Review - Sleepwalk With Me

At the start of Sleepwalk With Me, Mike Birbiglia turns to the camera and insists that the story we are about to see is true. He also reminds the audience to turn off their mobile phones, before he recalls being in a cinema when a fellow audience member answered his phone with "Who dis?" – "Not only was he willing to talk to someone on the phone, he was willing to talk to anyone on the phone!" a perplexed Birbiglia exclaims. This opening quickly establishes the style that will carry Birbiglia through his debut feature; the stand-up comic's wry observations on everyday absurdities, the frequent reiteration that all of this really happened, and the direct address to the viewer, which allows him to take us into his confidence and ask for our support. "It's important before I tell you this portion of the story to remind you that you're on my side," he tells us before an episode that potrays him in a particularly unflattering light.

Birbiglia's ability to keep us onside even as his behaviour occasionally appalls us is one of the key factors in Sleepwalk With Me's success. He has given the leading character in the film the name Matt Pandamiglio, but the events his film depicts are drawn from those covered in Birbiglia's confessional one-man show. Matt is an aspiring stand-up comedian whose aspirations haven't been dimmed by the lack of success he has had with his few performances to date. His girlfriend Abby (Lauren Ambrose) is supportive of his ambitions, but she wants something more from their long and now stagnating relationship. Abby has started talk of marriage and kids, something which sends Matt into paroxysms of anxiety, and that anxiety manifests itself as a series of incredibly vivid dreams and sleepwalking episodes.

One of the more persistent and troubling archetypes in recent American comedy is the selfish, commitment-phobic schlub who nonetheless manages to sustain a relationship with a woman who clearly deserves much better. When the star of the film is the director or creative force of the picture, this disparity between partners can come off looking like narcissism or wish-fulfilment, and some viewers will surely note that Matt doesn't deserve a woman as virtuous and lovely as Abby, even before his behaviour seals the deal. Much of the film is based around his unkindness and deception. When he finally gets the opportunity to take his act on the road, driving hundreds of miles for low-rent gigs, his first spark of success comes after he introduces his marriage woes into his routine with the line, "I don't want to get married until I'm sure nothing else good can happen in my life." Matt makes his relationship with Abby the central thread of his act, hiding this fact from her while she waits at home, proud of his promising progress reports from the road.

Birbiglia gets away with it partly through his own affable charm, and partly because his film feels so well-observed and sincere. Both the portrait of a young comedian's struggles and the scenes of awkward domesticity feel authentically depicted, and the fantasy interludes drawn from Birbiglia's nightmares ensure the film feels more accomplished cinematically than a stand-up's adaptation of his own routine might otherwise have been. In many respects, the tone and content of the film recalls Annie Hall, though there's a rough-and-ready quality to Birbiglia's filmmaking that leaves it falling short of Allen's great relationship comedy. There is plenty of promise evident in Sleepwalk With Me, though, and Birbiglia has already stated his intention to adapt his latest autobiographical comedy routine for the screen too. In Sleepwalk With Me he manages to play himself as the bad guy and still earn our sympathy; whether he'll be able to pull off the same trick twice is an open question.

Review - The Look of Love

Steve Coogan stares directly at the camera with one eyebrow raised and says, "My name is Paul Raymond. Welcome to my world of erotica." When The Look of Love opens in this way, it's hard not to recall Coogan's first collaboration with director Michael Winterbottom, 24 Hour Party People. In that film, Coogan played Tony Wilson and frequently broke the fourth wall to offer his commentary on events as we watched them unfold. But The Look of Love is not a film in a similar vein to that portrait of the Manchester music scene, and this early moment of self-awareness is not representative of the film's subsequent tone. In fact, it is more suggestive of a picture that doesn't seem sure what exactly it wants to be, or what story it wants to tell, from one scene to the next.

This lack of a coherent focus continues with the film's opening scenes, which are set in the early 1960s and are shot in black-and-white, although Winterbottom makes no attempt to impose similar distinctive aesthetics on any of the subsequent decades that his film covers. At this time, Paul Raymond was a touring coastal towns with his saucy variety act, and thirty years later his sex and property empire made him the richest man in Britain. This is undoubtedly a remarkable rise and compelling films have been built out of less interesting figures, but Winterbottom and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh aren't disciplined enough to focus on the key areas of the tale and to dig beneath the flashy surface.

The strongest thread is the relationship between Raymond and his daughter Debbie, played with an affecting fragility by Imogen Poots. Debbie was the child with whom Raymond had the deepest bond (his son left for America with his wife after the breakup of their marriage) and he had planned to hand the running of his various businesses on to her before she died from a drug overdose in 1992. Winterbottom occasionally cuts from the narrative to scenes of an ageing Raymond sitting alone, watching footage of his lost daughter, lost in his memories and his grief. It's a big stretch for Coogan to bring the necessary gravitas to this role (the ghosts of Tony Wilson, Alan Partridge and Tony Ferrino are never fully dispelled), but the moments in which he genuinely seems to connect with Poots are where the film briefly takes on another dimension. When Raymond has to face the fact that his daughter is not talented enough to lead the show he wrote for her, the scenes between them carry a real emotional weight. The fact that the film's title comes from a song that Debbie sings indicates that this is the heart of the story, but it's something that Winterbottom only flits in and out of, as he gets derailed by other, less rewarding, details.

The Look of Love is a maddeningly uneven picture. When it isn't squeezing in distracting comic cameos (Stephen Fry, Dara O'Briain, Matt Lucas and David Walliams) or unilluminating montages, it's indulging rote scenes of hedonistic excess that feel like little more than a watered-down Boogie Nights. Potentially intriguing aspects of Raymond's tale are left frustratingly unexplored, such as his discovery of a son from a previous relationship, which is raised and then forgotten about in a single scene. The film hops along in its energetic but episodic fashion, as if we should congratulate the filmmakers for touching upon so many aspects of the Paul Raymond story instead of questioning whether they have sufficiently explored any of it.

Michael Winterbottom is a director whose refusal to be pinned down and categorised has resulted in a body of work that is wonderfully eclectic in its style and content. But he can't quite find the right approach here, and the result is a fleetingly enjoyable but ultimately shallow and unfocused biopic. Winterbottom directed one of the all-time great London-based films with his 1999 drama Wonderland, and there was certainly potential for another landmark capital picture in this study of "The King of Soho," but the only real point of interest for Londoners lies in spotting the familiar locations that act as backdrop to the disappointingly mundane story. 

Review - An Oversimplification of Her Beauty

I'll probably need to watch An Oversimplification of Her Beauty again before coming to any firm conclusions about how successful it is. My first viewing of Terence Nance's picture was frequently exhilarating and occasionally exhausting. The title hints at oversimplification, but the movie is anything but as Nance dives into the complicated nature of his own love life. At its heart, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is a rather straightforward story about a boy who is in love with a girl, but whose love isn't reciprocated in the same way. It's the adventurous and idiosyncratic approach he has taken with this story that makes if feel like something new, even if it's an approach that is just as likely to alienate viewers as it is to beguile them.

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty has its roots in another film, How Would You Feel?, which Nance made in 2010. Both films focus on the filmmaker's relationship with Namik Minter, a friend and fellow aspiring artist whom Nance has been besotted with from as far back as 2006. How Would You Feel? details a moment when Nance had set a date, only for the object of his affections to pull out at the last moment. This prompts a bout of self-questioning from Nance, as he replays the incident, and the moments that led up to it, over and over in his head, gradually giving us more information and context.

When Nance switches between this movie and the new footage that An Oversimplification of Her Beauty consists of, he creates the effect of a VHS tape being paused and ejected, to be returned to later. An Oversimplification of Her Beauty continues to document the filmmaker's pursuit of Namik in a variety of ways. The most startling and memorable of these techniques is the incorporation of animation into the picture. Nance doesn't limit his romantic reveries to just Namik, and his thoughts drift to many women who have won his heart before slipping away. These encounters are re-imagined and shared by the director through hand-drawn and stop-motion animation sequences, with Nance mixing and matching from his grab-bag of stylistic tricks to create something that feels disarmingly imaginative and playful.

But is there too much of it? Nance reportedly had a three-hour cut of An Oversimplification of Her Beauty before taking the film to Sundance, where he listened to advice and pared down his vision to a more manageable ninety minutes. That ninety minutes feels so densely packed, however, it's almost bursting at the seams, and some aspects of it inevitably feel short-changed. In particular, despite Nance's offer to Namik to make her own film of their relationship and the Q&A sessions he shares with her, we are never clear on her own thoughts on the matter. Perhaps that's because she herself is unsure of her feelings, or perhaps it's appropriate for how opaque Namik seems to the lovestruck Nance, but I can't help feeling a more balanced approach to storytelling might have offered more incisive moments.

Nevertheless, there are incisive moments dotted throughout the picture, and it may divulge even more on repeat viewings. My favourite sequence – aside from the brilliantly judged, immediately seductive opening – involves Nance telling Namik about a passage in a book that reminds him of her, only for her to read it and fail to recognise any resemblance. The scene touches cleverly on the way people in a relationship see things from wildly different perspectives and misread signals, and it's the kind of scene that will surely resonate with anyone who has found themselves in such a situation. For those that haven't, there is still much here to enthral, stimulate and impress. An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is the work of an artist trying to find new ways to express the purest and most complex of emotions.

The Sundance London Festival 2012

Last week, Robert Redford's Sundance festival came to London for the first time, with four days at the O2 Arena offering up numerous films, musical events and masterclasses. I caught a few of the new features that were on show at the festival, and here's my take on four of them.

The Queen of Versailles

One of the skills a documentary filmmaker must possess is the ability to adapt when twists of fate dramatically alter the subject of the film they have set out to make. When Lauren Greenfield began filming David and Jackie Siegel, they were one of the wealthiest families in America and were in the process of building their dream home, a 90,000-square foot mansion in Florida modelled on the opulent Palace of Versailles. Within a couple of years, however, the financial crisis had caused significant damage to David's timeshare empire. The Queen of Versailles intimately captures the Siegel family as they readjust to the new realities of their situation – or fail to readjust in some cases. Jackie treats herself to caviar and facial treatments while her husband rages about money being haemorrhaged, and one telling shot shows the Siegels' nanny shaking her head as she sets down the kids' new bike next to an enormous pile of barely-touched bicycles.

For a while, it looks like The Queen of Versailles is setting the Siegels – and particularly Jackie – up to be mocked. She's a 42 year-old ex-beauty queen with enormous fake breasts, married to a man three decades her senior, who thinks nothing of taking a stretch limo to the McDonald's drive-thru. The couple's plans for their Versailles-inspired mansion are a monument to obscene wealth and tacky taste, and the pair give their interviews to Greenfield's camera while sitting on a golden throne. It may seem as if the film is aiming to let the Siegels hang themselves on camera, but Greenfield is fairer than that, and while many viewers will undoubtedly enjoy the sense of schadenfreude that comes with the fall of rich people, she never lets us forget that the Siegels are, at heart, decent people. They're generous and good-humoured, and perhaps their only fault is the naïveté with which they indulged in the pursuit of their American dream while failing to spot the storm clouds on the horizon. The Queen of Versailles allows us to empathise with them as one home begins to fall apart (dog turds litter the carpet as the cleaning staff is let go) while their fantasy mansion sits half-finished and David fights to keep hold of everything he has worked for. That fight is still ongoing as the credits roll, and Greenfield drifts rather uncertainly towards the ending as we sense there's more of this story to yet be told, but in her skilled and balanced hands, the Siegels' story becomes a fascinating, oddly affecting and cautionary tale.

Safety Not Guaranteed

Wanted: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You’ll get paid after we get back. You must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.

That's the classified ad that ran in newspapers in 2005, and it's the inspiration for Colin Trevorrow's moderately charming but exasperatingly underdeveloped directorial debut. It begins in the offices of a Seattle magazine, where this ad is raised as the seed for a potential story. Cocky reporter Jeff (Jake M. Johnson) sets out to investigate with interns Darius (Aubrey Plaza) and Arnau (Karan Soni) in tow, but he's really intent on rekindling an old flame, leaving Darius to do most of the work. This is good news for the movie, because Plaza is an actress who rarely gets a chance to shine in a lead role and seizes this opportunity. Her dry, sarcastic delivery is tempered by the surprising amount of emotional texture she brings to the film as Darius grows increasingly conflicted in her relationship with would-be time traveller Kenneth (Mark Duplass).

There's not really enough going on in the central narrative of this story to sustain a movie – even one that runs for a brisk 84 minutes. Trevorrow tries to pad his movie out with a subplot involving Jeff's burgeoning romance with his high school sweetheart (Jenica Bergere) but these scenes feel rushed and half-assed, and are transparent in the way they exists solely to give their character something to do and to try and provide some shading for his personality, an attempt that fails. Similarly, the awkward and virginal Arnau is very much a third wheel and Jeff's attempt to help him get laid is shoehorned into the film clumsily and subsequently forgotten about. Safety Not Guaranteed is all loose ends, and while some might think this gives the picture a shaggy charm, it just felt underdeveloped to me, when a rewrite and firmer directorial hand could have fully exploited the genuinely good ideas it has in its locker. Duplass and Plaza are an endearing pair who are largely responsible for Safety Not Guaranteed being as engaging as it is, but the film is a litany of missed opportunities, with rushed and botched ending being a particular disappointment.

For Ellen

 

Before it stumbles with an ending that feels forced and obvious in its stab at resonant ambiguity, So Yong Kim's For Ellen is an absorbing and quite moving character study. Paul Dano impresses in a role that forces him to carry much of the movie singlehanded, playing a rock star who is in the midst of a messy divorce. His lawyer (a dialled-down Jon Heder) has negotiated a settlement for Dano's Joby Taylor, but the deal stipulates that he will have no visitation rights with his young daughter, a revelation that forces him to consider if this is what he really wants. Joby and his wife (who never really registers as a character) had their daughter when they were very young and probably before they were ready for such a responsibility, but the film gives him one last chance to connect and play the role of father before she leaves his life forever.

There's plenty of scope for sentimentality in this setup but Kim mostly avoids it. Her film is low-key and observational, allowing for long stretches in which little happens but Dano's committed performance holds our attention. His awkward relationship with Heder's well-meaning but ineffective lawyer are amusing, but the film's finest moments occur when Dano is finally allowed a two-hour visit with Ellen (Shaylena Mandigo). Opinion was divided after the screening over Mandingo's performance – some found her charming and convincing, while others found her false and cloying – but I liked her and I liked the rapport she developed with Dano. The hesitancy and slowly emerging affection in their short scenes together felt real and moved me without feeling too heavy-handed. Sadly, Kim doesn't real know where to take her story once the focus has shifted away from their relationship, and the ending (which features a rather purposeless cameo from Jena Malone) is a glib disappointment.

Nobody Walks

 

There's a lot to like in Nobody Walks. The performances, from a collection of indie-movie regulars, are uniformly excellent, the film is beautifully shot, and there are some notable instances of sound being intelligently used – but there's really nothing here you haven't seen before, and Ry Russo-Young's film fails to freshen up its familiar material. Set in LA, the film charts the effect that attractive young artist Martine (Olivia Thirlby) has on the family she goes to stay with while working on her installation. Sound designer Peter (John Krasinski) has agreed to help mix her soundtrack, but he's instantly smitten, as is any man who apparently lays eyes on her. Peter's wife Julie (Rosemarie DeWitt) is all too aware of the spell Martine is casting over her husband, but she has temptations of her own to deal with, as one of the psychiatrist's patients (Justin Kirk) has become very open about his amorous intentions towards her.

It's hard to really pick holes in Russo-Young's film as there's nothing inherently wrong with it and it probably succeeds on the terms the director has set for herself. But it's also a hard film to get excited about or particularly involved in, and I think much of that has to with the director's storytelling choices. She opts for a simmering, detached tone that feels as if it's only skimming the surface of the turbulent emotional territory that she and co-writer Lena Dunham have opted to explore. Some aspects of the movie are particularly short-changed by this tentative approach, such as the strand of the narrative that touches on the uncomfortable relationship between Peter and Julie's daughter Kolt (India Ennenga) and her Italian tutor, which should either have had more time allotted to it or been dropped completely. By the end of the picture, the waters that this family swim in appear mostly untroubled, which the filmmaker may cite as a subtle move but which I'm taking as a lack of conviction. By the way, the central narrative of Nobody Walks – of a dangerous innocent disrupting a family with their sexual power – brought to mind Pasolini's Theorem, but without any sense of danger, mystery or intellectual rigour. Nobody Walks fails simply because it so consistently plays it safe.