‘Black Bear’ is riveting at every step
“Black Bear” is a weird, entertaining and original film that does great things for Aubrey Plaza. This is someone who has made her name in comedies, but whose distinct quality — a certain unknowability, a certain watchfulness, a certain suggestion of some underlying hostility — always seemed like it would lend itself to drama, at least theoretically.
Well, with “Black Bear,” we are out of the realm of theory. She’s amazing here. Written and directed by Lawrence Michael Levine, the film capitalizes on everything Plaza has done previously on screen, but then takes her — and us — to entirely new places. So we get the withdrawn, sardonic Plaza, with the usual hints of paranoia and disdain. But then we watch her detour into an absolute abyss of rage, despair and loss.
That said, “Black Bear” is a difficult movie to talk about in a review, because it changes significantly. The beginning is not like the middle, but to talk about the beginning and middle would be to reveal too much of the story. So it’s better, instead, to pull back and discuss what “Black Bear” is about in a larger sense, what its issues are overall. That will give you the flavor of the movie without ruining its power to surprise.
It’s a caustic film about human emotion and the artistic impulse and how those two things interact, inform each other and, potentially, distort each other. At the start of the film, Plaza — that is, Allison — arrives at a bed and breakfast, where she plans to work on a screenplay. She is a filmmaker who makes, she says, “unsuccessful movies that nobody likes.”
Her hosts are her age, and they’re not exactly in the bed-and-breakfast business. They’re just trying it out, making use of a relative’s waterfront property. Gabe (Christopher Abbott) is a musician and would-be composer, and Blair (Sarah Gadon), his girlfriend, is very pregnant. So it’s three people thrown together, and soon we notice a brisk, clashing energy between Gabe and Blair.
At first, it’s subtle. They’re doing that thing that unhappy couples do — they’re gradually revealing their conflicts to a stranger. They interrupt each other and contradict each other. They’re unsettled and unsure of their future, but because Levine is a good writer, the dialogue isn’t about that. Rather it’s a three-way conversation touching on all kinds of things, including the value of traditional gender roles. As in life, the people reveal themselves through what they say, but unwillingly and indirectly.
Throughout this beginning, though Gabe and Blair have most of the dialogue and share most of the conflict, our focus remains on Allison. It’s hard to know exactly how Plaza and Levine accomplish this. At no point do we think this is the story of a couple that gets a visitor from the outside. Rather, we understand that this is about the visitor, and we try to read her response in the things she says and the looks that cross her face.
All three actors give intense, unrestrained performances, but this screenplay is a gift to Plaza, allowing her moments of both mystery and absolute revelation. It capitalizes on her aura of coldness and then unleashes floods and torrents of emotion, and yet her performance is not just a matter of fluctuating between two extreme registers. At times, she has to turn it on and then, consciously, turn it off. She even has to calculate alcohol intake. Her performance combines abandon with technical precision.
Ultimately, “Black Bear” is about the price of art — not only the price the artist pays, but that the people around the artist end up paying, unwittingly. Yet in the actual experience of it, the movie doesn’t feel so lofty. It just feels tense and disquieting, like a thriller. In that sense, it is a thriller, but one of the emotions, and it’s riveting every step of the way.