Madeline’s Madeline
Indie director Josephine Decker (Thou Wast Mild and Lovely) is damned if she’s going to get caught making a conventional movie, and she works hard from the get-go to make sure you know it. Blurred focus, jerky pans, off-subject framing, jarring sounds, and a general impression of scenes shot from inside a washing machine on the tumble cycle shape much of the early going in this impressionistic study of a teenage girl in an avant-garde theater group. Madeline (newcomer Helena Howard) is the youngest member and brightest talent of the troupe, which is led by its director Evangeline (Molly Parker).
In the company’s development exercises, Madeline is encouraged to let it all hang out, to explore the inner experience of being a cat or a sea turtle. At home, she is under the watchful eye of her mother Regina (Miranda July), who tends toward an overprotective parenting style. A bit of tug-of-war for the upper hand over Madeline develops between Evangeline and Regina.
As the film progresses, Decker transitions from her aggressively artsy cinematic style, moving into a less self-conscious, more straightforward mode of storytelling. Evangeline invites Regina to sit in on the rehearsal process. Regina takes it as a friendly gesture, though it’s anything but. Evangeline is encouraging Madeline to mine her emotionally turbulent life for material to inject into the project, and Regina is essentially there to serve as a punching bag onto which Madeline can pour out her resentments.
Evangeline at first seems like a cool, calm, and collected lady in control, but she too begins to unravel under pressure. For a little while, there’s even a hint that her interest in Madeline may go beyond mentoring and into romantic territory. An evening when Madeline comes to dinner and drinks a bit too much wine further unsettles Evangeline’s placid exterior. Eventually, there’s a palace rebellion of the troupe against her, for pushing too far in exploiting their psyches in the pursuit of art.
It all builds toward an ending that explodes with pent-up resentments and gives Howard a stage for an unsettlingly fierce and powerful tour-deforce performance. That explosion blurs the line in the movie between the artistic and the personal, and it suggests a similar blurring between what its creators have put into the film, and what issues they may be carrying over from their lives outside it. — Jonathan Richards