Kicking and Screaming · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Somebody lands the joke, and the camera doesn't cut. It holds. You watch two or three faces decline to laugh, the beat runs a half-second long, and the scene moves off as if nothing had been spent.

That held beat is the whole movie. J. Kathleen Gibson cuts the film so punchlines get caught in the act of not working: the line, then the non-response, then on. Jokes die in frame. Phil Marshall's score stays out of it, and in 1995 — a year after Pulp Fiction made the wall-to-wall needle drop the house style of American independent film — declining to cover a silence was a real decision. The pauses are audibly empty. Baumbach wants you to hear them.

Gilles Deleuze has a name for a movie where the silence is where the drama went, though he got there by a very different road. His two-volume account of cinema turns on one hinge. In the classical film, what he calls the movement-image, a person perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the cutting exists to link the perceiving to the act. Then, after the war, in Rome and in bombed Berlin, films appeared in which the acting no longer worked. The situation was too large, or too senseless, and the character was reduced to looking at it. Deleuze listed the symptoms of that collapse: a dispersive situation with many weakly-linked people in it; slack causality, events that fail to cause other events; the balade, the aimless trip that transforms nothing; and a consciousness of clichés, characters who can see the ready-made gestures they're making and go on making them.

Four out of four, in a rented house within sight of a college campus.

Take the dispersion first, since the camera is built for it. Steven Bernstein's dominant unit is the medium group shot: three or four bodies laid across a kitchen or a bar rail, held long enough for a full conversational volley to finish inside one frame. Nobody gets promoted to protagonist by the cutting. This is close to what Bazin admired in the sustained deep-focus take, the event allowed to unfold in one continuous space so the viewer chooses where to look, repurposed here for comedy so that reactions arrive in the same shot as the line that caused them. It is also a portrait of a group in which no one has a decisive relation to anyone. No antagonist. No escalating obstacle. Jane announces Prague in the opening minutes, Grover declines to go, and the remaining runtime is an itemized accounting of that refusal.

The balade is the one Baumbach mutates, and the mutation is his. Deleuze's postwar wanderers at least walk — through rubble, through the city, arriving nowhere but moving. Here the trip gets refused at minute five and what's left is rotation. House, bar, video store, diner, house. The staging keeps re-composing the same bodies in the same rooms so you can feel the loop closing, which is Diner's architecture picked up whole: Levinson anchored his stalled men to one hangout and built scenes out of digressive disputes that resolve nothing, and Baumbach keeps the anchor and drops even the wistfulness. Otis taking a job at the video store is the largest career event in the film.

Then the clichés, where Baumbach's real invention shows. Deleuze's seers often can't act partly because they can't find words; the situation exceeds speech. Baumbach's characters can't act because they speak extremely well. Fluency is the disease. The quiz games and the ranking and the lists come straight out of Manhattan, where Gordon Willis's wide group compositions let the cut be dictated by the line rather than the look, and cultural scorekeeping became a comic unit. The argument scenes run on Rohmer's engine from My Night at Maud's: near-real-time moral self-justification staged in unobtrusive two-shots, rhetoric standing in for event. Withnail and I had already proved that unemployed articulacy could carry a feature at performance pitch. What Baumbach adds is the diagnosis. All that verbal energy is generated precisely so none of it has to be converted into a decision. Josh Hamilton plays Grover as a man who can talk his way out of any feeling, which makes him a very talkative version of Deleuze's voyant, the one who sees and endures instead of acting. Chris Eigeman arrives as Max with the condescending-explainer delivery imported almost intact from Metropolitan, so the film's most quotable cruelty is itself a citation. Even the cruelty is secondhand. Nobody here is stupid, and Deleuze's hard point is that knowing you're inside a cliché has never once been an exit from it.

The past is where the movie actually lives. Deleuze calls a flashback that represents a former present a recollection-image, and normally it serves the present: you remember in order to decide. The Grover–Jane flashbacks get interleaved into the present tense unannounced, no dissolve, no title, no optical marker, which is the architecture Annie Hall built and Baumbach's most exact debt. He identifies them by scale alone. Two people instead of five, closer framing, less air. That's the visual argument in a single parameter: intimacy is what the group shot squeezes out.

The consequence is structural and it's brutal. If the present refuses stakes and the past keeps supplying them, the forward motion is a fiction; the film advances by remembering. So it ends not at the airport but on a memory, relocating every available warmth permanently behind us. A bleak formal joke, played straight.

One more thing about the frame. Prague is never a location. The standing sets are a house, a bar, a video store, a diner, and an airport counter, and the counter is as far as the camera gets. Deleuze distinguishes the out-of-field that is merely the next room from the kind that opens onto something the film cannot situate at all. Prague is the second kind. Not a place in this movie. A direction. Which is why Grover's refusal registers as more than cowardice: there is literally no shot of the life he turned down.

The film has been charged with complacency, with being made at no distance from its subject, and the charge isn't stupid — Baumbach was four years out of Vassar. The format answers it. This is 35mm, properly lensed, lit and covered, three years before DV would make talk-driven micro-budget filmmaking cheap and mumblecore would take up the same lives with camcorders and let the shabbiness carry the meaning. The polish is the argument. It insists that stalled, articulate, unimportant people are worth the same materials as anyone, and a decade later The Squid and the Whale and a Criterion edition would drag the film back out to be looked at properly.

Watch it again for the objects. Books, cigarettes, bottles, the trivia game that keeps getting resumed. In a film where nobody acts, objects are what hands do instead, and the quiz especially is the seminar continued by other means, a way to keep being graded after the grading stops. Deleuze would call that a gest: a posture that exposes an entire social relation without anyone naming it. Once you see it, the bar scenes stop being filler. They're the plot.