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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The director of the minimalist, suburban "Thumbsucker" explains why he hates "American Beauty" and "Garden State." Plus: A polysexual French farce, and a master filmmaker's sweeping history of Greece.
Sep 8, 2005 | Our role here at Beyond the Multiplex world HQ (an operation far more efficient than FEMA or the White House, it appears) is to be the friend and champion of lonely indie filmmakers, to adopt worthy little movies found wandering in the wilderness. You know it and I know it, gentle reader: There are weeks when we practice a little affirmative action on behalf of likable projects that aren't necessarily among the most memorable or moving films ever made. Why? Because it's the right thing to do, dammit, and because nobody ever died from extending a little generosity to artists who strike a genuine spark, no matter how small, amid the encroaching gloom of the film industry (a dire pair of words if ever there was one).
This is not one of those weeks. You and I have not been thinking overmuch about movies in the last 10 days or so, I imagine. I've certainly been going through one of those post-9/11 phases where I ask myself: "In the face of you-know-what, are the things I write about actually important?" I don't have an answer, and I suspect any answer I tried to come up with right now would be facile and stupid. But I can tell you that I believe art -- successful art, at any rate -- creates its own inescapable meaning as you experience it, and that meaning might not be the same for any two people. I believe that when you encounter it, it requires no justification, because it carries its own moral compass. This week we've got three marvelous films to talk about -- any one of them could be my lead item in a normal week -- and whether I found in them a reflection of reality or a respite from it, I can tell you that (as dumb as this may be) they all helped.
What's more, they're completely different. Mike Mills' debut feature "Thumbsucker" is an earnest, meticulous and beautifully acted exercise in suburban minimalism, with one of the most amazing casts put together for any recent American film. Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau's "Côte D'Azur" is meticulous in a different direction, a door-slamming, bed-hopping polysexual farce, flavored with seafood and summer sunshine, in the grandest Gallic tradition. Theo Angelopoulos' "The Weeping Meadow" opens a massive, tragic trilogy on Greek history that is meant to conclude this masterly director's career. It's precisely the kind of prodigiously moving, cinematically overwhelming spectacle that ordinary moviegoers avoid like a moldy Milky Way bar and hardcore film geeks mark on their calendars in three colors of ink.
"Thumbsucker": A tale of TV commercials, Keanu Reeves and Ingmar Bergman lost in suburbia
Sadly, my picture does not appear on Mike Mills' blog. The writer-director of "Thumbsucker" did, however, take a picture of the chair I sat in during our interview in his New York hotel room, part of his good-natured and halfway self-critical attempt to chronicle his publicity tour. In the blog, Mills muses on his two literary avatars, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, but recognizes he couldn't be like the famously standoffish and manipulative Dylan if he tried. Ginsberg, on the other hand, bonded with interviewers, opening up to them emotionally and inviting them into his life. You could describe that as manipulative in a different way, I guess, but Mills is clearly in that camp.
I approached both Mills and "Thumbsucker" with considerable trepidation. Mills is a veteran of the early-'90s Lower East Side art scene, who designed album covers for Sonic Youth and the Beastie Boys and went on to become a celebrated director of music videos and TV commercials. His film debut, six years in the making, is an adaptation of Walter Kirn's cult-hit novel, with one of the most amazing casts ever assembled at this level: Vincent D'Onofrio and Tilda Swinton are the suburban parents of 17-year-old Justin, the eponymous thumb-sucker, who is played (marvelously) by newcomer Lou Pucci. Vince Vaughn plays the high school debate coach. Keanu Reeves, for Christ's sake, plays the kid's orthodontist.
But "Thumbsucker," it turns out, is not some jokey hipster wallow. It's a lovely and meticulous film, intimate in scope, that captures the awkward terrors of adolescence with an honesty few movies have ever managed. As Mills puts it, not at all ironically, "It's a sincere, thoughtful movie that's not trying to be weird." Justin's not a thumb-sucking freak, just a talented and insecure kid who has a certain level of secret shame and believes himself to be unlovable. That sounds like, hmm -- you? Me? Everybody?
Mills, too, might be described as a sincere, thoughtful guy who's not trying to be weird. He tells me he's a "total Criterion Collection guy," whose filmmaking inspiration comes from Ozu and Bergman, as well as from such no-longer-fashionable American directors as Hal Ashby and Elia Kazan. "Thumbsucker" is a marvelously crafted movie, with a few real surprises I won't spoil and a powerful emotional payoff. But in all honesty, Mills probably has better pictures in him down the line: The real story here is the arrival of a smart, sharp and generous new filmmaker.
You know, when I first heard about this movie, before I knew who was in it or anything, my first reaction was: "A movie about a 17-year-old kid who sucks his thumb? That's gross. I don't want to see that."
Well, there were a ton of people who said: "A movie about a 17-year-old sucking his thumb? Gross; I don't want to finance that." Every film company you could think of said that. Part of me has been a little curious about this nervous reaction to an adult who is thumb sucking. By the time the 50th person says it, I was like, "Huh." There really is this great taboo and fear and energy around an adult thumb sucking.
A very famous supposed "friend of the director," a big producer-financier guy, said, "Friday night, people looking for what they want to see, and you've got a movie called 'Thumbsucker'! You might as well fucking name it 'Buttfucker'!" I was curious -- here's this homophobic statement, you know what I mean? It is similar to homophobia. Another person told us we might as well call it "Masturbator." But it isn't masturbating, or butt fucking -- not that either of those things are bad, right? But it's an interesting conundrum you get into.
Actually, It was James Schamus who said that, the "Buttfucker" thing. Go ahead and print it. Maybe on some level that's what "Thumbsucker" is about: We all have these things about ourselves that are secret, that we feel are shameful or unlovable or unacceptable, and we're trying to cover them up. That galvanized me a little bit. It made me feel like this wasn't just a quirky, whimsical coming-of-age bullshit thing. There's actually a nerve here that we're touching.
