First Impressionism

In search of a genre for Steve McQueen's searing, troubling IRA prison strike masterpiece "Hunger."

I can’t say I believe every frame of Joe Swanberg’s “Alexander the Last” was “meant” — too often, the home-doc images feels arbitrary, aimless and imbued with the slumming laziness that’s supposed to, in the subgenre as a whole, characterize the entire semi-articulate mumblecore generation’s way of life. But every movie, and every “wave,” no matter how tiny, has the right to its own version of the world, and Swanberg’s is a 20something universe of infantile distractions, half-sentences and immature superegos, which I prefer to take as the mumblecore contingent’s peculiar and even critical vision of themselves rather than simply “realism.”

In any case, “Alexander” has a relatively racy pulse, as it follows a nubile newlywed actress (Jess Weixler) rehearsing a small play as she waits for her folky-cool musician husband (Bishop Allen’s Justin Rice, of course) to come back to Brooklyn from his tour, and flirts with her Southern lug of a co-star (Barlow Jacobs), with whom she has on-stage sex scenes. Complicating things just a little is the heroine’s nearly manic-depressive sister (Amy Seimetz), who’s gorgeous and goofy-artistic and thankfully manic most of the time, and who bags the lug without anything resembling her sister’s guilt crisis.

Swanberg ramps up his strategy’s mileage here by contrasting and commingling, as have Renoir, Ophüls and Bergman before him, the “reality” on stage with the “real” reality off, but he does it nakedly and simply, with Weixler’s still-childish woman-girl getting so confused about her own “performance” in either context that she half-heartedly creates a web of near-betrayals. The subtexts help, even if they’re rather sparsely explored, and Swanberg’s film has received generous raves as a substantial uptick from his previous films.

But since his is (still) not a cinema of incident or impact, but of improvised downtime, of (ostensibly) the stuff that the characters are trying not to talk about as they doodle the hours away, sometimes it looks too easy, leaving you with the sneaky suspicion that all mumblecore filmmakers make their films because it’s easy — look, we didn’t rehearse or light or anything! And it’s still a movie! Of course, it’s not as easy as that, even if every fiber of the films encourages you to think in those terms.

The saving grace that’s unarguable are the actors, who are usually deftly cast (smart and relaxed and not too beautiful). Weixler is a classic example — often, “Alexander the Last” is pared down to watching her unexceptional but bubbly Alex waiting for someone to return or someone else’s business to be through, and you can see the little girl she used to be so clearly it casts an intimate spell that the diffuse movie around her cannot weaken. This is cutting through the bullshit in another fashion — Swanberg seems never as engaged from behind the camera as when he is watching a girl sit idly in the sunshine, the demands of story or “content” be damned.

“Hunger” (Criterion Collection) is now available on DVD and Blu-ray; “Alexander the Last” (MPI Home Video) is now available on DVD.

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