Minor Tinkering

Reviewing the split personalities of Wes Anderson's "Fantastic Mr. Fox" and the drama/thriller "Uncertainty."

Another kind of game theory, Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s “Uncertainty” postulates from the outset two parallel possible stories for a single day in the life of a young couple, semi-employed musician Bobby (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and budding Broadway dancer Kate (Lynn Collins). Intercut and color-coded (one is yellow, one is green), the two tales are versions of a July 4th, one spent uneasily working out relationship problems in the company of Kate’s Hispanic family in Brooklyn, the other leaving domestic concerns in the dust, after a cell phone is found in a cab and the small effort expended in finding the owner gets the couple embroiled in a mysterious Russian mob plot that keeps them running throughout downtown Manhattan.

If you’re sensibly waiting for a Charlie Kaufman shift somewhere, coming from the filmmaking pair whose “Suture” (1993) was a meta-noir predicated on identical twin brothers, one white and one black, then you shouldn’t hold your breath. “Uncertainty” is a dialectic without synthesis; the gimmick of its structure, so politically hair-raising in Kieslowski’s “Blind Chance” (1987) and so drably chick-flick-y in “Sliding Doors” (1998), promises the opportunity for additional complexity, but none is to be had.

McGehee and Siegel are so far all about revisiting noir conventions (their second feature was a spicy remake of Max Ophuls’ “The Reckless Moment”), and the “yellow” thread of the new movie is a tantalizing twist on the wrong-man paradigm, updated with on-the-run email anonymity and cell phone surveillance. You cannot be blamed for wishing the suspense plot would overrun and invade, or at least obviate, the mundane nest of familial conflicts and unspoken resentments playing out on the “green” B-side, which builds to little, despite a thicket of great naturalistic acting. The two leads even limn slightly different vibes in each story; the differential between crazed panic and dull micro-drama is so wide it’s as if we’re meant to expect a meta-film upgrade, a crossover, that never manifests.

That McGehee and Siegel are a little hammy in their own way, ramping up the soundtrack-music emphasis and filling each story with multiple color flags (subway lines, clothes, wallpaper, etc.), doesn’t help their cause, but it’s nothing we wouldn’t happily swallow had “Uncertainty” had more on its platter than just a cute bifurcation and two bland characters that are nonetheless entertainingly embodied. (Maybe too entertainingly — Gordon-Levitt hardly breaks the sweat Collins needs to, but she’s also so lovely it’s sometimes distracting from the “green” tepidness, if not the “yellow” Hitchcockianism.) It comes as little surprise to read that “Uncertainty” arose spontaneously and cheaply from the crash of another, bigger project for the filmmakers — it has energy and wit, but it’s only half thought-out.

“Fantastic Mr. Fox” opens in limited release on November 13th, expands on November 20th; “Uncertainty” opens in New York and will be available on VOD on November 13th.

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