P.E.N.S. (Poetic Energy Needed in Society)

Houston has had a long and storied music history, particularly in the hip hop scene in the early and mid 1990s.  Anyone familiar with it would not at all be surprised to discover that scene had grown and mutated over the decades to produce a thriving slam poetry incubator developing the identity and voices of the next generation of artists.  They would probably be surprised to discover that didn’t happen; that it was changes in the Houston stand-up comedy scene that led to the city developing as a slam poetry mecca.  The people involved (including P.E.N.S director Limbrick) in the scene are as surprised by that as anyone but that hasn’t stopped them from diving into the new art form with both feet.

P.E.N.S. – Poetic Energy Needed in Society – is only partly interested in the history of the art and culture scene it is documenting.  It’s there because it must be, particularly when it turns its lens on the earliest members of the current poetry moment, but that’s a side effect of its real focus.  The Houston slam poetry scene is not just a stage for self-expression, its proponents say, but first and foremost a plinth for its members to stand before the world and state that they exist and have worth.  In many cases it is the entanglement with poetry that the young poets don’t just state this for the first time publicly but actually realize it for themselves.

It’s stirring and engrossing as an idea and sometimes as an experience, but it’s also frequently let down by the nature of the film it is in.  Filmed over time, and over a pandemic, with different levels of access to its subjects and even equipment available, P.E.N.S. doesn’t embrace the amateur aesthetic that it belongs to but can’t escape from it.  It’s a reality that exists not just within the individual interviews and moments but within the construction of the film itself as different interviews are placed side-by-side with one another without any real feel for the juxtaposition or development of the story as a whole.  It frequently comes across as a random collection of interviews, each a microcosm of the world the film seeks to expose but with no real connection beyond that.  There is an attempt to bring it together at the end as Limbick holds off on his biggest interview, with Se7en the ‘founder’ of the movement, to create both a thesis and a wrap up for everything that has come before.  But that can’t hide how random much of the other material has felt.

If the complete package is not a complete package, that doesn’t take away from its internal pieces at all.  Within each individual’s story – from a football player who gets hurt and loses his sport to suddenly discover poetry to an older housewife looking for more out of her time and her life – is a universe of possibility and promise.  Whenever any sole poet is talking P.E.N.S. magnetic, its flaws melting away.  The stories themselves vary tremendously in content, from individual biography to in depth discussion of specific poems and what they mean, but all of them ultimately are descriptions of the poet’s connection with the idea of poetry itself.  It’s a style that sometimes works hand in hand with the extended pieces of poetry performance everyone is given, and sometimes works completely against.  There’s no real understanding in whether a sequence needs this or not and adds to the patchwork feeling of the film as a whole.

Both greater than and less than the sum of its parts, P.E.N.S. ultimately succeeds when we stop looking at it as a film and focus solely on its subjects.  As a film with a cogent through line leading to an easily understandable destination it is intermittently successful.  As a focus on a growing artistic movement and what it is doing for the self-realization of its members it is an unmissable proof of the power of art and its necessity as part of everyday life.

Too Late

Comedy, as the saying goes, is hard.  So is horror, actual scary horror, for very similar reasons.  Putting the two together does not reduce the scale of difficulty any.  If anything, the difficulty increases as a film now has two different sets of tastes (which may not have any correlation) to appeal to.  On the upside, if it does work the final product can be more than the sum of its parts as it pulls from radically different emotions simultaneously into something that shouldn’t work but does, like combining bacon and pineapple on a pizza. 

There is a grey middle ground, however, where nothing quite works together or quite falls apart.  Maybe it’s scarier than it is funny.  Maybe it’s funnier than it is scary.  Maybe it’s only kind of funny and kind of scary but not enough of either.  Maybe it’s Too Late. 

Set in the dank world of on-the-cusp stand-up comedy (which in and of itself is scary enough), Too Late is also the name of one of the top comedy clubs in Los Angeles, a little brother to The Improv or The Comedy Store.  It’s one of those places comedians go to be discovered for their first special or sitcom, and thus it’s one of those places where they constantly pester Violet the booker (Limperis) to get them on.  But Violet, and Too Late, have a secret as well; they are both owned by ageing comedy legend Bob Devore (Lynch) who keeps himself going by the adulation of his audience and the blood of promising comics he must consume whole during the dark of the moon. 

Too Late is certainly not the first film to dramatize the dehumanizing reality of trying to break into entertainment in the form of actual horror, from deals with the devil (Rosemary’s Baby) to sadistic bosses physically and emotionally torturing their employees and vice versa (Swimming With Sharks).  It speaks to the nature of the business that these sorts of cliches have so much power.  It also means anyone venturing in these waters needs a really deep hook or a new tack beyond just the premise itself.  Too Late does not, unfortunately. 

What it does have is a lot of humor.  Limper and Weldon (as her slowly, possibly, potential boyfriend) in particular have both great chemistry and delivery and the handful of comedy sets Too Late showcases could easily fit themselves into any standup routine anywhere.  Nor is it left to just the comedy sets; the characters themselves from the best friends to the monsters are all aware they are in a comedy and bring their best line readings to their best sequences.  Taken in bits and pieces it is exactly the absurdist diorama its makers were aiming for. 

Taken as a whole, it’s a different beast, not least because the characters – as funny as they can be – exist only in pieces themselves to set up punchlines but more often to set up its statements about life in Hollywood.  Just to make sure no one misses out on the direct line Too Late is drawing between its horror movie conceit and the dehumanizing reality of trying to break into entertainment (along with the misanthropic personalities frequently attached to that reality) writer/director D.W. Thomas makes sure to mention them several times particularly with Bob’s offhand shrug that ‘people come and people go.’ 

It’s possible to be that on the nose without it hurting your story, but not while also trying to be funny and or scary.  Too Late’s absurdist humor and absurdist heart are all in the right place but it’s trying to do too much and ultimately trips over its own ambitions. 

The Penny Black

An unbelievably rare collectible hidden in the middle of nowhere, an invisible conman who comes and goes leaving nothing but questions in his wake, an innocent man with a questionable past caught in the middle … it’s all the makings of the grandest (and sometimes most cliched) of noir stories. The make the hero (and we as his surrogate) question what makes a choice good or bad, what are the realities of being honest or dishonest and are there ever any actual consequences to any of these things. 

The Penny Black asks the most complex question of all: ‘does any of this even matter?’ 

Poking a pin in the bubble surrounding the core of your conceit doesn’t usually end well; it just reveals the whole exercise was the caretaking of hot air.  Unless it’s all (maybe) real in which case the dire moral questions of fiction are quickly dropped for the more practical question of ‘what do I, or can I, do about this?’ 

This is the question (questions) before young Will (no relation to the director), an assuming Arizona man who happens to be the custodian of several volumes of very rare, very expensive (maybe authentic) stamps, including the notorious Penny Black stamp, left behind by his vanished-off-the-face-of-the-Earth roommate Roman.  Who may or may not have been part of the Russian Mafia.  And who may or may not realize Will has the stamps.  Also, did I mention Will’s father was a conman himself who both left Will with rampant trust issues of his own and a skewed perspective on the individual merits of honesty.  Is it any wonder director Saunders felt the immediate urge to begin documenting every part of Will’s story (even if none of it turned out to be true)?  It would be less surprising if Raymond Chandler rose from the grave, drawn by its internecine web to explore one last time the uncertainties of human connection and behavior. 

Saunders knows all of this and is up front from the jump that this could be all a put on by the conman son of a conman for reasons no one (least of all himself) could understand or articulate.  The fact that the aformentioned Penny Black, one of the world’s first stamps and itself notorious for being forged by cheap London hustlers, is so incredibly on the nose about the dilemma before both Will and his story is understood and noted by Saunders from the beginning and he (and his film) never let go of his skepticism even as more and more pieces appear including the mercurial Roman himself.  And why would it?   

At some point there’s no way of knowing if any of this is real, unless you are the one perpetrating all of it and maybe not even then.  Which may be the point.  But at the same time, how could anyone not tell this story when laid in front of them?  Which also may be the point. 

The reality of it unfolds (over months and months) with the absurdist gleam of a Cohen Bros. film as Will and Saunders search for the illusive Roman, uncovering more and more evidence of his strange (possibly criminal) background while simultaneously questioning Will himself when some of the stamps going missing.  Will’s very real concern quickly becomes very real paranoia as Roman himself becomes more and more of a cult figure, always out of reach, more folklore than man.  Until suddenly, like the Wizard or Welles’ Harry Lime, he just appears in front of an apartment complex one evening to the amazement of everyone.   

Is he the devil Will has started to recreate in his imagination?  Is he just a man?  Will he exonerate Will of his families (and perhaps his own) past deeds or will he accuse him of stealing the stamps as well.  Are the stamps real or just more detritus a bunch of people with too much time on their hands have strung together in search for meaning within the everyday drudge of life? 

There are answers to all of this, up to a point.  Which is itself the point.  There’s also a tremendous amount of humanity and some real wonder that yes indeed, truth really is stranger than fiction.  And we’re all better that way. 

The Penny Black is a slice of wonderful strangeness inside a slice of wonder life.  Check it out as soon as you can. 

Bad Cupid

Is it the trip or is it the destination?  Is it the end or the means?  Can an idea or a result be so purely beneficial on its own that it doesn’t matter how awful the acquiring of it was?  Is true love so wonderful on its own it doesn’t matter how you came across it?

Bad Cupid is not asking these questions, it already has the answer and wants you to know it.     

Which is how we get Archie (Rhys-Davies), a foul-tempered, foul-mouthed mean-spirited man who’s only two passions appear to be day drinking and ensuring that lonely individuals find their one true love.  That includes the obsessed Dave (Nepyeu), who cannot get over the one who got away (Turturro).  Well, not so much got away as dumped him hard for not being dramatic enough about his love.  Even a trip to Vegas sponsored by his fun-loving cousin Morris (Marin) is enough to break him out of his funk.  It does, however, get him crossing paths with Archie, Archie’s uncanny knowledge about his romance problems, the man Archie has bound and gagged in his trunk (Elder) and a ridiculously convoluted plan to get Denise back.

There’s a good movie in there somewhere, especially fans of the understated indie comedy.  The film and its makers know it, too, which isn’t always a benefit. Every genre has its conventions and it’s easy to just accept them when they appeal to you, without asking whether those conventions are helping or hurting the final product. 

Bad Cupid is a compilation of conventions from its hangdog to lead to his mercurial cousin trying to fix him and espouse their freedom loving ways.  From there commence long dialogue scenes about the nature of relationships and love which primarily restate the same ideas over and over with little change until the moment comes when Dave must finally do something.  Quirky characters come and go in between, mixing up the constant restatement of themes and hopefully their interesting enough on their own that they add some life to the film while they’re around.

It’s a style that has been around as long as independent film has and found its ne plus ultra in Kevin Smith’s seminal Clerks and plenty of people of tried to match it’s free flowing laughs and relationship drama that made it easy to forget just a few people and one location were all that were available, but mostly what has come out of it is repetition. 

Beethoven’s theory of composing required both statement of theme and then development, nothing just staying the same in order to create a complete work.  It seems like a simple observation when just stated that way but simplicity is usually the hallmark of mastery.  But even as obvious as it is, it’s not followed through often enough.

There are spots of real humor in the script by Ira Fritz, Neal Howard and Anthony Piatek, but they are frequently buried in the unhurried delivery and pace of film that is too short to be so laid back.  It only really comes alive when Archie appears.

Rhys-Davies carries Bad Cupid on his back not unlike Sisyphus carrying that boulder uphill every day and with roughly the same effect.  Some of that is because Archie is the only character who genuinely gets to be proactive – Dave moans about his lot in life and does nothing and Morris moans about Dave doing nothing while doing nothing – and some of it is just Rhys-Davies native screen charisma which can pick up even weak material and make it seem lively.  No one else is yet able to do that while also being saddled with bland roles.   

The bottom line is none of these characters are likeable.  The closest is the mean-spirited Cupid.  It’s not that they’re unlikeable in a charming way, Its that they are controlled by their weaknesses without enough corresponding strengths to balance them.  The question of whether bad or unlikeable people deserve love and how they find it probably could make a good movie, but that’s not what Bad Cupid is offering.

Bad Cupid isn’t bad but it’s not good enough to get by with what it does have to offer.

BAD CUPID SCORE: 5.5/10

Bad Cupid was directed by Diane Cossa and Neal Howard from a screenplay by Howard, Ira Fritz and Anthony Piatek. It stars John Rhys-Davies, Shane Nepveu, and Briana Marin.

This Is Not A War Story

The new Talia Lugacy drama.

This Is Not a War Story is lying right from the title card, and that’s okay. It is most definitely a war story, even if all of its stories of war take place off screen and in the past through occasional remanences.

But if This Is Not a War Story is low on pyrotechnics, it’s big on emotional implosion with an eye firmly on the cost of war. Not just the death or destruction or even the wounded among the soldiers and civilians on both sides, but the survivors who seem to come back hale and hearty.

A quiet, reserved character study, the film wants to make sure no one forgets the invisible wounds that have been left to fester for so long.

The most counterintuitively glaring of those wounds are the ones recently-discharged Isabelle Casale (director/star Talia Lugacy) is clearly carrying around. At odds with her family and everyone around her, war has exacerbated Isabelle’s anti-social attributes to the point she can barely look at anyone much less express what she’s feeling.

Her deep well of pain and solitude meets its match in the empathy of Will (Sam Adegoke) who runs a rehab group specifically for veterans with PTSD issues. Even as he draws Isabelle out of her shell, Will’s own issues begin to creep up on him again until no one is sure who is saving who anymore.

At its best, This Is Not a War Story is a quietly-enthralling character study in pain that dives into the heart of the unspeakable and comes out the other side. That is largely due to the work Lugacy is doing on both sides of the lens. As actor and director she is firmly in the ‘less is more’ camp, producing an Isabelle who is clearly defined in her trauma even as she will only talk about it in circles.

By the end she is so well defined a half slouch or a punch to the arm speak volumes even if she can’t. Lugacy the director is similarly reserved, matching her characters’ feelings of isolation with long silent stretches of them in their chosen environments by turns fidgeting and peaceful.

She has a strong on-screen partner in Adegoke, who sets himself the unenviable task of drawing Isabelle out of her shell and reminding her she has permission to be alive. It works because Will has his own pain to deal with which is slowly pulled from him as Isabelle’s.

It would have been easy to make him an all-knowing figure of wisdom who could give Isabelle just the answers she needs when she needs them, but as he himself reminds her he doesn’t know everything. He may not know anything, his own frustrations sending him off to a mountain retreat where nothing can get to him including his newest protégé.

But his presence as character and actor creates the space for catharsis. Adegoke and Lugacy have real onscreen chemistry, all the more prevalent for how few words they share until Isabelle finally tracks him down in the proactive moment she’s had in years.

All of this works because This Is Not a War Story is very good at pretending it’s not a war story when it really is, wrapping itself in the pain of its leads which could as easily be about a lost family member or sudden shock as about war and death.

Every so often it does remind us what it is, usually through brief mouthpiece who can speak diatribes about the American war machine and what it has done in different countries, the confusion of war and occupation and the realization that one may not be the hero they had been told they were. That’s all well and good, but when someone says it out loud, just like that, among otherwise very subtle shades of character and dialogue, the dichotomy is a bit much.

But it doesn’t happen that often. And it can’t cover up a sterling bit of both character work and deep thematic relevance from artist on the rise. This Is Not a War Story is definitely a war story, and it’s more than okay.

THIS IS NOT A WAR STORY REVIEW SCORE: 7/10

Acoustic Pictures‘ This Is Not a War Story was directed by Talia Lugacy and stars Sam Adegoke, Danny Ramirez, and Frances Fisher. The film was executive produced by Rosario Dawson.

Night People

In this series, I look back at some fantastic hidden gems which have been lost over the years and deserve to be rediscovered. We’ll kick things off with Night People, which opened in theaters in March of 1954.

If you ask a hundred different people what Gregory Peck‘s best role was, probably ninety percent would say Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. If you asked Peck, he would probably have said Lt. Col. Steve Van Dyke in Night People (buy at Amazon). And he may not be wrong. A terse, lean Cold War thriller, Night People brims with sharp dialogue and complex characters stuck on either side of a (not yet literal) wall of ideology and pragmatism.

In the early days of the Cold War, allies turned enemies and enemies turned allies were all ensconced uncomfortably together in the ruins of Berlin as the city (and country) were being rebuilt. While things seemed professional and steady on the surface, just below it the betrayal and spycraft were the order of the day and it was left to men like Col. Van Dyke (Peck), the Army’s head of intelligence for the United States sector, to keep things sorted. Things like a ne’er-do-well corporal suddenly disappearing into the Russian sector one night who also happens to be the son of a powerful industrialist. Which sticks Van Dyke with the thankless job of getting the corporal back without upsetting the delicate balance of alliances which post-war Berlin had become or losing any of his own agents in the process.

It’s the sort of thankless job which would make a person ask why anyone would do it. Rather than spend a great amount of time agonizing over that question, Night People simply offers us Van Dyke. Completely cognizant of the personal stakes involved, more so than his superiors, he doesn’t take any of the requirements of the job home with him. In the middle of the tensest situations where he has done all he could do, he takes the time to wonder about football season because there’s nothing else to do, so why worry about it? For Van Dyke it’s all just a job.

Peck’s Van Dyke is a refutation of the modern Hollywood protagonist. He has no backstory or hidden concerns. Beyond his job and the fact that he’s had some sort of relationship with his East German source Hoffy, nothing else is ever known about him. He is exactly what he appears to be, appearing specifically for the story he is built for and then disappearing again, unchanged beyond completing the problem immediately before him.

The closest modern version is a David Mamet lead where internal needs are the proverbial iceberg we only ever get hints at. And none of it is missed. He is, both as a character and a performance, complete without need for greater complication. It’s obvious in his grim approach to grim work and his occasional retreat to sarcasm why the role appealed so much to Peck. In a career of forthright men, Van Dyke may be the most forthright of all while facing the greatest stakes with the potential for World War III (or at least a great loss of position in the Cold War) flowing from any mistake he may make.

In some ways, he might not seem too out of place in a film noir, a genre Peck never spent much time in. The closest he ever came was Hitchcock’s Spellbound — though Hitchcock never really did noir (even if the overlap between Hitchcock noir is large) — and Cape Fear a decade later. In that sense, Night People is probably the most film noir film Peck ever really made. And yet, like Van Dyke, it frequently seems like a refutation of film noir, which at this point was largely on its way out.

It doesn’t seem like that on the surface. Alongside Van Dyke’s stoic, sarcastic take on the people he comes across is a twisty, ever changing chameleon of a plot which requires a flow chart to keep complete track of. [This is a good thing]. While the core goal never changes — returning the wayward corporal — the reasons for his capture and the different groups it affects grows and changes as Van Dyke dives further and further into the mess below the surface.

It’s the sort of crackerjack plotting Hollywood has usually excelled at and in the hands of career filmmaker Nunnally Johnson (best known for his adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath) that’s exactly what you get. Every scene reveals character and plot and does so with the kind of off-handedly poetic tough guy dialogue that Ben Hecht and the Coen Bros. made their careers out of. That’s a small thing either, it’s the main thing. Great roles make for great performances and Van Dyke is a great role nor is he the only one. Bjork’s Hoffmeir doesn’t outshine Van Dyke because she can’t, she flits in and out in order to propel the plot along and shine light on Van Dyke as he must quickly process years of deceit and make on the fly tactical decisions regardless of his personal feelings. It’s no accident Night People’s one and only Oscar nomination in 1954 was for Best Original Screenplay (one of three Johnson accumulated in his career).

[It’s tempting to say too that it was and is horrible overlooked, but the reality is films nominated for Screenplay and Film Editing far and away outlast most of their peers in staying power].

What it gains in masterful wordsmith at first glance it seems to lose in a muddle of commercially focused visual choices. In an extreme contrast to its title, Night People is so bright and colorful it seems like it always takes place in the bright light of day, even at night.

Coming in the mid-50s, the choice of Cinemascope made sense as studios battled television for eyeballs. For the viewer it presents a visual feast of Berlin (with much of the film shot on location) combined with lush color slowly transitioning from Technicolor to the less vibrant Eastman color. Cinematographer Charles Clarke (another one of those quiet professionals who just went about his job but isn’t highly celebrated despite his skill) not only makes full use of the new wider format but keeps as much of the bright primary colors of Technicolor as possible in the final print. Yet again, Night People goes against the film noir grain. Yes, there were a handful of films which did similar — Leave Her to Heaven, Niagara — but it’s still so rare that it sticks out when it occurs.

The days are glorious blues and the nights are glorious purples and more importantly everyone is carefully uniformed from Van Dyke’s immaculately pressed green to the blue of the British and the Robin’s Egg of Hoffy’s suit (her own sort of uniform). In a world of greys, everyone is carefully color coded.

The bright look seems at first a misnomer. Night People’s noir like story cries out for black and white as the different sides wade around in moral turpitude.

Instead the dirty deeds are all done out in the open, in the bright light of day and Technicolor. The bright color reflects the upstanding, unflinching and unfailing forthrightness of Van Dyke (even as he double crosses and double deals) slamming into the grimy darkness of noir. The lack of self-doubt, the lack of shadows or grey scale (even when there were shadows) is a, knowingly or not, counter point to film noir suggesting nothing is black and white or grey unless we let ourselves view events that way and to view them that way is a sort of weakness which does not reflect reality or tell us anything about it. The world isn’t what we make of it, it simply is what it is and we must survive in it.

It’s a point of view which is hardly foreign to Johnson’s heroes, intentionally or not. An auteur who spent most of his career in the studio system of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, Johnson’s hand is frequently covered over by the needs of the studios he worked for making artistic design harder to separate. Is Night People’s expansive look reflective of a desire to refute grimy crime film or a commercial need to combat television? Is its professional, stalwart hero the reflection of a purely professional filmmaker or the end result of a studio’s idea of what a post-War audience could handle?

This may be why it is largely forgotten. It so strenuously goes against the grain of what the modern view of films of its type should be it is overlooked in favor of films which don’t.

Either way, Night People is a film of change, sneaking into the post-War / Cold War culture of the ’50s where American optimism still lived but was beginning to be tinged with paranoia and cynicism before the inevitable break of the ’60s. It’s not quite ahead of its time but may have benefitted more from having appeared later when decisions about audience appetites had more latitude. Instead it is a film in transition, slowly, cautiously moving studios from the requirements of the Hays Code to the wilds of the New Wave. Or maybe it’s simpler than all that. Maybe Night People is just the work of expert craftsman doing their jobs and no deeper than that.

In that sense, Night People reflects the men who made it; quiet, knowledgeable professionals who eschew melodrama and personality dysfunction in favor of just doing their jobs to the best of their ability. It’s that very simplicity, masking complexity, which makes it great.

Starring Gregory Peck, Broderick Crawford, Anita Bjork, Rita Gam, Walter Abel, Buddy Ebsen; written by Nunnally Johnson, Jed Harris, Tom Reed; produced and directed by Nunnally Johnson.

South Mountain

Review of Hilary Brougher’s South Mountain.

Somewhere, on the side of a mountain in the Appalachians, a family is gathering for its annual celebration. Somewhere, a family is falling apart. Somewhere, the classic reactions and responses to unconscionable betrayal are turned on their heads. Somewhere, people act out their lives in a fashion both impossible to identify with and unmistakably human. South Mountain is both a hauntingly unique story of heart break and heart mending, and a classic staple of the character drama form.

The gathering is that of Lila (Talia Balsam) and Edgar (Scott Cohen), a middle-aged married couple celebrating their latest fourth of July with their teenage children and old friends. One of them, however, knows a life-breaking secret which will slowly but surely coming spilling out over the next month and change.

Edgar has fathered a child with another woman and though Lila initially does not want to embrace the standard reaction to such news, it soon becomes clearly inevitable what must be done. As slowly as news of the Edgar’s actions spilled out, so do the reactions filled with denial and acceptance and wrapped around visits from friends and family stuck within their own preoccupations.

South Mountain is a low-budget, character-oriented independent film. That isn’t a pejorative or a warning, any more than stating that a film is a big-budget action movie or a Blumhouse horror project. It’s simply a spoken announcement of the type of film involved invoking an unspoken aside that certain cliché’s of the genre will be involved. It’s worth repeating that cliché’s also aren’t de facto negatives.

It’s just that familiarity brings both contempt and comfort and it’s a constant reminder that we’ve been this way before. Not that being unique and different is a perfect antidote to those problems, but it’s also not an issue South Mountain spends a lot of time debating. To paraphrase Dune, “the forms must be obeyed.” Well, maybe not must, but they certainly will be.

There are long, silent, all encompassing shots of nature with human beings occasionally wandering through. There are long, under played conversations about past and present emotions with plot details left to be filled in behind the scenes. There is a direct, intentional attempt to avoid obvious dramatic fireworks, focusing instead of the slow, long-term reactions to such changes. In fact, that’s pretty much all South Mountain is: a reaction. A reaction to hurt, a reaction to pain, a reaction to history, a reaction happiness, a reaction to life.

A lot of that is dependent on the skill of the actors as the minimalism of the story and the visuals leaves us with only the people to hang on to. And that is a responsibility mostly on Balsam’s shoulders as Cohen (and to an extent most of the characters) floats in and out of Lila’s life, just enough to bring up memories of love and pain and let us see how plainly they appear on Balsam’s face. And her face is just about the only place we’ll ever get to see that deeper truth writer/director Hilary Brougher seems to be going for, because everything else is just so intentionally low core.

It’s not mumblecore, no one speaks near enough for that (or for it to be accused of resembling a play, though it shares some elements with theatrical drama), but it’s similarly low key to the degree the casual viewer may wonder just how much any of this matters to the people living through it.

Not everything needs wild plot gyrations and South Mountain would feel false with them. But it’s impossible to erase the feeling that something has happened, and we missed it. There was a moment where the world changed and we were looking the other way and what’s left is regret or acceptance. Or both. Brougher wants us to see why both are not so much needed as inevitable, with much to recommend and condemn them.

And she does it skillfully, never yanking the bandage off or going for visceral thrill. Even the most melodramatic moments — the reveal of Edgar’s infidelity — are approached from the side, growing in scope until they are impossible to ignore. Similar to the way we slowly learn that a phone call Edgar is having is with the woman giving birth to his child, we learn bits and bits and bits about Edgar and Lila’s long history with its ups and downs, creating more and more context for Lila’s reactions and her long delay of accepting how life has changed. It works better in theory than it does in practice – it truly does need a few more layers of dialogue and just speech, of opening of the characters inner lives to invest an audience fully in their lives.

But once the forms are observed and seen through, there is real meat on South Mountain’s bones. Brougher’s touch is so delicate it is almost invisible, which denies Mountain the forward momentum it desperately needs. But just sit back and let it wash over you like a cleansing rain and its depths with be revealed in the aftermath.

South Mountain Review Score: 7/10

Written and directed by Hilary Brougher, Breaking Glass Pictures‘ South Mountain stars Talia Balsam as Lila, Scott Cohen as Edgar, Andrus Nichols as Gigi, Michael Oberholtzer as Jonah, Macaulee Cassaday as Sam, Midori Francis as Emme, Naian González as Dara, Isis Masoud as Gemma, Guthrie Mass as Jake, and Violet Rea as Charlotte.