Playlist Double Feature

"Mumblecore" like "grunge," was a clever adjective that lost its charm the second time someone used it. It is a somewhat apt description for the crop of low budget indie films that popped up in the early part of last decade, but labels only ever end up forcing mass generalization and often overshadow the work itself. Back to grunge, it got to the point where it only mattered if a band was from Seattle for them to get swept up in the hype wave, not that they even sounded like the bands that came before them or, far less important, if they were even good. Luckily for the art form, if not for the artists, mumblecore has never been adopted by the mainstream. So not only do we still get interesting films that Hollywood would never make, but the filmmakers still get the freedom to make them.

We've talked (a lot) on this site about our admiration for the work of Mark and Jay Duplass, but there are other major players in the close-knit, collaborative scene. I recently watched two films by Joe Swanberg, Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) and Nights and Weekends (2008). He directed the first and co-directed the second with his co-star, Greta Gerwig. Gerwig is also the stair-taking Hannah and is credited as a co-writer on both films, though almost all the dialogue was improvised. Got all that?

Hannah follows Gerwig's character as she struggles to discover her post-college identity, both personally and professionally. The film opens with her in a seemingly healthy relationship with none other than Mark Duplass (it literally opens with them naked in the shower together). She soon finds herself drifting between co-workers played by Andrew Bujalski (the "Godfather of Mumblecore") and Kent Osborne in what she self-diagnoses as a state of "chronic dissatisfaction." It's a great term and may very well be this generation's emotional legacy.

That is essentially the plot, or at least the sequence of events. It's just people talking, but the lack of action is sufficiently supplemented by the authenticity of the on-screen relationships. I know this could so easily be a pretentious mess and no doubt would be if the actors weren't so uninterested in sounding like actors. The interplay in these movies is the closest I've come to listening to real people talking to each other on film.

Nights and Weekends actually lowers the fi even more with almost the entire film consisting of just Swanberg and Gerwig navigating their long-distance relationship. It's a character study more than a movie, but with an intimacy that's at times both refreshing and heartbreaking. The narrow scope does result in a few slow stretches, maybe a few too many. But, again, for its faults, it's hard not to appreciate what they were trying to accomplish.