JAMES WHITE AN EXTREME SPECTATOR SPORT
Debut director Josh Mond challenges audience with complex style, story
For much of James White, the camera floats just inches from his face, bobbing and weaving. This is a completely unblinking view of a guy with some serious issues, both internal and external. One of the film’s most gripping choices is its refusal to settle for a definitive view of James. It never really lets him, or us, arrive at a singular explanation for why he’s the way he is. It’s a discombobulation that makes things feel more alive.
James (Christopher Abbott), acts like a complete tool, but he’s got his reasons. One of our first weaving glimpses of him is at his father’s shiva. He’s shown up late, wearing a hoodie, and he’s just been introduced to his father’s new wife, someone he didn’t even know existed. It’s an extra slap in the face given that his own mom (Cynthia Nixon) has just gone into remission, with James acting as sole caretaker for her. By the time he escapes to the kitchen to suck back a beer, that hoodie starts to look like armour, or maybe a flag for his pain, or at least a warning not to engage.
Escaping for another beer with a friend, he starts yelling at loud women and then gets into a fight with a bartender. He keeps drinking. He meanders into selfpity. When he finally returns for the second day of shiva, he’s so burned out he kicks everyone out of the house. It’s easier to marinate in your misery alone.
Writer/director Josh Mond, making his feature debut, keeps us see-sawing between these sorts of extremes, not just in James’s life but in our sympathies. Sometimes it feels like he’s indulging the same black mood that holds James in its thrall, letting pain justify the character’s choice to act like a complete jerk.
The camera exuberantly bounces along when James slaps an uppity partygoer, and then lingers while James drunkenly cries about how scared his mother is, the both of them having learned her cancer is back. This is toughguy stuff, nastiness excused by a deep well of inaccessible sadness.
But then we resume watching James marinate in his misery, lost and perhaps just a jerk with a getout-of-jail-free card. Sometimes this everything-at-once tendency makes James feel more empty than opaque, but Abbott is at his best when we watch him spinning selfishness into justification, the way he hits all the wrong words when he explains to his mom that he’s taken care of her because he’s her son, and that’s what he’s supposed to do, but he still needs his own space.
He’s also pretty good when the revelations start adding up. He resists an increased sense of self-awareness every step of the way even as it starts breaking him — the pressure oozes out of his pores.
James White is a movie hard to look away from, hard sometimes to take, hard to settle into. The discomfiture seems to be its ultimate message — when we take the easy way, we’re doing something wrong. And we’re already doing enough things wrong.
James (Christopher Abbott), acts like a complete tool, but he’s got his reasons.