Cho constructs tale of art, life in ‘Columbus’
The most distinctive feature film debut I have seen in a long time, “Columbus” is set in the modern architectural mecca (and childhood home of Mike Pence) of Columbus, Ind. The film tells the far-fromearth-shattering tale of a young Korean man named Jin (John Cho, best known as Lt. Sulu of “Star Trek”), whose father, a Columbusbased master architect, suddenly falls into a coma.
The angry misfit son — a kind of Asian-American James Dean — is summoned by his father’s partner (indie icon Parker Posey) to the side of a sick man from whom the son has long been estranged. Jin is none too happy to be stranded, however luxuriously, at the lovely Inn at Irwin Gardens in Columbus.
But he finds companionship in the film’s other protagonist. She is a 19-yearold local “architecture nerd” and library worker named Casey (Haley Lu Richardson, “The Edge of Seventeen”), a young woman devoted to caring for her recovering methamphetamine addict mother (Michelle Forbes).
Casey’s mother works the night shift at a cardboard box factory and cleans some of the city’s buildings. Casey has been offered an internship that could lay the groundwork for a future career. But she is afraid to leave her mother on her own, while Jin pretends to wait dispassionately for his father to die.
Written and directed by self-named Korean filmmaker Kogonada, a cinemaphile who previously shot and edited film essays about the likes of Yasujiro Ozu (“Tokyo Story”), Hitchcock, Bergman and Richard Linklater, “Columbus” presents its characters as existential beings dwarfed not by green-screened CGI, but by existing sculptural spaces and structures such as Eero Saarinen’s Miller House and Garden and his glorious North Christian Church and Myron Goldsmith’s glass building for The Republic newspaper.
Are the crises of Jin and Casey — and the obvious sexual spark between them — minimized or expanded and extolled by the weight of history and artistry around them? Discuss.
Cho has always been a bubbling crucible of anger and resentment, however dashing and handsome, and the camera loves Richardson, whose developing expressive repertoire becomes a form of confused self-restraint and part of the way Casey fulfills expectations.
Casey’s friendship with a smitten fellow smoker and library worker (Rory Culkin) is an important part of the film’s emotional tapestry. The pacing will remind many of Ozu and Bergman. Music by Hammock is another plus. “Columbus” may be Kogonada’s “Bottle Rocket.” See it if you want to meet an artist at the start of a brilliant career.
(“Columbus” contains profanity and barely repressed sexuality.)