NOT EVERYTHING’S A-OKAY IN BRIGSBY BEAR
If you were too young to be there, the ’80s must look like a genuinely haunted time for North Americans.
“The regional Christian children’s educational entertainment is particularly fun and interesting to us,” says Dave Mccary, calling the Georgia Straight from New York’s West Village. “Already these ’80s and ’90s children’s educational shows are fun and nostalgic and have those unintentionally funny moments and the low production values. The homemade art, the creatures, the puppetry—we love all of that stuff. When you add the layer of preaching a religious view, or a worldview, to a very vulnerable child who is taking everything as gospel? That adds such an interesting and disturbing aspect to it.”
The 32-year-old filmmaker is talking about his friend Kyle Mooney’s reportedly massive collection of vintage VHS tapes and the shared obsession that these two Saturday Night Live contributors—mccary writes and directs digital shorts, Mooney is an increasingly popular cast member— have moulded into the poignantly funny new film Brigsby Bear.
Opening Friday (August 4), it’s a high-concept feature that could have traded, but pointedly doesn’t, in all the “stranger danger” panic that gripped people back in the Reagan era. As the film starts, Mooney’s character, James, is presented as a man-child obsessed with the titular kids’ TV show. Gradually, we learn that James lives in a bunker with his parents because the outside world is apparently toxic. It then transpires that, actually, James was kidnapped as a child and held captive inside this bizarre construct. The rest of the film deals with James’s reintegration into the world and the creative impulse that drives him to rope his new friends and biological family (plus the FBI officer who rescued him, played by Greg Kinnear) into a feature-length homemade re-creation of Brigsby—which, it turns out, was created entirely for James by the man who abducted him (Mark Hamill—told you it was high-concept).
Remarkably, Mccary and Mooney, who have been friends since middle school, have come up with an edge-free and remarkably warm film. Brigsby Bear is high on offbeat laughs, and very, very low on cynicism. As for the show within the show, the team nails the “low production values” of ’80s TV, right down to tape glitch, and complete with the kind of low-level social engineering that was increasingly being laced into kids’ entertainment.
In the case of Brigsby Bear (the show), any messages embedded into it by James’s abductor are, of course, wildly “incorrect”, as Mccary puts it. But Brigsby Bear (the film) is so committed to its sunny and compassionate vibe (welcome to the feel-good hit of the summer, everyone) that the director has no problem at all mounting a defence of its putative villains.
“They are multidimensional and they do want to protect this ‘child’ of theirs, and they don’t want to hurt him and they are operating out of love,” he offers with a chuckle. “They just happen to be completely wrong in what they conceive the world to be.”
Brigsby Bear,