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Things
I Don't Understand
(2011)
by Johnny Web (Uncle
Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)
Quick. Name a film based in New York in which
an important plot development hinges on the use of an
apartment, and in which the female lead is named
Kubelick, and is an independent, strong-willed,
sharp-tongued single woman who sleeps with too many of
the wrong men, survives a suicide attempt, and finally
ends up with the right guy.
If you're a film buff, you probably think I'm describing
a film you have seen, Billy Wilder's acclaimed 1960
dramedy, The Apartment. I'm not. Apparently this premise
comes around automatically about once per century, like
the Halley's Comet of film concepts. The 21st century
appearance of Comet Kubelick is called Things I Don't
Understand, the second film of director David Spaltro,
and his second collaboration with his lead actress,
Molly Ryman.
So is the new film a rip-off? No, not at all. Like a
lawyer who has to strain to create a defense for an
obviously guilty client, I've fabricated a completely
artificial case out of a few superficial facts. Apart
from the factors which I strained to cobble together in
the first paragraph, the two films have nothing
whatsoever in common. Given a few ostensible
similarities, the use of the Kubelick name in Things I
Don't Understand seems like a simple tip o' the cap to
one of IMDb's top 100 films of all time.
Things I Don't Understand is actually a philosophical
film about a brilliant but aloof and damaged woman who
is looking for some answers about life, and some reasons
to continue participating in it. Her graduate thesis is
on the human understanding of life after death, and that
project eventually leads her to befriend one of her
interview subjects, a young hospice patient who is
nearing the very end. The bond between the two women
doesn't necessarily increase the researcher's
understanding of life after death, but it does help her
appreciate how an obsession with such a topic can cause
us to miss the value of life in the first place, in
moments which need to be treasured, in a summer's lease
with too short a date, as ol' Billy Shakespeare put it.
The woman who doesn't want to live is revitalized by the
other who doesn't want to die, and thus eventually makes
real progress at reaching out to other people.
Needless to say, this is not a summer blockbuster or a
franchise starter. It's the kind of independent film
that Sundance and the Independent Spirit Awards were
probably meant to honor, back in the days when they were
supposed to represent individualism, idealism and
passion in filmmaking, if indeed there ever really was
such a time. It's the kind of highly idiosyncratic film
that dominated the counter-cultural era between 1967 and
1972, when films expressed ideas which flowed
passionately out of the author without regard to the
ultimate profitability of the project, and when
audiences expected to walk out of a film discussing
those ideas. These days, films seem to get financed and
greenlighted (greenlit?) based on whether they can
anchor a franchise which will eventually include many
similarly titled films followed by ever-increasing Roman
numerals. Back in the 60s and early 70s, authors just
poured out their hearts on film, so that it would be
impossible to imagine many of the best movies of that
era spurring sequels. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest 2?
Easy Rider 2? A Clockwork Orange 2? Harold and Maude 2?
I'm not saying that the films of those days were better
than today's. They were just more individual; more
passionate; less mass-produced; less generic.
Things I Don't Understand would slip easily into that
era, not just because it serves as the starting point of
a dialogue between the author and his audience, but for
other reasons as well. The author/director of this film
is not lacking a sense of humor, for example, and
fearlessly punctuates his very serious film with the
kind of unexpected tone shifts and comic relief one
might expect from the 60s and 70s. There are colorful,
quirky background characters, for example, like Ms.
Kubelick's two roommates. One of them is a stoned,
pan-sexual punk rocker from France. The other is a
female performance artist who stars in a
far-off-Broadway play about dancing vaginas, and who
seems oblivious to the utter absurdity of her "art."
In addition to its thoughtfulness, the film's great
strength is that all of the characters are distinct, and
seem real. I can believe that these people actually
exist in real life, and that those real people could
actually speak the exact lines in the script. On the
other hand, the narrative weakness is that some of the
late plot twists, especially a deus ex machina resolution to the
roommates' housing crisis, seem contrived and false, and
seem even more unbelievable in contrast to the
down-to-earth, credible characters which have been so
painstakingly established. I hate when movie reviewers
use the word "organic," but in the sense that it means
"less artificial," I wish there had been a more organic
development of a sub-plot involving a buy-out of their
apartment. Frankly, I didn't find that entire sub-plot
necessary at all, but that's the choice the author made,
and once made it should have been resolved without
resorting to a miracle which made everything seem to
wrap up too quickly and conveniently
That's a fairly minor annoyance, however. The big
picture is this: Things I Don't Understand is not just a
script with engaging ideas, but also contains acting and
cinematography which are surprisingly good, given a tiny
budget (reportedly under $200,000). More important to
me, the film doesn't develop its serious ideas as an
aloof intellectual exercise or a pretentious "tone
poem," but within the context of an involving story with
credible characters that interested me from the
beginning and never prompted me to reach for the
fast-forward button. Hell, this film not only held my
attention for two hours, but it even got me to re-watch
The Apartment immediately afterward, thus committing me
to an additional two hours well-spent in New York.
Except now I want to slap Fred MacMurray around.
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