Mumblecore masters learn to enunciate
11 YEARS after film genre’s modest debut, its founders are ready for a new beginning
JOE SWANBERG
“I’ve felt it’s time to not just be a self-absorbed filmmaker. It’s about time that we grew up a bit.”
When Andrew Bujalski, 24 at the time, was directing his first feature, Funny Ha Ha, initiating a movement in American independent film was the last thing on his mind.
“It was funny to me that Funny Ha Ha got pegged as the beginning of anything,” Bujalski said.
“I always felt that given the tradition I was working in” — a zero-budget character study shot on 16 mm film — “I wasn’t kicking off the indie movement of the ’00s — I was just a really late straggler, making the last indie movie of the early ’90s or late ’80s. I thought this was probably the end of something, much more than a beginning.”
And yet that’s not how critics saw it a decade ago. Much was made of the so-called mumblecore movement of low-fi independent films that emerged in the wake of Funny Ha Ha. Eleven years after its modest debut at the Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival i n Birmingham, Ala., and eight years after he uttered the tongue-in-cheek label that would come to be attached to an entire generation of do-it-yourself-minded American movie makers, Bujalski is ready for another beginning. So, too, are other prominent directors associated with mumblecore, a moniker equally employed to celebrate and denigrate the shot-on-the-cheap, talkcentric, variously improvisatory films largely made by and about young postgrads.
At the time, the sudden confluence of films focusing on the vernacular and mores of such a particular demographic was certainly worth noting, especially as “the scene” developed, with participants turning up in one another’s films and caravanning together to film festivals. But mumblecore was always a frustratingly imprecise designation, ignoring not only major differences among films and filmmakers (for instance, Funny Ha Ha was largely scripted, unlike other films of the cohort), but also the long legacy of American independent cinema that placed these new iterations, pace Bujalski, on a continuum rather than a vanguard.
The term continues to have currency in the U.S. and abroad — “When I was in Berlin in February, I had journalists from all over the world asking me about mumblecore,” Bujalski said — yet its signature representatives have decidedly moved on.
Now a 36-year-old husband and new father, Bujalski has taken a left turn with his formally adventurous and eccentric new period piece, Computer Chess, which opens Wednesday. So, too, has his fellow festival fixture Joe Swanberg. His Drinking Buddies is a spiffily produced romantic comedy that, after his 14 flagrantly non-commercial features, showcases stars like Olivia Wilde and Anna Kendrick.
They join their kindred spirits Mark and Jay Duplass, who way back in 2010 graduated f rom the microbudgeted road movie The Puffy Chair to the more mainstream Cyrus, starring Jonah Hill; and actor-writer Greta Gerwig, who parlayed parts in Swanberg and Duplass films into collaborations with Woody Allen (To Rome with Love) and Noah Baumbach (Greenberg and Frances Ha).
It’s not just that these upstarts have done well for themselves. It’s that they’ve done so on their own divergent terms — some under the aegis of Hollywood (Mark Duplass has acted on television and in films like Zero Dark Thirty); others, like Bujalski, following a more idiosyncratic muse; and all seemingly free of the expectations of the movement they helped (or were consigned) to define. The reasons for these departures are varied but also indicative of what it means to go from idealistic 20-somethings to working artists in their 30s. Like Bujalski, Swanberg, 32, and Jay Duplass, 40, also have young children, and none are the festival road hogs they used to be.
“I’ve felt it’s time to not just be a self-absorbed filmmaker,” Swanberg said. “It’s about time that we grew up a bit.”
Increased responsibility has proved liberating for Swanberg, a former oneman-band who has learned to love working with a larger crew.
“After having been the driver, the craft services person, the wardrobe person, the producer and the grip, it was so amazing to show up to work every day and only have to be the director,” he said over coffee in New York.
But Swanberg’s strippeddown self-sufficiency hadn’t only been motivated by necessity; it was an ethic of indie-rock-like independence. With that philosophy came a distrust of anything that might be deemed commercial, which in retrospect he views not only as a formative commitment to his craft but also as the idealism of “an angry young man coming out of film school and trying to reinvent the wheel.”
“I had created a false dichotomy in my head,” he said, “that you could make challenging films that lived in the super tiny art-house circuit, or you could make commercial films that by default couldn’t be challenging.”
Inspired by two decadesold films that managed to be critical and commercial hits — Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice; The Heartbreak Kid — he created Drinking Buddies, which operates within the realm of the unrequited office romance (in this case at a Chicago brewery) yet also, as with all of his films to date, employs improvisation.
It’s a balance that Jay and Mark Duplass came upon earlier and easier. Soon after The Puffy Chair toured the festival circuit alongside Bujalski’s Williamsburgset fugue Mutual Appreciation and Swanberg’s erotic drama Kissing on the Mouth in 2005, the brothers moved to Los Angeles to work on Hollywood scripts and develop projects that would unite their taste for documentary-like unpredictability with accessibility.
“We always wanted the chance to have our movies reach a bigger audience,” Jay Duplass said by phone from Los Angeles, where he had just finished wrapping a pilot for HBO.
Not coincidentally, at the time of The Puffy Chair, Duplass was the same age that Swanberg is now.
“I was very much itching to get paid making movies,” Duplass said. “If you have a kid, you’ve got to make money.”
It’s a sentiment that Bujalski echoes: “I kind of can’t put that off any longer.”
After three psychologically intense character studies — including 2009’s Beeswax — he at first worked on a more conventional, commercially amenable script. But when that project hit a roadblock, he “turned on a dime,” he said, to retrieve the eightpage treatment for Computer Chess from his drawer.
“This was running off to what seemed like the least commercial thing that I could possibly imagine,” he said.
Yet save for the budget, it’s an entirely different monster than anything he’d concocted before. Unlike his three earlier films, in which everything was marshaled toward capturing naturalistic, complex performances, the conceptually motivated Computer Chess gave him license to rethink everything, including shooting and editing strategies as well as tone and costuming. Set in the early 1980s in a nondescript hotel, where variously geeked-out tech teams compete in a virtual chess tournament, the film is shot on vintage Sony video cameras and stock, coming on like a found-footage documentary before slipping into deadpan science fiction.
While the low-res Computer Chess isn’t likely to rake in millions at the box office, it’s such a stylistic departure from this filmmaker’s previous work that anything could now be in play. Swanberg finds himself in a similar place. And in light of the pigeonholing that accompanied the career-starting benefits of mumblecore, it’s where they both need to be.
“It’s hitting the reset button a bit,” Swanberg said. “I feel like Drinking Buddies is my first film, in a way, that I’ve just had the best 10 years of practice that a filmmaker could have before making his first feature.”
Bujalski has a similar if mischievously ironic view of Computer Chess, which was actually his first to be shot on video and without a traditional script. “I’ve been telling people this is my first mumblecore movie,” he said.
That it’s unrecognizable as such might finally augur, for Bujalski and his brethren, something like independence.