FILMMAKER BLOG  Monday, March 09, 2009
THE NEW YORKER DISCOVERS MUMBLECORE
 A bit late to the Dance Party USA, David Denby discovers mumblecore in this week's New Yorker, devoting his entire film column to the genre.From the piece: You’re about twenty-five years old, and you’re no more than, shall we say, intermittently employed, so you spend a great deal of time talking with friends about trivial things or about love affairs that ended or never quite happened; and sometimes, if you’re lucky, you fall into bed, or almost fall into bed and just enjoy the flirtation, with someone in the group. This chatty sitting around, with sex occasionally added, is not the sole subject of “mumblecore,” a recent genre of micro-budget independent movies, but it’s a dominant one. Mumblecore movies are made by buddies, casual and serious lovers, and networks of friends, and they’re about college-educated men and women who aren’t driven by ideas or by passions or even by a desire to make their way in the world. Neither rebels nor bohemians, they remain stuck in a limbo of semi-genteel, moderately hip poverty, though some of the films end with a lurch into the working world. The actors (almost always nonprofessionals) rarely say what they mean; a lot of the time, they don’t know what they mean. The movies tell stories but they’re also a kind of lyrical documentary of American stasis and inarticulateness. Channelling Margaret Mead, Denby forages through some of the familiar discussions of the m-word before the piece reveals itself to be a long wind-up to a brief discussion of Joe Swanberg's Alexander the Last, which will be premiering at SXSW this weekend and then going immediately to IFC On Demand. While some of us in the blogosphere may find Denby's acknowledgement of these films, which have bubbling up since 2002, rather tardy, the real story here is the fact that the genre's slow burn, its public cresting just as most of its practitioners have distanced themselves from the label, has leveraged major media play for films that premiere not in theaters but at festivals. From what I understand, other Big Media Outlets are having their film reviewers cover Swanberg's latest as well, making it something of a watershed event. I also think Denby has touched on the apt directorial reference for Swanberg and some of his colleagues as they move forward: Eric Rohmer. In Alexander the Last, the project is a local theatre production. A married actress (Jess Weixler) attracted to a good-looking actor she’s working with contemplates an affair with him, only to discover that her sister, with whom she’s very close, is already sleeping with him. The story, in its formal symmetries, suggests one of Éric Rohmer’s narratives of advance and retreat in Six Moral Tales. In the past, people in Swanberg’s movies slept with one another without much consequence—the plots were not fully worked out, and many implications, not to mention relationships, were left hanging. The slapdash style of storytelling was part of Swanberg’s cool contempt for mainstream filmmaking. But in Alexander the Last he’s advancing toward a firmer structure and more emotionally explicit scenes. I'll let you all decide whether Rohmer is a comparison or a goal, but his name popped into my head as well as I watched Swanberg's latest movie. Alicia Van Couvering's interview with Swanberg will appear this week as part of our SXSW standalone section, but in the meantime you can check out her lengthy article on mumblecore, "What I Meant to Say," from our Spring 2007 issue.
Comments (4)
So... you don't think this one's getting more attention because... um... Noah Baumbach helped produce it?...
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posted by @ 3/09/2009 11:56 AM
Actually, no, I don't. I think that's kind of reductive. Sure, he helped raise its profile, but I think rewards come to people who stay in the game. IFC made a commitment to him and are now leveraging that commitment to launch this new festival premiere thing they are doing. A lot of mainstream media have heard about mumblecore but never checked it out, and, likewise, have heard about SXSW but never gone. Baumbach gives it all some tastemaker cred, but I wouldn't attribute it all to him.
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posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/09/2009 12:01 PM
More on all of this later (and elsewhere), but I think the real story here is just how deeply out of touch Denby is with the world these characters (and these filmmakers) actually inhabit. Moderately hip poverty? With the posh and well appointed west Brooklyn apartments, Hudson River boat rides and champagne sipping finales (I forgive those who mistakenly believe Justin Rice has somehow fallen into a Lil' Wayne video when watching the second to last scene) on display in Swanberg's latest, anyone confusing the lifestyle represented in the broad majority of these movies with "moderately hip poverty", especially in the waning years of the 00s, needs to get outta the Upper West Side and see how the North 11th & Driggs crowd really lives. There's something distinctly Bush era about mumblecore and the narcissistic, reductive, unengaged (which together equal destructive) worldview of the cycle's acknowledged concerns that one would hope someone of Denby's long critical experience would pick up on and have some feelings about, but he doesn't - he's just as cloistered as the subjects of these m... movies. Yes David, a critic should "grant a filmmaker his subject", but he should also hold them accountable for justifying it with some truth, some wisdom, even a touch of beauty, which most of the m... movies are surely lacking in, if never in bathos.
Despite their rough hewn aesthetic, are m... movies just recycling the ideas of Italian post neo-realism & Left Bank Cinema, with their "Come Dressed as the Sick Soul of Europe" parties, for our era of diminished expectations and Pabst Blue Ribbon swillers? The joyous embrace within the cycle of chic forms of never spoken of as such but surely spiritual malaise, practiced almost solely by the privileged and the pale and the bored, mysteriously never rooted in any economic, social or political machinations (as things in real life usually are and which most worthwhile narrative storytellers attempt to dramatize), is straight outta Antonioni, minus the craft and the existentialism.
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posted by @ 3/09/2009 9:21 PM
I'm not sure the intention of these m... moviemakers are anywhere near the realm of Antonioni, Rohmer, etc. The DIY school of art often comes along with a somewhat healthy ignorance of what came before. Think of post-punk bands like The Meat Puppets, who came from the wastes of Phoenix (a metaphor for the burnt culture suburbia killed?) and ask yourself if it isn't more like that - some kids on a blasted moonscape of a cul-de-sac found camcorders this time, instead of electric guitars. It's an attempt to re-invent cinema (ie, the wheel) and should be judged on that basis.
Like the characters in SLACKER, these people are perhaps more defined by what they reject than by what they embrace. Is it cinema? I don't think they care what Andrew Sarris' answer would be, just like the guys from The Minutemen didn't bother to read Rolling Stone.
Yes, it would be great if the films were better, but the lesson there seems to be the same as was shouted from the stage at the end of every Big Boys gig - which always ended in a shambling mess with the crowd onstage - "now go start your own band."
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posted by JeanDodge @ 3/18/2009 1:26 PM
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