Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Reviews

Nights and Weekends /  USA  /  2008

Nights and Weekends is shot in hotel rooms and apartments and hallways and public spaces. You’ve seen all of these things. The film has a brazen disregard for the basic capability of film to display things, people, and places with which the viewer is not familiar. This applies to the film emotionally as well; it concerns a relationship between two attractive white people. Conceptually, you’ve seen this sort of film before, probably many times.

My description is reductive and says little of the film’s formal ingenuity, but it is valid as co-directors Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg (also stars) are more interested in form. As with the company’s previous Hannah Takes the Stairs, Nights and Weekends subsists on nuance and ambiguity, to the point that the film is predominantly nonspecific. It’s ideas without clarity, and it’s told sparsely, comprised of disconnected excerpts that find the couple in the middle of some type of impromptu tryst or confrontation. More or less the film is intent to posit an ambiguity in relational status, and yet its characters constantly attempt to reconcile their status. Rather, it changes, from day-to-day or, in regard to the nature of the relationship between the two principle characters, from the nights and weekends isolated for the two – he in Chicago, she in New York – to see each other.

The film benefits from a conceptually familiarity, in effect emphasizing the nuances and not the particulars of this relationship. Hannah Takes the Stairs is also very nuanced, but it is also very self-indulgent, vesting little concern in what a wide gamut of viewers will find entertaining; it’s esoteric, by this measure, and this has a lot to do with its appeal. Nights and Weekends has an aspect of self-indulgence – it’s impossible to consider this film without mentioning how its co-directors have staged their own lovemaking – but it’s considerably more accessible. Gerwig’s Hannah was manipulative and indirectly deceptive; here, her insecurities are surfaced, and her lover is responsible in tending to her emotional vulnerability.

Such vulnerability pertains to both parties in question, but the film isn’t about this vulnerability any more than it’s about the joy that precedes it. The establishment, maintenance, and dissolution of this relationship are entirely ambiguous; the emphasis is the frankness and courage that facilitates each of these things, and how these details are especially necessary in a long-distance relationship. It opens forthrightly, with the two greeting each other after, presumably, an elongated absence. They kiss and embrace passionately, and collapse naked on the floor as soon as the front door is locked. This occurs in an unbroken take, and proceeds just beyond the threshold of what would be considered a conventional sex scene. It looks real, but not pornographically embellished.

Swanberg and Gerwig are not involved outside of this film (both are in other relationships, which they were also in during filming), but their collaboration is depicted in the film with what I imagine is some amount of transparency. They’re essentially putting themselves on display. When Gerwig enters a bathroom late in the film, exchanging her clothing for a bathrobe in preparation to seduce her ex-boyfriend, and eyes her body with scrutiny, her desperate anxiousness is doubly manifest—she’s considering herself as both a lover and a lover in a film. She looks like she’s playing a part, and Nights and Weekends is characterized by this notion of staging and performance. It’s less a fictional relationship than it is a demonstration of the filmmakers’ unsteady relationship with one another and their audience. They want to impress each other and they want their film to be liked. It’s at times bold, intimate, unfunny, and discomforting, but it is never anything less than sincere.

Rumsey Taylor | © 2008 notcoming.com

Comments / 4 total / Submit Comment

1. Teddy Blanks / 13 April 2008 / 9:53 PM / URL

   Rumsey, great review! (As always.) But I have a small gripe. Or rather, I’d like to use this comments section as a soapbox so that I may voice a pet peeve: the topic of race in reviews of “mumblecore” (bad bad word, I know) movies. In your first paragraph, this phrase appears: “it concerns a relationship between two attractive white people.” … You haven’t spelled it out completely here, but a common criticism leveled on Swanberg, Bujalski and peers is that their films are focused on a niche group: young, white people. It strikes me as ludicrous – and once again, I’m referring to a larger trend here, as your review just grazes on this particular accusation and moves on to discussing completely unrelated aspects of the film – to smear a burgeoning movement, however subtly, as racist, because the filmmakers involved simply ‘write what they know,’ so to speak. At a time when most of Hollywood and independent movies still, as they always have, focus mostly on young, white people, by all means, lets start a conversation about this disturbing and continuing fact. But until we are mentioning race in every movie with all, or mostly-white casts, why use the topic with derision toward these small-budget, struggling films?

2. Rumsey / 16 April 2008 / 12:55 PM / URL

   Just to clarify, my mention of race is to illustrate this film’s lack of innovation in characterization (white people) and circumstance (who are in and out of a relationship)—it’s not so much an issue of race as it is one of what I refer to as conceptual familiarity. Although I relent to apply the same argument to the other mumblecore (God I hate that word) films I’ve seen, I think the accusation is valid. Many if not all of the films in question have a proclivity toward young, hip white people and their relational banalities. For the record, I belong squarely in this demographic—my issue is, simply, I’m not regularly entertained by this as a topic for a film. (Also, this is one of the reasons I liked Baghead so much, because it begins as a film about young, hip white people and their relational banalities and becomes something else entirely…)

   I object to your use of the word “racist” (unless you’re referring to other responses to these films that do explicitly accuse them of being that). But these do remain films that have a shallow conception of the spectrum of emotions that humans are capable of exuding and film is capable of depicting. What I most admire in them is their nuance and unpredictability. Few of them seem cinematically contrived; they don’t have climaxes or suspense or drama in a cinematic sense. But they remain – for the most part – conceptually slight films, despite their earnestness or authenticity. (And Swanberg’s own web series Young American Bodies is the most sophomoric example I can think of.) The thing is, I can easily emotionally identify with the scenarios in mumblecore (meh!) films (trying to make a girl laugh, trying to sustain a conversation at a party, trying not to look bored, etc.). It’s this that makes me more critical of them, because I’m familiar with their conflicts and circumstances (and God, I don’t want to see films about my own neuroses). But I will reiterate part of what I say here, and that is lumping all these films together and applying blanket criticisms against the genre in whole is a bit forced, when I feel the genre is much more varied then it’s made out to be.

   To conclude I’ll point to Bujalski’s illuminating remarks on his first film, available here.

3. Teddy Blanks / 18 April 2008 / 11:52 AM / URL

   I think you have pinpointed the underlying problem with picking on mumblecore (I know, I know) for featuring only white people: it’s not what we really mean. As you indicated in your response, it’s the hegemony of “young, hip white people,” not simply of “young white people” that bugs us. These films are about hipsters, which, as 20-something fans of obscure films, we both are. (Don’t deny it Rumsey! I’ve been to record stores with you!) We are perhaps in the worst position to objectively critique these films because we identify with them so closely. It’s hard to watch; somebody makes a movie about our generation and culture, and gets some of it right … Cringe!

4. Ryan Sarnowski / 19 April 2008 / 9:34 AM

   They get some of it right, but they also get a lot of it wrong. I don’t mean to lump all of these films into one pool nor do I want to use that horrible term to define the genre, but what disturbs me more than the lack of ethnic diversity is the lack of age range. Yes, twenty-somethings can live in an insular bubble, but most of them came from parents (many are probably still have them as a safety net) and yet all we see are the friends and co-works (of the same age). The mumblecore kids appear to live in a Charles Schultz world where parents and adults are never seen and rarely heard from. I think that these filmmakers and Swanberg especially do disservice to their stories and their characters by not making them connected to families or by forcing them to consider their lives in relation to those older and younger than themselves. I think about great scenes like the one in Stranger Than Paradise when the NYC hipster are at home with the Cleveland grandma or in Grown-Ups when the young couple moves in next to their old school teacher and his wife and I just don’t see things like this in Mumblecore.

   As for the last comment, the one about hipsters, I think it is certainly striking at something. Recently a blogger found financial success by cataloging the things white people like and while I enjoy many of the same things and I may have once been, and to some extent, still am a hipster. I think there is a distinct difference between white people and white hipsters. I believe much of it may have to do with economics and regionalism, but when someone makes a comment like he once did about the Iraq war having no real affect on his and his friends*, you sense the sort of bubble that he lives in, compared to many others who have served or have family members serving in the war. He, and most of the other mumblecore kids, live in a different world. I can recognize part of it, like something from a dream I had ages ago or a different life. Now, I’m 30 have a family and to a larger extent this world that Swanberg’s characters lives in is very foreign to me.

   *Amy Taubin really took him to task on this in her Film Comment article which lashed out at this genre.