Amy Seimetz and Jess Weixler in Alexander the Last
This picture represents a huge leap forward for its director, Joe Swanberg. I’ve complained in the past that the “reality” of Swanberg’s features doesn’t resemble the reality of the world we all share so much as it does the reality of a half-assed improv acting workshop. With Alexander the Last, which Swanberg, as per usual, also co-wrote, shot and edited, the invented reality is artful enough to finally convince. Shots and actors’ movements are blocked competently. Furniture is where it should be. Compare the beach scene in Swanberg’s 2006 LOL with a similarly-set scene here and you get the picture immediately.
Other aspects of the film are similarly more honed than in any prior Swanberg picture. The dialogue, while hardly ever pithy or witty, is more pointed, rambles less. There even are a couple of moments that are as funny and charming as they want to be, say, when Hellen (Amy Seimetz), sister of title character Alexander (Jess Weixler), applies some wet flour to Alexander’s face in the middle of a dough-making session and dubs her “a Knight of the Order of the Baked Goods.” The acting, overall, is more even; you don’t have the feeling, as in Hannah Takes The Stairs, of one potentially engaging performer (in that film, Greta Gerwig), futilely rubbing up against a couple of hapless flounderers. Indeed, lead actresses Weixler and Seimetz interact, and eventually confront each other, so convincingly that the film almost achieves a near-combustive emotional temperature heretofore unknown in Swanberg’s works. And while it’s true that Justin Rice (of that fucking wuss-ass band Flogging the Bishop*, and Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation), playing Alexander’s musician husband Eliott, is a somewhat problematic male screen presence in that he appears to possess no testosterone whatsoever (seriously, he makes the “before” character in those old comic book body-building ads looks like Burt Lancaster), and that Barlow Jacobs, as the acting colleague for whom Alexander develops a vexing affection, does indeed, as Jeffrey Wells notes, have a very bad haircut, your correspondent was grateful enough for the on-screen absence of the auteur himself that these guys didn’t bug him all that much.
In other developments, it seems as if Swanberg’s been watching some Godard. To wit, near the end of the film Rice recites Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Bells” as Weixler attempts to—what’s the word?—canoodle him. Kind of brings to mind the reading of Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” in Vivre sa Vie. Only, you know, less purposeful. Earlier in the film there’s a lengthy shot of Weixler and Seimetz facing each other in profile, with Jacobs in between the two, facing the camera in dark sunglasses and maintaining a deadpan expression as the actresses simultaneously recite some doggerel about their very-close sisterly relationship. The net effect is kind of Mystic Pizza by way of Made in USA, but you gotta give Swanberg points for trying. Maybe producer Noah Baumbach’s signal contribution to the piece was lending Swanberg some DVDs.
Does this polishing, and the concurrent stabs at contriving direct effects (including, I have to admit, a final shot that is every bit as ominous and resonant as it wants to be), mean that Swanberg, as David Denby speculates in his New Yorker review of Alexander, is “giving up some of the methods of mumblecore?” “I think not, baby puppy,” Denby’s colleague Richard Brody responds at his excellent new blog The Front Row. Okay, no, he doesn’t actually say “I think not, baby puppy.” He instead says that Swanberg is “deepening” mumblecore, citing the scenes in which Jane Adams’ unnamed character directs Alexander and Jacobs’ character Jamie in a sex scene for the play they’re rehearsing. Per Brody,the questions explored in these sequences, among them “how do you fake sex?” mean that Swanberg’s “digging deeper into the twin essence of mumblecore: the relation of filmmaker to performer, and the relation of documentary to fiction.” Perhaps. But by keeping himself out of the film—for which, I once again say, I am in most respects very grateful—Swanberg rather lets himself off a particular hook. At the film’s website, the scenario page reads, “Focusing on an artistic young couple, Alexander the Last illuminates the challenges of monogamy amidst myriad sexual and creative temptations.” That, along with the potentially allusive title (to Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland, an 8 1/2 homage about a would-be auteur’s crisis), led me to extrapolate, at the time the site went up, that this movie could be about, say, a director who casts both himself and his wife in his films, in various explicit sex scenes, and who could be suspected of using other sex scenes in his films as pretexts by which to put himself into sexual situations with attractive female performers who aren’t his wife. Now that would’ve been a ballsy flick. Kind of creepy in a Schraderesque way, or maybe more like that dude who made Secret Things and then got arrested, and then made a movie in response to getting arrested…
But, you’ve got to take the film you’ve got, and admittedly, the film we’ve got here is quite a bit more, let’s say, pleasant than what I might have anticipated. (Turns out the title isn’t particularly allusive to anything, either.) And still, like Manohla Dargis, I’m not entirely impressed or convinced. For every flash of insight or emotional truth offered up by Alexander the Last, there are at least two more moments of dull diffusion, passages in which the film only circles around in its self-created cul-de-sac…and for all that Swanberg has to stretch out his end-credit sequence for a near-eternity in order to get Alexander up to the 72-minute mark. Alexander the Last is, I have to admit, not entirely gruel. But it’s still pretty damn thin.
*Yes, I know that Rice’s band is actually called Bishop Allen. I like my name better.
I just re-read your previous anti-Swanberg screed and noted that you barely mentioned NIGHTS & WEEKENDS, which to me is where Swanberg made his lead forward. I was in the “can’t tell if he’s promising or hopelessly slack” camp until N&W, and then I thought he began to show a necessary focus. Haven’t seen ALEXANDER yet – looking forward to it – but if you revisited N&W (a prospect I’m sure you’d find unappetizing), you might find more of that polish than you remember.
Actors. God love ’em…
Happy to see you are at least willing to at least examine swanbergs new work and high light his strengths. Disappointed in a lot of the petty ramblings of the previous anti-swanberg stuff but anticipate that you feel the same way.
I think it’s important to give every artist the freedom to work, and the blogger world is quick to add negative wit and rhetoric, that can be particularly harmful for a subjective audience interested in film.
I mean to say, that it’s important for film bloggers like you to support the art of film in general, whether or not a specific film is suitable by ones standards to be held in high regard or not. I think its really generous, considering your previous, forementioned anti-swanberg ramblings, that you took the time to see his film and to talk about it humbly, modestly and with recognition of its strengths.
Noël, the reason I didn’t discuss “Nights and Weekends” more is because I was afraid if I let myself go on about it, I would both make myself physically ill, and open myself up to a lawsuit. I don’t think the leap is there, frankly. Formally the film is tidier than “Hannah,” true, but that’s largely because its focus is, let’s say, more monochromatic. You know what I mean?
It is interesting to note that in a new interview at Spout,
http://blog.spout.com/2009/03/14/joe-swanberg-kris-swanberg-interview-sxsw-alexander-the-last/#more-12134
…Swanberg acknowledges that “Alexander” itself, and its dedication to his wife, constitute a sort of “apology” for “Nights and Weekends.” Smart move, slick! Still, it doesn’t bode well for your New Year’s Resolution bemoaning the fact that you can’t make your movies “wilder.” But that’s life, right?
Watching ALEXANDER tonight, I wish I could agree.
To me, it was his weakest film (although I haven’t seen NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS yet). I found the characters to be some of the least interesting in any of his work.
Five minutes in, the film had lost me. Ten minutes in, after that obnoxious and annoying baby imitation scene, I actually got out my portable DVD player and put on the blogger roundtable extra from SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK. That was far more interesting than anything onscreen.
Or perhaps the title alludes to Boorman’s “Leo the Last” and the recitation of “The Bells” invokes Phil Ochs’ song appropriating Poe’s poem. After seeing “Alexander”, I’m not sure if it really matters. Despite a skein of allusions, the film is a true snore.
For what it’s worth, I’ve finally plunged into the mumblecore scene. My thoughts and ruminations, tangentially on LOL, more broadly on the implications of the movement, are here:
http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/2009/03/lol.html
Thanks for such a detailed review. You’ve very keen observation for the details that should be there, indeed.
thanks for such a detailed review.