Mumblecore

All the Real Girls

Garden State

Hi, hello, how are you, dear readers? I hope 2023 is treating you well so far. Me personally? Well, I’m still watching movies and writing about them mostly for free, so your 2023 can’t be that bad! It’s easy to get bogged down by the negativity, to be crushed by the overwhelming sensation that you’ve accomplished nothing, and if there’s one genre of film that validates these feelings of meaninglessness, it's mumblecore. We’ve been over mumblecore on this blog before, when discussing auteurs like Jim Jarmusch and Richard Linklater. These types of films are often marked by their low budgets, indie performers, and a general sense of existential nothingness. These films present small slices of life that focus more on their characters rather than on the events that happen to them. Mumblecore is about moments, details, feelings, and even the lack of feeling. Nothingness, with a side of good dialogue, and for the era of mumbecore we’re dissecting tonight, healthy dose of cringe. I’m drawn to these films about nothing because unless its got Keanu Reeves in it, I tire of strictly action films. I love dialogue—good, believable dialogue—and I think it’s cool when a filmmaker is able to romanticize the most mundane and banal aspects of life. The only downside to mumblecore, in this humblecore critic’s opinion, is that it can easily drift into pretentious territory. I don’t mind monologues about life’s miseries, I don’t mind some cheesy song choices, but I do mind pithy performances and films that won’t allow its audiences to have any fun during the course of its numb narratives. While I did enjoy one of tonight’s films way more than the other, I will say that they both dabbled in trite material, they both reveled in their own cornballness, and they both failed to properly utilize the entirety of their respectively impressive casts. Up first was David Gordon Green’s 2003 Sundance hit: All The Real Girls. Before they made Pineapple Express, Your Highness, and the new (attempt at) Halloween films, David Gordon Green and Danny McBride collaborated on this sweet, quaint, mumblecore movie where a man named Paul (Paul Schneider) falls in love with his best friend Tip’s (Shea Whigham) younger sister Noel (Zooey Deschanel) after she returns home from boarding school. Paul has a past as a womanizer, and just about every young woman in town has had their heart broken by him, but as the film constantly reminds us—Noel is not like the other girls. She’s younger, less experienced, more impressionable, and doesn’t hate him yet so to Paul the hometown hero, she’s the girl of his dreams. Noel is super into him—despite her brother’s disapproval, despite Paul’s very clear oedipal complex (I mean his mom is played by Patricia Clarkson so who can blame him, really)—and yet he mostly just strings her along. He’s so afraid of tainting what they have, of corrupting her, of losing her. So he places her on a pedestal of purity and perfection, and refuses to sleep with her. Then one weekend when she’s away, Noel has sex with someone, very briefly, very unceremoniously, so unceremoniously that we do not see it, and Paul loses his shit. The entirety of this movie up until this point is just slow-burning, only somewhat hot foreplay, and for this reason, I really can’t blame Noel for sleeping with someone else. She never asked to be seen or treated a certain way, she just rightfully desired that thing between two people who really like each other. This event demystifies her, and Paul is completely shocked that this young girl might want to get with other people, or at least with a person who isn’t simultaneously fetishizing and infantilizing her. On top of everything else, Paul’s best friend and Paul’s mother—two characters who I firmly believe were in love with him the whole time—are now very angry with him. Paul does a lot of sulking to a lot of mumblecore-essential mopey music, but to find out exactly how he got out of this mess, you’ll have to watch the film for yourself. Not because All the Real Girls was particularly special, but because I watched this film, took notes, and still can’t really explain how all of these loose ends wound up being tied by the end of the film. This movie really just meandered from one scene to another, its use of a crossfade between lingering shots sum up the languorousness of the film well—and by the end of it I honestly could not tell if our male and female protagonists actually end up together in the end. Paul Schneider was so cute in this, and that was the greatest silver lining. If you’ve watched Parks and Rec season 1, you understand the unique sexiness of Paul Schneider (aka Mark Brendanawicz)—an office-setting type of sexy that only exists in fantasies, the type of smart and attractive that isn’t sociopathic or pretentious. There are few actors who can get away with the kind of cringe conveyed in this film, and still be good-looking, and thank god Paul Schneider is one of them. Although I did laugh and begrudgingly relate when his character said, unprompted, out of nowhere: “If anybody ever smiles at me again I’m gonna freak out.” His chemistry with Zooey Deschanel was just impeccable, and even though every actor here is and was fairly established, they all felt like real, viable people existing in one’s hometown. All of the performances were excellent, (and I’m not just referring to the brief shot of Paul Scheider’s dick) between Shea Wingham’s complex bromantic feelings, Patricia Clarkson’s supreme ability to give anyone mommy issues, Zooey Deschanel being understated and chill for once, and Danny McBride’s character “Bust-ass” having way more heart than you’d expect—I actually really liked the characters here. I just wish that it all amounted to something a little more substantial. I wish all of that foreplay led to a climax. I wish I were exaggerating about the incestuousness of this fictional small town, and I really wish that the whole “she’s not like other girls” thing weren’t so present throughout the whole film but it is. You know when an actor is like “what’s my motivation?” Well this was a question that came up in my mind when any character here did just about anything. The moral of this story really seemed to be “shit happens” and while this conclusion kind of pissed me off in All the Real Girls, it pleasantly surprised me in the next film that I watched: Garden State. Where All the Real Girls made me go “uhhhhh” Garden State made me say “oh hmmmm”. I thought All the Real Girls had hit the mumblecore peak with its mopey music, kissing in empty bowling alleys, and small town resentment, but Garden State reached greater heights of indie ingrate-ness, yet somehow I liked it more. Garden State was written and directed by Zach Braff, and is largely based on his own life. Garden State follows struggling actor and waiter Andrew Largemen, who we meet as his father calls to tell him he must return back home to New Jersey because his mother has passed away. Suddenly we’re thrown into the mundane melancholy of this guy’s life, shifting from one monotonous setting to another, from his sterile apartment full of no furniture but plenty of pills, to his job at a Taiwanese restaurant where the patrons have the jobs he wants, to the airport, all while Coldplay blares in the background. (I’d heard tell of the legendary Garden State soundtrack, the heavy reliance upon The Shins, and it did not disappoint.) Eventually we’re at Andrew’s mother’s funeral, where iconic Jewish character actress Jackie Hoffman sings a gloomy rendition of The Commodores’ Three Times a Lady. At the cemetery, Andrew runs into an old friend named Mark (Peter Sarsgaard) who suggests they go to the new house of their other friend Jesse (Armando Riesco) who just came into a fortune for selling the patent of his noise-free velcro. While the youth parties around Andrew, his vibe remains to be “I’m not like other guys, I’m depressed.” They smoke weed, they drink, they dance, they play spin the bottle, all while Andrew drowns in his own sorrows. All of Andrew’s friends have grown up to be gravediggers and cops and other depressing stations of life, and in the midst of his hometown reckoning and overwhelming grief, the only thing that can save him is a manic pixie dreamgirl by the name of Sam (played by indie and blockbuster icon Natalie Portman) When Andrew decides to go to the doctor to have his migraines checked out, he meets Sam in the office waiting room, where she is listening to The Shins on comically gigantic headphones. She’s just quirky enough, just weird enough, just annoying enough to excite and inspire Andrew—to feel his feelings and to decide what exactly he wants to do next. This trip home to New Jersey wasn’t meant to be anything special, and yet when he meets Sam, the story really begins, and the audience is able to connect with him way more. Garden State features a lot of musings about life, about finding the feeling of “home” when you leave home, and about what really matters in this silly, fucked up world. It also features an incredible cast (Ian Holm, Jean Smart, Method Man, Denis O’Hare, Jim Parsons, and Ann Dowd) that, once again, could’ve been utilized so much more. Garden State was a lot like All the Real Girls, in that I often questioned where these poorly planned romances could possibly go in such depressing environments, but Garden State featured a budding romance that I could actually root for. Zach Braff was hotter than I’ve ever seen him, and his chemistry with Natalie Portman felt genuine. Their scenes together were cute but awkward and Natalie Portman especially deserves an Oscar for the level of cringe she was forced to delve into here. But their characters were both evenly un-keeled—they both seemingly suffered from various mental illnesses and traumas and yet neither of them used this as an excuse to treat the other like shit. And best of all, I didn’t have to guess whether or not these two ended up together in the end—Zach Braff had the decency to give us a clear, hopeful ending after all of the somber sweetness. Toward the end of Garden State, my closed captions indicated Zach Braff was “ruefully chuckling”, which feels like the best way to sum up both of these movies. Kinda funny, kinda depressing, mostly numb to the crushing reality that life sucks, but willing to have a good cry about it anyway. I may have talked a lot of smack, but I do enjoy films that are light on the action and heavy on the dialogue—especially from this era. I love the early 2000s of it all, the (almost)indie sleaze of their aesthetics, the somewhat self-indulgent nature of their stories. These movies are clunky, in many ways, but in what other time and type of cinema would you see Jean Smart enjoying breakfast with her lover Jim (bazinga) Parsons before he’s off to his shift at Medieval Times? There is a lot of beauty in our day-to-days, a lot of magic in our unchanging milieu, so why not take the time to appreciate it, with two films that hyper-focus on healing powers of the humdrum. Thanks for reading along this week, dear readers, you keep me sharp, and help to remind me of what is most important in this life: hot Jewish men. Ta ta for now :)