Arizona Reporter - Movie Reviews - 02/12
UNCERTAINTY
Reviewed for Arizona Reporter by Harvey Karten
Grade: B-
Directed by: Scott McGehee, David Siegel
Written By: Scott McGehee, David Siegel
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lynn Collins, Olivia Thirlby, Assumpta Serna
As George W. Bush has frequently said, we in the U.S. have freedom: everyone else hates freedom. But is freedom really all that it’s cracked up to be? Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s experimental film “Uncertainty” appears to imply that maybe it’s sometimes better to tell people what to choose since giving them carte blanche to make choices on their own (especially if they are young and inexperienced in the ways of the world) can lead to disaster. Not only that: what comes across as well is--do people really know what they want to do? One principal character asks his significant other what she wants to do, what we hear from her is almost what we heard way back when Ernest Borgnine’s Marty replied to everything, “I don’t know: what do you want to do?”
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A surreal tone starts the story in high gear. Bobby (Joseph Gordon) and his g.f. Kate (Lynn Collins) stand in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, not too eager to choose between two alternatives. A coin is flipped. Writer-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel avoid showing us their call. Instead they have the couple act as though they could make both choices simultaneously. The two sprint away from each other, ending up in story 1 in a yellow cab, both in yellow shirts, where they find a cell phone that a previous fare had lost; and in story 2 wearing green tops and driving their own green car.
The two stories are vastly different in tone and risk, though in both, the young couple face the need to make…yet another series of choices. Maybe psychoanalyst Erich Fromm expressed the right idea in his classic text “Escape from Freedom,” which holds that people do not really want the free will to make choices lest they face responsibility for the wrong ones, ones that lead them into danger, alienation, and guilt.
Of the two stories, the noir thriller is easily the more involving, the more entertaining, the nervous couple pulling together to save their skins after selecting a disastrous option. The cell phone turns out to contain information of the utmost importance to the Mob, actually to warring factions, the greed of the couple for reward money leading them to put their lives in great danger. The more peaceful story is the one that the production notes state is made like a European art film—never mind that the drama has none of the intensity of Thomas Vinterberg’s script for “Festen,” or “Celebration,” in which a birthday party for the family patriarch forms a platform for the revelation of bottled feelings. In story 2, Bobby and Kate go to the latter’s Fourth of July family dinner, an event whose importance includes Bobby’s introduction to his future Argentinian-American in-laws and extended family. The conversations are banal, made even more so when contrasted with the thriller from their other option.
A particular filming achievement is photographer Rain Li’s lensing in Manhattan in broad daylight amid a background of actual pedestrians rather than extras photographed, perhaps, at night when no-one else is around. Li captures the couple running like bandits from a Chinese gunman (Ted Oyama) sent by Russian gangster Dmitri (Patrick Walsh), the crowd of summer tourists and residents looking with interest and confusion at the melodramatic happenings. Having the two stories performed in tandem, one scene from group 1 and one scene from group 2, etc., is a good move. What’s not so great is that too much of the dialogue is improvised, an artistic decision that could in some cases lead to surprises but is generally a poor idea. There is nothing like a strong script to propel a story, pages crammed with bon mots enjoyed by the Danes participating in “Celebration,” for example. Depending on actors, however proficient (and both Gordon-Levitt and Collins are convincing as people who love each other), to come up with the kind of prose that offers a story its wit, charm, eloquence and authority, was inadvisable. The prosaic nature of the conversations in story 2 makes one wish that the directors would get us back to the action.
UNCERTAINTY (IFC Films)
Unrated. 105 minutes. © 2009 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
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