"The Mend" and "Fort Tilden" are among your best indie bets for August

…I say “among” because I have not yet seen Alex Ross Perry’s Queen Of Earth, which I have every reas­on to anti­cip­ate warmly. But good grief, the fel­low’s already got a ret­ro­spect­ive at The Museum of the Moving Image com­ing up, and Queen itself is going to be screen­ing at MOMA, and Perry’s gonna do the voice of Winnie The Pooh for Disney or some­thing*, so he hardly needs my help anymore. 

Bridey Elliott and Clare McNulty in Fort Tilden, dir­ec­ted by Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers

Many of the accounts of Fort Tilden, I think, weight the film’s sociological-observation side a trifle too heav­ily. Which is my fancy way of say­ing that you don’t have to know any bitsy-whingey deeply shal­low wan­nabe “cre­at­ive” Williamsburg/Bushwick res­id­ents in order to “get” the movie or find its jokes funny. 

In the tra­di­tion of day-trip pic­tures like this week­end’s Grandma (which is also quite worth see­ing; my review for RogerEbert.com is here), Greg Mottola’s aptly-titled 1996 The Daytrippers, and, um, maybe Rudolph Maté’s 1950 DOA, Fort Tilden fea­tures char­ac­ters on a short-term  mis­sion that hap­pens, in this case, to coin­cide with at least one Life Turning Point. Lanky and brown-haired Harper (Bridey Elliott) and her pint-sized blonde pal Allie (Clare McNulty) are two Williamsburg res­id­ents who have per­haps lived their vari­ant of la vie boheme a little too long. Allie seems some­what aware of this, but her pro­posed solu­tion to this seems like swat­ting a fly with a bazooka: she’s join­ing the Peace Corps. But on the day of her appoint­ment with a place­ment officer, she decides to blow it off and trek with Harper to Fort Tilden, the outer-borough New York City beach beloved of con­tem­por­ary hip­sters and bros and such (“It’s cool, you can just like, drink there without any­one both­er­ing you,” one of said bros observes of the loc­ale). Various semi-catastrophes ensue, some pre­dict­able (the minute one of them fetches a bicycle, you just know the vehicle’s not long for the movie), oth­ers not so much. And along the way the movie, very deftly dir­ec­ted by Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers, who also wrote the spec­tac­u­larly zinger-rich script, skew­ers pretty much every social type clot­ting Millennial New York and gives that type a few turns in the rotisserie. 

It’s not quite satir­ic­al in that there’s noth­ing lesson-like impar­ted. Despite Harper and Allie’s ever- mount­ing cas­u­al cal­lous­ness and clue­less­ness, the movie does man­age to make them kind of poignant by the end, at least in a kind of “oh, dear” way. (Both per­formers are excep­tion­ally enga­ging even at their char­ac­ters’ worst.)  The women’s self-delusions and integ­rity gaps are cogently summed up, inad­vert­ently, when Allie observes of her Peace Corps place­ment officer, “She’s a little bit…too real.” While Lena Dunham’s Hannah on Girls is a Protagonist With Problems—no mat­ter how appalling her beha­vi­or might get, the view­er­’s still meant to have a root­ing interest—Harper and Allie are Problem Protagonists, which is all fine, because what the movie finally is is a com­edy, and a relent­lessly hil­ari­ous one. 

Josh Lucas in The Mend, dir­ec­ted by John Magary

I first saw John Magary’s The Mend last June at the BAM Cinemafest, and I’m quot­ing what I wrote back then because it still holds: “[The Mend] is not just a stag­ger­ing debut fea­ture, it’s a stag­ger­ing movie full stop. The scen­ario setup might seem on the con­ven­tion­al side: One seem­ing hel­lion of a broth­er (Mat, played by Josh Lucas with what one might call phleg­mat­ic com­mit­ment, among oth­er things) recon­nects with the oth­er attempting-to-be-a-normal-person-in-Upper-Manhattan broth­er (Alan, an excel­lently often-recessive Stephen Plunkett). But that’s the only thing con­ven­tion­al about it. Writer/director John Magary opens with an arrest­ing iris-out open­ing image that recalls Arnaud Desplechin, and the movie, like many of Desplechin’s, has a deli­ri­ously packed feel. Content arrives in the form of dia­logue, inflec­tion, eye move­ment, cam­era move­ment, cut­ting, light­ing, music, some­times all at once, but nothing’s ever on-the-nose; sel­dom does a shot or a sequence resolve on a con­son­ant note. But Magary’s in full con­trol of his dis­son­ance. The movie is nev­er not pro­fanely hil­ari­ous, but it’s also almost nerve-wrackingly tense through­out. The movie’s open­ing is a good example of how Magary con­founds stand­ard film gram­mar, cut­ting from a down-and-dirty seduc­tion scene to a screech­ing shit fit in which the seducee ban­ishes the sedu­cer, without depict­ing the pre­cip­it­at­ing act. In the hands of a less assured film­maker this kind of ellip­sis can seem affected, but Magary makes you like it, as he does the long, altern­ately mor­ti­fy­ing, tit­il­lat­ing, and immers­ive party scene that fol­lows. The movie’s side-steps into genu­ine sur­real­ism, largely centered around a dodgy power situ­ation in Alan’s apart­ment, are also con­sist­ently exhil­ar­at­ing. I should make a dis­clos­ure here that Magary is a cor­di­al acquaint­ance who’s been a long­time com­menter on this blog, so I came to The Mend with some good feel­ings and high hopes.”

I saw the pic­ture for a second time earli­er this week with My Lovely Wife, and her occa­sion­al gasps and starts-in-her-seat brought home how power­ful and power­fully affect­ing and some­times raw a com­edy The Mend really is. After the screen­ing, she com­men­ted on its rich­ness; the movie, she observed, has a lot of “treats,” incid­ent­al details that pay off later on, or char­ac­ter notes that devel­op in unex­pec­ted ways when you’re least expect­ing them to, and so on. It’s a sim­ul­tan­eously tough and blithe movie about dam­aged people. Check it out.

* I kid, I kid. I don’t want to roil any sens­it­ive artists, I’m just jok­ing, hon­est; Good Alex is in fact employed to write a Winnie The Pooh movie.