There Once Was A Wave: A Shift In Independent Cinema

I spent today re-watching my three favorite movies from 2011 on DVD. I wrote about them when I saw them in theaters but I didn't have a blog then. So since I do now...

Yesterday I saw two movies in the theaters: Like Crazy and Martha Marcy May Marlene. It’s not something I do often but I did so because the months of buzz and rave reviews that followed their respective premiers at Sundance¹ had done their job on me. And this is just a couple of weeks after I went to see another festival favorite, Take Shelter (Critic’s Week Grand Prix Winner at Cannes). Walking home from BAM last night after the unsettling ending to Martha… I started thinking about commonalities among these three movies.

To start, all three are very good. All good stories that are well written, perfectly paced and get excellent performances from their key characters. They’re also all made by relatively new, American filmmakers (Like Crazy is director Drake Doremus’ fourth film². Take Shelter, Jeff Nichols’ second and Martha, Sean Durkin’s first). They each close with scenes that are sure to be polarizing and lastly, they are all pretty “serious” films.

It’s that last link though that struck a chord with me. It seems pretty clear that for the past fifteen years we’ve been in the midst of a wave. Not that it had ever been given an official name like it’s predecessors The French New Wave, New Hollywood, or what I like to call “90s White Drama” (Pacific Heights, Single White Female, Crush, etc)³ but there is one word most commonly associated with many films of this period. A nasty little word that filmmakers prefer not to hear and critics love to use: Quirk. If you’re not familiar with the term as it relates to movies, just know that if you’ve seen a Wes Anderson film, you’ve seen quirk⁴. Films that create a world in which reality is slightly off kilter (not to be confused with the totally unrealistic nature of fantasy or the reshaping/redefining of reality which is surrealism) for characters that are painfully unaware of societal norms (see: Barry Egan, Punch Drunk Love or Penelope Stamp, The Brothers Bloom). From the late nineties up until around 2008 (by my own estimation), independent film has been dominated by these quirky movies and their wacked out lead characters that made the movies fun but could still deal in real life issues like impending death (The Savages) and divorce (The Squid and the Whale).

Barry Egan in Punch Drunk Love

The most recent attention grabbers however, take hardcore subject matter and present them in a way that is unflinching and direct. Take for example, Afterschool (Co Produced by Martha director Sean Durkis) a film whose central character is an outcast teenage boy at a prep school. This could have easily been another quirky coming of age story in the growing list of Rushmore retakes like Charlie Bartlett or Submarine but instead explores our generation’s fascination with voyeurism and desensitization to violence. While it didn’t pick up any awards when it premiered at Cannes in 2008, it   did win an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature.

There is more behind this shift though than the current generation of filmmakers having a mind that leans more toward the dramatic. Studios seem to be pointing their wallets in that direction as well. Submarine, a film about a super precocious 15 year old boy who tries out myriad hobbies in an effort to find himself, earned pretty good reviews after it’s premiere at Sundance and was subsequently picked up by The Weinstein Company. After reading about Submarine I was interested to see it, even if only to witness how something so close to flat out copying could be seen in such a positive light by critics (there’s even a scene about a mother giving a handjob)⁵, but I somehow managed to miss it’s run in New York entirely. As far as I can tell, the film received little promotion in the US, while the three other Sundance darlings I mentioned earlier were as in your face as a small studio indie film can be.  

I tend to believe the wind that caused this change in the current must be the string of great cinema coming out of Europe. Much the same way French New Wave pioneers Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut influenced New Hollywood directors in the 60’s to do crazy things like shoot on location and use editing as a stylistic tool instead of just a functional one. It would be hard for me to believe that the box office success and critical acclaim of films like A Prophet (France), Animal Kingdom (Australia), and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (Romania)⁶ had no influence on American filmmakers and studio heads alike to make a conscious move away from the quirk.

Some would say this is perfect timing. Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York was lukewarm. Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg⁷ was a success with critics and critics alone and Wes Anderson’s last live action flick, The Darjeeling Limited, was probably the weakest of his catalogue. Even Like Crazy director Drake Doremus saw the writing on the wall. His first three films, each critical and commercial failures, definitely fell into the genre of quirk. This time around he strips away the pretense and just like that he becomes a name to know. Apparently the proof is in the organic, unsweetened applesauce, not the pudding. 

---

1. Grand Jury Prize for Like Crazy and the Dramatic Directing Award for Martha Marcy May Marlene.

2. His first two movies received very little attention (re: no one saw them).

3. Mumblecore is probably better defined as a moment of experimentation.

4. I happen to believe that “quirk” had been showing up in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Hal Ashby and Peter Bogdanovich, among others, long before Wes Anderson got a hold of it but good luck finding the word in any review predating Bottle Rocket.    

             

5. For the record, I did wind up feeling that it was very well done (the movie, not the handjob).

6. Each of these films has scored 95% or better on the Rotten Tomatometer.

7. I really wanted this to be good. Saw it on opening night. Fell asleep on the last 15 minutes.