Take Shelter, which I liked a lot. Nichols describes the latter as a film about love and commitment. It certainly is about Jessica Chastain's character's commitment to her husband (Michael Shannon), who appears to be descending into paranoid schizophrenia.
Writer-director Nichols is a 34-year-old Arkansas native (where Mud is set and was filmed), and he presents as a smart, gentle, literate soul. He mentioned Mark Twain, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, and Townes Van Zandt (Nichols had worked on a documentary about him) during the Q & A with Elvis Mitchell. Mud has a very literary quality to it. It's both mythic and realistic, humorous and heartbreaking. Its time is indistinct--it feels like a period piece. The riverboat homes of Tye, Shepard, and Shannon are like nothing you've ever seen on film. And that's Nichols' point--they are not long for this world. But some things, like love, are enduring, even when they break our hearts. Even when they ruin us. And there is always someone else to capture our imagination in that wide expanse of open water and horizon that Mud awakens to at the end. And among the new girls whom Ellis passes, having had his own heart broken. Love is, to repurpose a line from Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning," "like wide water, without sound."
Here's the trailer for Mud:
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