2011 TV Judgment

Another year of TV has passed and I feel the need to make some sort of big sweeping statement summing everything up. I’ve whittled it down to this: TV is all about judgment these days.

I hate to be the guy sitting on his high horse on top of the moral high ground, waving his finger at people, making highfalutin statements.  But it’s true.  Judgment seems to be an increasingly prevalent theme in British broadcasting.

Judgement is nasty.  No one does it.  But we all do it when we watch telly, on so many different levels.  It’s complicated.

Take the X Factor for instance, a show primarily about judgment.  When the X Factor’s on I scoff and criticise the show.  Then I watch for a bit longer and I find myself criticising the judges and contestants.  Then I think about it for a while and write a blog criticising how the show makes you criticise things.

Judgment: it’s everywhere.  It comes in a whole bunch of different forms too.

Here’s a short list of shows which are quite overtly about judgment: the X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, Masterchef, Britain’s Best Dish, Come Dine With Me, May the Best House Win.

They all follow a simple formula: subject matter + judgment.  Easy.

Masterchef is cooking + judgement.

Come Dine With Me is dinner hosting + judgement.

The X Factor is mediocrity + judgment.

You get the idea.

Then there’s reality shows which don’t necessarily contain an element of judgment, except that the enjoyment derived from such shows clearly comes from a sense of judgment on the part of the viewer.  The Jeremy Kyle Show, Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity, etc.  These shows allow people (obnoxious ones, more times than not) to present their personalities for judgment.  I watch Jeremy Kyle  and think “Jesus, are there people like that actually out there?”.  I watch the antics of desperate Big Brother wannabe celebrities and think the same thing.

We watch to judge.  I’m not an expert on human behaviour but I imagine it’s something to do with making ourselves feel better about our personalities and social situations?

Shows like Jeremy Kyle deal with social problems in a chat show format, but the same kind of thing can be seen in the documentary format.  The Scheme is a horrendous social documentary which follows the lives of a handful of families living in one of the most deprived and depraved areas of Scotland.  The enjoyment is a gawping curiosity at the shocking lives of a particularly underclass community.  You can’t help but stare at the drug addicts, dealers, thieves and criminals with judgmental eyes.  If you watch The Scheme and think “that’s perfectly normal” then you either belong to one of the stereotypes I just listed, or you live in The Scheme.  Or both.

Closely related to such social documentaries as The Scheme are shows like the Big Fat Gypsy series.  These shows exist to uncover often secretive or little-known cultures and societies.  They satisfy a voyeuristic curiosity in us as we’re allowed to see and, subsequently, scrutinize the ways in which people from different cultures live.  Amish: World’s Squarest Teenagers and Bitches and Beauty Queens are further examples of this type of cultural curiosity documentary.

Lifestyle documentaries typically document the lives of people with unusual lifestyles, disorders or illnesses.  Shows like Tourettes: I Swear I Can Sing, Obsessive Compulsive Hoarder and The Real Thumbelina tackle Tourettes, OCD and dwarfism respectively.  It would be entirely wrong for me to generalise here and say that this sort of programming only exists to satisfy a judgmental impulse in the audience, but looking at the increasing trend of light entertainment programming and the recurring theme of judgment within contemporary mainstream culture, I think there’s more to these programmes than simply touching and insightful documentary.  This might seem like a dark and disturbing observation, but it makes sense when you look at the context.

Channel 4 seems to have a particular penchant for these lifestyle documentaries.  Judging by the nature of the rest of their output, I doubt their interests are entirely sympathetic to their subjects, either.  Channel 4’s canon of zany game shows like Balls of Steel , Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker-brand satire and the paramount in soft-porn programming Eurotrash, make it clear their interests lie very much in satisfying the need for light entertainment (to say the least).  How can documentaries about neurosis and behavioural disorder be taken seriously when they exist in relation to unashamedly provocative sensationalism such as Embarrassing Fat Bodies, and have badly-tasted titles like A Bipolar Expedition.

I don’t mean to demonise Channel 4, they just happen to be the clearest example of how cultural context (in our case one ridldled with judgment) influences our reading and understanding of other texts.



A strange new genre of show has emerged recently and is, I think, representative of 2011 TV and the culture of judgment I’ve been harping on about.  I’m talking about the hybrid between reality TV and soap opera, the truly disturbing The Only Way is Essex, Made in Chelsea, Geordie Shore and Desperate Scousewives.  Horrendous displays of narcissism, egoism and vanity are displayed in dull plots with such hammy acting it leads you to contemplate whether it’s real or not.  TOWIE is about as real as an Essex girl’s boobs.  These shows are truly awful and the characters are so annoying, but people watch to judge their words, actions, tastes and appearances.

This kind of superficial judgment is where I think ‘light entertainment’ has taken us in 2011.  It’s like a tacky tabloid culture on screen.  Press standards and tabloids have been getting whipped into shape by Lord Leveson this year. However, the chances of the same happening for TV’s throwaway ‘light entertainent’ is sadly pretty thin, I think.

I wouldn’t say that everything on TV is about judgment.  I’m not going to pretend that the vast majority of shows have, in some form, an aspect of judgment, either.  But there is definitely a noticeable recurrence of the theme, enough for me to say I think it stands among one of the most defining features of British TV and culture in 2011.

Evil is in the eye of the beholder, as the saying goes, but I think there’s too much evidence for this to be merely a cynical view of my own. The theme of judgment spans genres and formats.  At uni we were taught that commercial imperatives are increasingly taking over for broadcasters, which means populist imperatives take over for content producers, which then results in an increase in ‘light entertainment’ over more 'serious' programming.  Whether you take that to mean the quality of broadcast programming is in decline is up to you.  But there’s definitely a lot of judgment going on.

Here's to 2012.

Social media, the Batman and my first byline.

The trailer for The Dark Knight Rises was released on Monday.  It's probably one of the most hyped films I've ever not seen yet.  Everyone's been going on about it.  So I thought I'd write a little piece on this with my thoughts on how social media could be changing the game for filmmakers and marketers.  I got it published on the STV Entertainment website with my first ever byline.

Without getting too self-critical, it is a little conjectural and verbose.  On the positive side, I felt like I was sharing some decent ideas and writing for a large readership was an enlightening challenge.

Here it is:

The article.

Comments welcome.

The Notebook (2004): writing the textbook for the romance genre.

Well, I did it.  I took my masculinity to the next level.  I watched The Notebook.  And I liked it.

Many of my female friends have cited it as ‘the film they’ve cried the most at’ over the years.  Some of my more honest male friends have said the same, only in fewer words.  Something like “really sad”, usually.

It is really sad, because it was designed to be.  Every aspect of the film was designed to tug on your heartstrings at strategic points in the story.  It’s this formulaic nature that is the film’s most crowning achievement.

The story follows a very classical design, what scriptwriting guru Robert McKee calls the “Archplot”.  It features causal and linear change, a closed ending, external conflicts and protagonists who actively pursue their destinies.  The Notebook is undeniably of the romance genre and has exactly what you would expect from the genre: boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy loses girl and so on.  The picturesque cinematography and dreamy orchestration immediately scream at the audience: “this is a conventional romantic drama”.  The casting directors have chosen conventionally attractive male and female leads: the gorgeous Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling.   The overall design is cohesive, coherent and pleasing.

Despite all of these very apparent and deliberate generic traits, enjoyment of the film is not hindered in the slightest.  In fact this conventionality is the very trait that makes the film so enjoyable.

It’s all about balance: too much generic traits and the film is plagued by cliché and contrivance; not enough conventionality and the film becomes too incoherent to be enjoyable.  The Notebook strikes these balances perfectly in all aspects of the film.  It is expressionistic at times, naturalistic at others.  Its glowing romanticism avoids saccharinity by measured moments of dramatic realism.  Its sadness is balanced by a sense of simple optimism.  The soundtrack is overtly emotive, but used selectively.

As well as all of these technical elements, the story also does well to avoid laborious mediocrity in a genre notorious for it.  For example, one aspect of the story is that Allie’s parents are opposed to her relationship with Noah.  Just as you think “that’s all a bit Romeo and Juliet”, the mother character is given a new dimension as a complex subplot is revealed, her motivations change and everything feels more real than an archetypal Shakespearean romance.  The Notebook consistently sits on the sweet spot in the tension between generic and unique.

When a film can be described as generic yet original, that’s when it can be described as a textbook example of its genre.  This is Hollywood filmmaking at its finest: when films are designed to provoke a certain kind of reaction and achieve this goal with devastating accuracy, whilst remaining effortlessly enjoyable.

Rating:

Frozen Planet, “Polar Bear-Gate” and the lamentable British tabloid culture.

It has recently come to light that some of the sequences of Frozen Planet include footage which was filmed elsewhere, other than in the wild, as the programme’s content was leading people to believe.   A few of the most contested instances of this practise include shots of a polar bear in a zoo, timelapse photography of ice particles forming and a caterpillar hibernating over winter.

This recent storm in a teacup has nothing to do with the ethics of producing a wildlife documentary, and everything to do with the British media’s political climate.

Frozen Planet’s use of this material is a matter of practicality.

If you watch Frozen Planet’s hibernating caterpillar and think “yes, that’s what they’ve done: they’ve found a caterpillar in the middle of the Arctic and set up a camera which probably costs hundreds of thousands of pounds and paid a crew to undergo the whole operation for months on end among the harshest conditions on Earth” - then you are an idiot.

If you take this view, I’ll spell it out for you with another example so it’s nice and clear: it’s really difficult to find a polar bear in their natural habitat, film that same polar bear day after day from a helicopter and in extremely treacherous weather conditions AND make a story out of it which people will enjoy watching.

Frozen Planet is a drama documentary: it takes the nature documentary format and makes it more engaging and enjoyable for modern audiences by creating characters and narratives for their featured subjects.  Whether they’re talking about a family of whales, a tiny lemming or the Arctic landscape itself, the programme personifies the subjects through storytelling conventions, thus allowing the audience to relate to the subject.  Frozen Planet very much fulfils the principles that Lord Reith set out upon creation of the BBC as a public service broadcaster in 1927: to inform, educate and entertain.

In order to comply to a storytelling format, sequences have to be logical and linear.  If there are certain crucial moments missing in a sequence, the story doesn’t make sense.  The producers can either describe the missing moments through narration or splice in footage which was taken elsewhere in order to finish the sequence.  As Frozen Planet’s essence lies in aesthetically pleasing visuals with minimal narration, the producers’ choice is clear in this case.

This kind of logic isn’t good enough for the British tabloid culture, however.

Throwing around terms like ‘fakery’ and ‘misleading’ and getting a right kick out of putting the word ‘gate’ at the end of things, the journalists involved in this so-called scandal are ignorant children at best, political and commercially motivated puppets at worst.

The BBC’s director-general Mark Thompson has suggested this is all retaliation to the BBC’s coverage of the Leveson inquiry into Press standards.  Drenched in delicious irony, the Daily Mail, that great arbiter of truth, tried to spin his words into a gossip story.  There are probably many examples of how various papers and media outlets have taken this non-story and milked it for their own agendas, but I do not have the willpower to wade through the trash in order to pick out the particularly filthy bits for you.  You can help yourself to that bit of enlightening research.

This all sums up the general decay of Press standards and the rise and rise of tabloid culture.  It’s no more than gossip-driven, morbid, invasive pulp with a particular fetish for scandal-porn.  ‘Polar Bear-Gate’, if anything, strengthens the validity of the BBC and the need for public service values to be upheld above populist and commercial imperatives.

If the press genuinely believe the BBC have orchestrated Frozen Planet’s stories in a misleading way, it is a step backwards for media-savvy-ness.  Frozen Planet is clearly a drama documentary. It deals with stories. It’s quite clear there is a dramatic and necessarily fragmented element to the show.  To suggest that Frozen Planet doesn’t make this clear enough is either very stupid of an individual journalist or insulting to their paper’s readership – or both.

I’d like to see these journalists attempt to burrow under the snow to film an over-protective wild polar bear and her cubs resting in their den.  Although, they’d probably do quite well as they’ve already proved their proficiency in sticking their noses where they don’t belong (see: Leveson inquiry).

Take Shelter (2011): exploiting generic permutation for thrills

Take Shelter is all about the actors.

Michael Shannon, who I know most prominently from HBO’s tremendous drama series Boardwalk Empire, provides a fascinating portrayal of the main character, Curtis.  An experienced actor, Shannon normally fills supporting roles, however Take Shelter proves he can provide a captivating lead performance at feature length too.  Shannon is particularly suited to antagonistic characters so his place as the thwarted hero in Take Shelter makes an interesting addition to his profile.  I suspect, however, there’s a likelihood he’ll be forever typecast as the villain following his performance as General Zod in the upcoming Superman film Man of Steel.

Curtis is a simple and honest man, living and working in a small Midwestern town with his beautiful wife (Jessica Chastain) and deaf daughter.  Curtis embodies the characteristics of the all-American man: pride, confidence, rationality and the alpha-male, breadwinning instinct to protect his family and their happiness.  Shannon effectively portrays this character, who could almost be clichéd were it not for Shannon’s ability to subtly develop him into something more complex as his mental stability deteriorates throughout the film.  Curtis is never over-acted by Shannon and remains engrossing and delightfully plausible for the most part.  However, there is one badly written scene at the end of the second act which seemed like needless dramatic sensation and didn’t suit the character at all.  Not really Shannon’s fault and, in fact, he and Chastain did well on a couple of occasions to try to understate any particularly overtly dramatic moments in the script – most notably the closing scene, of which more later.

Jessica Chastain provides a dynamic performance as Curtis’ wife, Samantha, a loving, compassionate and god-fearing homemaker.  As with Curtis, she starts the film as a character who is almost too idealistic and is also somewhat marginalized.  As the plot thickens, though, her emotional depth is revealed and she becomes engaging and surprising.  This character is particularly attractive in that she demonstrates an uncompromising loyalty to her husband in the face of an adversity that was instigated by her husband.  In an age when the definition of the word marriage is, frankly, anyone’s guess, Samantha’s persevering trust is an undeniably charming characteristic and makes a refreshing change to a majority of the heroines of modern cinema.

Despite the fact that the film won the Critics Week Grand Prize at Cannes, among other awards and rightfully received acclaim, I think there are a number of criticisms to be made.  The film is dry at times, in my opinion, probably because it suffers from a kind of auteur syndrome.  It was both written and directed by Jeff Nichols alone and so is necessarily restricted to his creative vision.  As a result of this, the film can occasionally feel hollow.  Any character outwith the main three are shallow and one-dimensional.  It’s apparent that all minor characters are written to fill a specific narrative purpose, rather than exist as part of an organic story.  Whenever any of the minor characters are given any kind of idiosyncrasies, it comes across as decoration to their character and is painfully contrived.   There are a number of unexplained ambiguities, too, for example the fact that Curtis’ daughter apparently has the ability to sense the storm that plagues Curtis’ existence.  It isn’t just the characters that lack an extra dimension, but the story too: there is a distinct lack of subtext and subplot, giving the film a stifled air of artifice.

Nichols has perhaps over-simplified minor characters and plot lines for a purpose though.  One of the film’s most redeeming features is that it travels between genres, fluidly and enjoyably.  The film is quite a straight character drama, in the first instance, but progresses into borrowing heavily from psychological thriller and, more interestingly, apocalyptic horror.  There are hints of zombies, supernatural disturbance and divine retribution, but you are never sure if they are instances of Curtis’ own personal psychosis, or if they represent something more real and impending.  This aspect of the film is gripping and you never suspect when Nichols switches the flick from sober drama to paranormal thriller.  For this overall design and the merging of genres to work, Nichols has minimized plot and character complexity - perhaps sacrificed them.

Clearly expert in exploiting the conventions of various genres, it seems Nichols has merely borrowed the quiet style of arthouse character drama only to provide a stark and terrifying contrast to his unexpected moments of horror.  I don’t object to mixing genres, unless it’s to purely facilitate momentary sensationalism or to pull a veil of plausibility over viewers’ eyes to then present them with a ridiculously far-fetched conclusion.

The ending gives the entire film a new meaning, but at the expense of inflicting serious detriment to plausibility, suspension of disbelief and, subsequently, appreciation of the whole film.  As enjoyable as the performances are, the blending of genres and the technical elements of the film, Nichols writes quite thinly and has a tendency for sensationalism that is somewhat contradictory to the films otherwise naturalistic feel.  Jeff Nichols can write a film as a whole, but it seems he needs to work on making his minor characters more real and his stories more multidimensional.  Either that, or fully realise his desire for sensationalism and step away from the more delicate realm of arthouse-esque character drama.

Rating:

Oslo, 31 August (2011)

Oslo can be considered both an adaptation of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s 1931 novel Le feu follet and a remake of Louis Falle’s 1963 film of the same name.  Changing the Parisian setting and French names with an Oslo setting and Norwegian names, the story is essentially the same.  It is the story of a young recovering addict who has spent a period in a rehabilitation clinic and is struggling to reconnect with his friends, family, society and himself.  At the most basic level this story is about drug addiction.  Its span of 80 years proves the story’s resonance throughout modern history.  Its tragic nature (without giving too much away) proves that society still hasn’t come up with any resolutions for this recurring tale.

Although the film can be classed as minimalist in the sense the main character’s conflict is internal and the plot is focused on a mere 24 hour period, it maintains a classical structure through the consistent presence of causality.  One small action leads to another and this cause-effect progression constantly drives the story forward beat by beat.  Although the film is minimal in a lot of respects, the plot is rich and well developed and there is never a dead frame.  To make a film both minimalist and captivating is testament to the screenwriting ability of Eskil Vogt and director Joachim Trier.

The sober rationality of the young Norwegian intellectual classes provides a perfectly blank canvas on which to paint the conversely complex neuroses of the anti-hero, Anders.  Anders is an intelligent and gifted opinionist and writer, but his addiction has left him riddled with insecurity.  The film focuses on the most pivotal moment of this young man’s life as he’s tragically stuck between recovery and regression: that moment is both sprinkled with glimmers of hope and drenched in melancholia.  Anders’ contradiction is the eternal paradox of the addict, and perhaps Trier is presenting it as an allegory of the modern human condition.

A couple of the main themes of this piece are dependence and reliability.  Anders is at a stage of his life where he needs people to be there to support him, but the people in his life are at a stage where they have given up trying to support him.  As much as they try to help him, it’s clear Anders is extremely high maintenance – too much to sustain through his increasingly erratic behaviour.  There is a distinct absence of Anders’ family in the film and the friends he has are unreliable.  Anders is highly egocentric and constantly in need of a crutch, whether that’s a lover, family, friends, drugs or suicide, but there’s a vulnerable and childlike part of Anders that’s highly relatable, making his story ever more heart wrenching.

Anders Danielsen Lie gives an incredible performance as the enigmatic hero and the acting throughout is consistently authentic, convincing and engrossing.  The soft-focus cinematography (Jakob Ihre) works well with a particularly engaging sound design which, along with very conscious direction, editing and general production design, makes for technically masterful cinema with an aesthetic that is both selectively minimal and enjoyably rich.

Oslo is a tragedy.  Its simple, melancholic tone and metropolitan landscapes make the film undeniably reminiscent of the French New Wave - think Hiroshima Mon Amour in present day Oslo.  The film is minimal and stylized, presenting social realism in an artistic form without losing any of its dramatic potency to surrealism.  Utterly convincing and captivating: an instant indie classic.

Rating:

Dr Stangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

Black humour, I’ve learned, truly is the way to my heart.  I stopped worrying and learned to love this film immediately.  Kubrick masters the art of black humour in Dr Strangelove, casting a satirical eye over the shortcomings of modern man, making this film one of the most potent pieces of reflective cinema in history.  Nazism, racism, eugenics, nuclear warfare, anti-communist conspiracy, propagandistic brainwashing, bureaucratic corruption, insanity and the apocalypse: all heavy, heavy issues.  Kubrick brings these behemoths to their knees with his timely execution of irony, satire and the inappropriate joke.

“Life is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel.” Horace Walpole

Black humour is about subverting the darkest of issues with a treatment of comedy.  When you think about life, it is hilarious.  It is the divine comedy.  Whenever you’re reflecting on something tragic that’s happened in your own life, there’s always that tiny part of your brain dying to make the most unsavoury of jokes.  That part of your brain is called Stanley Kubrick.  In Dr Strangelove, Kubrick harnesses the power of the absurd to expose the contradictions of seemingly powerful men and the ultimate futility of war.  In order to most effectively provide an argument against nuclear deterrence, hateful prejudice, anti-communism and bureaucracy (among others), Kubrick ridicules them all with his cripplingly potent black humour.  He stepped back from the debate, stopped feeling, started thinking and started laughing.  This is how he learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.  In my opinion, humour is the single most effective way to put across a wholly humanist point of view on the most controversial of ethical issues.

“The richest kind of laughter is the laughter in response to things people would ordinarily never laugh at.” Bill Hicks

Peter Watkins’ 1965 drama documentary The War Game supplied an altogether different argument against the nuclear arms race.  Watkins dramatized a full-scale nuclear assault on Britain, which aimed for nuclear disarmament by terrifying the authorities with the apocalyptic consequences of nuclear warfare.  The film was banned, but its message was clear and valid and became a powerful piece of propaganda for the CND.  However, this approach means the whole debate is validated by clear support of one side over the other.  Propaganda is a dirty word and propaganda will always be propaganda to the opposition.  Propaganda is always propaganda, no matter what side it’s rooting for.  Satire is completely unique in that the producer doesn’t take a side, but steps back and points out how ultimately ridiculous the whole thing is.  It helps put things into perspective, as in a pointless argument, when both turn sides step back and say “wait, are we really arguing about this?”  The tactic of subversion by humour is, in my opinion, the absolute utilitarian stance: not only is an argument avoided, but it’s bloody entertaining too.

Post-Hollywood Blacklist era, Dr Strangelove avoids being labelled as either anti-HUAC or pro-communist.  The film sits in perfect tension between rubbishing the ridiculous communist conspiracies (typical of characters like Gen. Buck Turgidson and Gen. Jack Ripper during the post-war HUAC-dominated America) and validating them.  The film is rife with this kind of irony, summed up best by the eternal line:

“You can’t fight in here, this is the war room” delivered by none other than Kubrick’s President of the United States, Merkin Muffley

Released in 1964, Dr Strangelove capitalizes on the tension of global post-war paranoia and the tragic, blood-stained past to crack the most inappropriate jokes to devastating effect.  Kubrick’s black humour in Dr Strangelove was the joke needed to break the ice of the cold war – and despite its specific subject matter in this respect, his tendency to subvert conflict with comedy is universally appreciable. Dr Strangelove has the effect of La Grande Illusion, The War Game and Nuit et Brouillard rolled into one and injected with an infectious and hilarious absurdity.  It is completely unique and the quintessential cold-war-era-HUAC satire.  Probably my favourite film of all time.

Rating:

Jack Goes Boating (2010)

Yesterday was the UK release date for Philip Seymour Hoffman's first directorial effort Jack Goes Boating.  So I popped into my local independent cinema to give it a watch (£4 a ticket on a Friday afternoon, why not?).  It got me thinking and that got me writing.  Here's what I thought.

Right from the start the world is beautified by that simplistic aesthetic so typical of independent cinema.  The framing is mostly quite tight and the visual palette is consistently minimalist, leaving room for the audience to concentrate on the complex characters and themes of the film.  Perhaps the visual aspect of the film was necessarily rendered minimalist due to budget constraints, or maybe as an effort to unashamedly embrace the indie ‘look’ – either way it looks great and, more importantly, allows for a sense of clarity which is a perfect atmosphere in which to propagate some of the big ideas that the film explores.  And the film discusses one of the biggest issues: love.  It does so modestly, almost unintentionally, though, concentrating more on character development than making any grand philosophical statements.

The film achieves so much through the undeniable human charm of its four central characters.  Philip Seymour Hoffman is the incredibly enigmatic protagonist, Jack.  He’s quiet, socially-awkward and lacks common sense but is occasionally profound and deeply emotional.  Clyde (John Oritz) is his friend, work mate and mentor.  Clyde and his long term girlfriend Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) are trying to set Jack up with Lucy’s colleague Connie (Amy Ryan).

Clyde’s own relationship is falling apart, however.  The cracks are beginning to show under the strains of previous affairs and Clyde soldiers on, insisting that it’s just one of the natural burdens of being in a long-term relationship.  Clyde tries to teach Jack about love as he struggles with his own jealousy and insecurity and Lucy struggles with her lust and infidelity.  Ironically, it turns out Jack is the one with the best approach to love and life: untainted simplicity and an enduring optimism (or “good vibe” as Jack would say quietly growing his dreadlocks as he listens to reggae on his Walkman).  The last shot of the film effectively sums up Clyde’s realisation of this irony as he stands jaded and alone, watching Jack and Connie walk off in the simple happiness of each other’s company.  There are several of these poignant moments in the film that are loaded with dramatic meaning and subtext even though the scene is almost void of any dialogue – reminding the audience that the story was originally conceived for the stage by writer Robert Glaudini.

One of the most interesting and prevalent themes in the film is perception.  It discusses the way we see things and the way things actually are.  Again, the choice of characters is absolutely astounding as it allows for a well-illustrated exploration of this theme.  The film makes a stark contrast between Jack and Connie’s simple optimism (not naïve ignorance) and Clyde and Lucy’s defeatist, cynical realism/pessimism.  The film favours Jack’s integrity in his slow and wary but ultimately positive outlook compared to Clyde’s self-deprecating acceptance of a sub-standard relationship.  This theme of perception is manifested as a visual metaphor throughout the film: Clyde tells Jack to picture success in his head in order to achieve it when he’s teaching him to swim.  Jack starts to use this visualization technique in other enterprises (learning to cook for Connie, for example), but Clyde fails to heed his own advice, constantly swimming against the current of his own denial.  The use of this visual metaphor is a nice touch by first time director Hoffman: it isn’t overstated and nicely concretes the idea of perception within the viewer’s mind.

In criticism, the film verges on the side of cliché fairly often.  There are some overly contrived lines, most notably when Jack’s evening with Connie doesn’t go to plan, he smashes up the apartment, locks himself in the bathroom and Clyde reassures him: “we can get by this…everything is ruined but we can get by this.”  This one line pretty much sums up the whole point of the film: coming to terms with the tension between enduring dysfunctional relationships and fruitlessly chasing an unobtainable ideal.  I’d imagine that kind of melodramatic, on-the-nose dialogue would work perfectly in the theatre, but it doesn’t translate well onto film.  Some things are better left unsaid.

When Fleet Foxes’ White Winter Hymnal started playing it occurred to me that the producers were trying very hard to stick to textbook indie style (which isn’t really surprising considering it’s the same guys who made Little Miss Sunshine and The Savages).  The soundtrack seemed to be doing little more than borrowing a sense of style rather than adding significant meaning and, at times, the music was either redundant or jarring.

Amy Ryan’s is one of the weaker performances in the film, in my opinion, making Connie no more than a female counterpart of the lead at times and cartoonish at others.  I think the character is good though - perhaps Ryan would’ve done her justice if the producers had focussed more of the film’s attention on Connie.

The film takes a look at the nature of love in modern relationships by comparing its starkly contrasted characters and their perception of love.  There are a couple of moments in the film that verge uncomfortably close to the cliché and contrived, but not enough to detract from the overall value of the film.  The film contains some truth and insights that will resonate amongst many of the audience members.

Overall, a well-crafted and relatable film that allows audiences to invest in its superb characters and reflect on its meanings.  At 89 minutes it’s easy to digest and easy to enjoy.  It’s a visually pleasing piece of textbook independent cinema that Philip Seymour Hoffman should be proud to call his directorial debut.

Rating: