“I saw this movie today that’s going to give you an aneurysm.” That’s what A.O. Scott said to me one afternoon last year after he had seen Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel for the first time. “It might not be up your alley, really.” That’s what an actual cast member of the film said to me when I told him that I intended to finally see the thing today.
Geez. You’d think that my work in the critical realm had marked me as somehow aesthetically hidebound, or something. On the other hand…well, actually, Scott’s recently published New York Times reassessment of The Color Wheel, which I hadn’t read until just now, very elegantly iterates quite a bit of what I found myself thinking during my direct experience of the film, and make no mistake, it is very much an experience. The first ten minutes, had me rather wanting to walk out, in spite of the largely admirable black-and-white cinematography. It’s not just that lead character Colin, played by the director, has a voice that makes chalk on a blackboard sound like a Mozart piano sonata. It’s the way he’s wheedling “girlfriend” Zoe into sex by comparing his penis to that which he imagines would be one possessed by an African-American man, and I am so sick of the knowingly meta-thrice-removed-racist-joke-that’s-so-confident-it’s-gonna-get-a-pass-on-that-accout-but-may-not-really-want-to-get-a-pass-because-what-if-it’s-really-racist-which-might-be-kind-of-edgy-and-“dangerous” that I could puke, which is another thing the character played by the director has a tendency to do more than the average human. This is not the first instance of this kind of humor, either.
But I stuck with it, and aside from being struck by the very bravura performance of Carlen Altman (above) as Colin’s remarkably non-functioning sister, I was consistently disarmed if not befuddled by just how weird of a movie The Color Wheel is. As Scott notes, it is “full of obnoxious characters in scenes that seem overwritten and under-rehearsed, oblivious to the most to the most basic standard of tonal consistency, narrative coherence or visual decorum.” Yes, exactly…and at the same time, I, like Scott, kept getting signals of something else. There’s a sense in which the unpleasantness of the characters, all of the characters, is so oppressively overwhelming that one gets a sense of an Ionesco-style absurdism put into a contemporary hyperdrive, with a bit of sneering near-Letterist technical crudity thrown in. The effect, at certain other times, is of a Which Way To The Front?-era Jerry-Lewis-written-and-starring incest comedy directed by Carnival Of Souls’ Herk Harvey.
As these associations accumulated in my mind while watching the film, I rather wondered if I was indeed reading too much into it. The relentlessly unironed shirts worn by the main male characters weren’t after all that different from what one might find in a Bujalski or Swanberg movie, so was Perry’s game necessarily that much more advanced? The performance here by Bob Byington, the director of the thoroughly abysmal Harmony And Me (and also a producer of this film), is an outstanding, even virtuoso bit of unpleasantness, true. Then again, on the evidence of this video interview, one might rather have a beer with Josef Stalin than with the “real-life” Byington anyway.
But then there are the film’s final minutes, which trade its all-over-the-map is-it-knowing-or-is-it-not eccentricity for an almost horrifically assured naturalism. It doesn’t recall Cassavetes so much as a simulation of Cassavetes based on an interpretation of written account of his work. And it brings the relationship of its central characters…well, it actually makes plausible characters out of its up-until-now completely implausible characters, and then makes them intensely discomfitting…which makes the fact that the film’s first shots are actually derived from this sequence, which makes The Color Wheel a kind of loop…well, if the structural intrigue here is in fact Perry’s editing-room save from his own fecklessness, my hat is very much off to him. And it’s off to him if it’s the other way around, too. Damn it.
The Color Wheel plays at BAM’s Rose Cinema through Thursday. It really is a uniquely infuriating thing.
According to the website, this isn’t scheduled to come to DC anytime soon, so I won’t get a chance to see it for a long while I imagine. Still, I’m intrigued because it sounds like everything I’d hate in a movie and yet a lot of people are really touting it as something special.
So my question is, as far as obnoxiousness v purpose goes, how does it compare to Frownland?
I think it’s in keeping with the current American cinema that so many esteemed New York critics have to kick up a certain proportionate dust-cloud of moral oppobrium re: a writer-director’s view of the world, heroically defending the taboos to which we’re all subscribers whether we like it or not, before getting to the part where the movie is actually, y’know, distinctive and unusual and interesting.
I suspect you mistake my irritation with rid-nudging faux-tweaking of a taboo with actual moral oppobrium, but…what you will. If I can’t find the all that much actual humor in pasty white dudes making black-man-penis-size jokes even from, as I said, an almost tertiary remove of intended irony, well, I’m gonna have to live with that. And I feel that I absolutely can. Enjoy your own freedom while I sink in my chains.
Just to clarify: by “make you have an aneurysm” I of course meant “inspire you to write a well-reasoned, eminently dialectical blog post.” I wonder what you make (or would make) of ARP’s first feature, “Impolex.”
Aw c’mon! I’ll clarify too, Glenn – my comment was less a cry for your own liberation than an extended eye-roll at the supposed licentiousness so many people seem to be publicly getting over on behalf of this movie. In form and dialogue, you’d think being confronted with these unpleasantnesses was, if not THE point, then at least one of many reasons why we go to the movies.
For one, a lot of folks seem to take it as a given that the character performed by Mr. Perry and Mr. Perry himself are the same person, some via the joke you cite – which I found less an attempt at Bringing Teh Funny than evidence of his character’s utter cluelessness. It’s hard to imagine, say Miranda July undergoing the same conflation (which is funny for other reasons). But when the movie does work, it works because of the precision of choices like this.
Well then let me be a little more precise: yes, I understand the joke is meant to convey Colin’s cluelessness. But the manner and context in which the joke is presented strikes me as trying to have things THREE ways, as in “Of course this isn’t really ME saying this” AND “Haw haw look at what I’m getting away with.” Colin’s overall cluelessness seems such that underscoring it with an in-character “racist” “joke” strikes me as both opportunistic and gratuitous. My objection stands.
Opportunistic in terms of prematurely/emptily provoking an audience, and/or opportunistic at the expense of the African-American males? I’m intrigued by this – not sure if I agree or disagree. Perhaps wisely, it’s a theme that doesn’t get much play in the remainder of the film. In the meta-context, would it be easier to stomach if somebody other than the writer-director-star were saying it?
Anyway. I hope people go see it. If the packaging errs on the side of “I SURVIVED THE COLOR WHEEL”, I guess that’s better than nothing.
Opportunistic in the former sense. But, you know, it didn’t put the film out of the running for me obviously.
Longtime reader, first time comment – I saw lucky? enough to see The Color Wheel at the AFI Fest here in Los Angeles last year where I also found it to be a singularly frustrating experience. Though there’s no explicit evidence of talent on display here, it strikes me that Alex Ross Perry is at the very least an intelligent and clever fellow who has no idea what kind of movie he’s making or why. Hearing him speak and justify the ending as “logical” doesn’t pass the smell test – indeed, that he attempted to justify it at all weakens its placement (the scene itself is probably the film’s best, next to the solitary shot of the partygoer inexplicably eating a burrito). Shame that the comments here are so focused on Colin’s bad joke rather than the thing that truly seems to be prematurely/emptily provoking an audience – the film entire. Blah blah blah. Love the blog.