SXSW Film/Interactive Festival Dispatch 1: Sunday, March 9
Nearly all my impressions of Austin come from the SXSW music festival, and walking down 6th at 8am brings the familiar sense and smell of all-night-party aftermath—perhaps not quite as strong as it will be once the rockers and their handlers, sycophants, and various remora show up on Wednesday. For now, a city built for music is being used for film. The result is a sparser, mellower, gathering, notable for the presence of serious movie fans and serious moviemakers—as opposed to the industrial vermin who cough their plague-ridden blood all over the shores of the music portion every year. Who knew SXSW could run so smoothly? With badges that actually get you in places? With no hassles and no confusion? Combined with the presence of actual enthusiasts—almost no one seems to be here in the hopes of squeezing any money out of the proceedings (unless that money is meant to bankroll another movie)—this ease of use is an exciting variation on the SXSW experience I’ve been having on and off for the past 11 years as a musician and journalist.

As ever, I am late in arriving. By Sunday morning, the fest has already been in full swing for a day and a night, and people are burbling about the movies they’ve seen. the red carpet-bestriding Harold and Kumar Escape Guantanamo Bay has gotten the widest attention—SXSW Film is an interesting blend of the legitimate underground and the slightly left of mainstream; other big premieres include David Schwimmer/Simon Pegg’s Run, Fatboy, Run, the Judd Apatow-produced Forgetting Sarah Marshall (which doesn’t look all that awesome, but features a supporting performance by the inestimably brilliant stand-up comic/reality TV refugee/former junkie/and full-time dandy boy Russell Brand, who has the best radio show/podcast in England, if not the world, and will almost certainly be a massive star in America before too long), as well as Stuart Townsend’s The Battle in Seattle (a dramatization of the WTO riots starring the great Charlize Theron and Andre 3000). Most of the movies I’m planning on seeing are a bit lower to the ground.

First things first: My Effortless Brilliance, by Seattle’s own Lynn Shelton, starring and semi-written by me and Basil Harris and Calvin Reeder and Jeanette Maus, screens at 11am. On Daylight Savings Morning, after a long night of Texas-style drankin’. Everyone’s a bit nervous that no one will show, but people do. The theater is about 3/4 full, and though our movie has a laconic tempo, they seem to respond. The Q&A is hilariously predictable (what was your budget, how much was improvised, etc.) but good natured, and then it’s over and you’re like, hey, can we have another screening right away, please?

Next up, an acting workshop featuring Jeffrey Tambor (best knows as Hank Kingsley on The Larry Sanders Show, and the dad from Arrested Development, though to me, he’ll always be the guy from The Ropers) and indie stalwarts Kent Osborne (Hannah Takes the Stairs) and Greta Gerwig (Hannah Takes the Stairs, almost every film in this year’s festival. If, as media types keep trying to say, SXSW Film is the new Sundance—it really, really, super isn’t; it’s WAY better than Sundance on 50 levels, but play along for the sake of analogy—then Greta Gerwig is its Parker Posey. She has prominent roles in three major films showing this year, her face adorns the cover of the Austin Chronicle film issue, and she’s not yet so famous that she seems unapproachable. Evidence of this approachability can be found in the phalanx of 5-20 dudes often to be found within a few feet of wherever she is. Anyway, the real story here is not Gerwig, who has obvious star quality, but Tambor, who emerges from the acting workshop as a combination guru, master thespian, and life coach. From a career spent as a brilliant supporting actor, reliably being the funniest thing about a funny show or picture, you wouldn’t necessarily assume that he’d be so commanding as the focus of the room. But that’s absurd. No one is better prepared for his moment at center stage than a character actor; he had the best stories, the the shrewdest insights, the warmest convictions about the essential beauty and truth at the heart of acting. Watching him put Gerwig and Osborne (to be fair, he focused more on Gerwig, from which you can glean what you will) through the paces of a scene from John Patrick Shanley’s The Dreamer Examines His Pillow, calling audible directions, asking exacting personal questions, insisting on more specificity, more commitment, more risk taking, more MORE, was a constantly expanding thrill—particularly if, like anyone with any sense, you don’t really greet the prospect of watching someone else’s acting class with relish. You watched the scene get better because of how he directed the actors—both of whom have traditionally been seen in films with a reputation (however inaccurate) for feeling undirected, improvised, amateurish. You also saw them get better (not to mention being able to see them taking stock of themselves on stage, reeling from the respectful invasiveness of his approach). You felt like you were getting better. “People are ridiculous. Write it down!” he commanded the room, and I reached for a pen. “If you have a problem with the word art,” he digressed at one point, then paused for effect before declaring: “Go Fuck Yourself!” I hate the word art when used by people who make art, especially actors for some reason, but I cheered right along with everyone. I honestly wish every single person I know could have been in that room. Though I’ve known who he was since I was six years old, and have been a fan of his for at least 15 years, I never saw Jeffrey Tambor coming. I would happily follow him into hell.

The rest of the day would be devoted to seeing films by people I’ve met in the course of being part of a movie that’s loosely associated with the horrible (however occasionally apt) term mumblecore. Both the films and the filmmakers seem bent not so much on breaking out of that pigeonhole—after all, it’s nice to get some attention rather than none—but on pushing the edges of the ill-defined non-genre (nonre?) to make more capacious cinematic shapes. Or maybe they’re just getting better after having made a few films and gained an audience. The Duplass Brothers, whose The Puffy Chair is probably the most visible product of this “movement” (I really don’t think it counts as a movement, not in the same sense of, say, the Civil Rights Movement or even cubism were movements), have made Baghead, a genuinely funny/genuinely scary hybrid of comedy, drama, and horror involving two guys and two girls in a cabin trying to write a movie. The plot gets intricate (and does indeed involve a scary dude with a bag on his head out in the woods), but not as interesting as the constantly shifting sexual, romantic, and platonic dynamics between the four characters. The movie is really smart and really funny, and unbefitting the mumblecore archetype, very crafted. Well crafted, but crafted. (Well acted, and well written, too.) Intentional. And super enjoyable.

The other major filmmaker of mumblecore (like everyone anywhere near this school, I deeply wish I were clever enough to generate a useful replacement word, but I fear it’s just going to be the grunge of its moment—though it probably won’t be as big; there is no Alice in Chains of mumblecore, nor will there be a Candlebox) is Joe Swanberg, whose films LOL and Hannah Takes the Stairs have set the standard for the improvised dialogue, verite camera, candid sexuality, and “revealed” narrative style that characterizes these films (and frustrates their detractors). With Nights and Weekends, a project written, directed, and acted in close collaboration with Greta Gerwig, Swanberg has utterly outdone himself. A far craftier movie than Hannah or LOL, Nights and Weekends nonetheless capitalizes on the emotional language (which is to say, as opposed to intellectual language) those earlier films developed. It’s another movie about feelings, but the frame Swanberg and Gerwig (Swanwig? Gerberg?) hang around the central doomed, obsessive relationship—which ends midway through after being on arduous artificial life-support for the first 45 minutes, and is revisited, obsessively, brutally, even tragically, during the second 45—is exactly the piece that has been missing from this whole oeuvre (oeuvrecore!). There’s drama in this movie, not just feelings; progress, not just process. It’s also probably the most French movie I’ve ever seen by an American, so French it’s almost Swedish (shades of Contempt, but also of Scenes from a Marriage). It makes Vincent Gallo look like Nora Ephron. And it is fucking cataclysmic, though not exactly cathartic. As the impossibly lovers walk away from each other (a subtext here is Gerwig walking away from deep-down independent cinema and towards a glorious future), you’re left in the exact position you are at the end of a relationship—before you figure out what you’ve learned and what you haven’t, before you have “distance” or “closure,” before you’re ready to like yourself or your ex- at all. It’s agony. But it’s powerful cinema. Swanberg and Gerwig are no strangers to onscreen nudity, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a movie be so naked before. The audience sat in the screening room totally flummoxed and shellshocked by what we’d seen. Then a bit of Q&A got going, but unlike every other post-screening session, no one asked how much it cost to make.

You could tell that the filmmakers weren’t entirely certain themselves.