The Cruise

A well done, extremely funny documentary that leaves you wondering if it is actually staged. The "plot" of a neurotic NYC tour guide operator is full of acute observations of life, by a person who may or may not be deranged. He is a romantic, but not in a classical sense. Rather, he fills you with a sad humor and made me draw a comparison to another misguided societal interpreter, Ignatius Reilly (of Confederacy of Dunces fame).

It's hard to tell. I was the Assistant Music Supervisor on this film and the reason it was shot in B&W was because Bennett Miller made the film on about $5,000 - It had nothing to do with trying to be "Arty." I saw the rough cuts of the film, and they were great because they gave you more of a glimpse into Tim's life. I ran into him on Wall Street this spring (2005), where he was shooting something. We chatted for a few minutes, but he was predictably vague about what he was doing and trying to comprehend the "Tim-Speak." The WTC scene is a little spooky to watch these days, but it's my favorite scene in the film for posterity reasons.

Timothy "Speed" Levitch is more than just a New York crank, he's a spokesman for the genX drop out philosophy; find the space you are happy in, forget the rest. Forget the conventions, forget the rules. He's cruising because he's in love with everything that is creative and destructive in himself. That's what a romantic does. And he is the quintessential modern romantic.

The Cruise has been criticized as for being a purely sympathetic portrait of Levitch-- but that's what makes it so exhilarating; we are brought to Levitch's way of seeing; we don't come to judge, but to cruise.

When I try to think of flaws in this movie, I come up with virtues: that we don't get enough, that Levitch's secrets are not revealed, that we are left wondering about the reactions of those pastel-visored tourists... these mysteries actually augement the movie's charm.

I should have given it a nine.

The Cruise (1998)

Who is Timothy Speed Levitch?

A New Yorker, most of all. If you're a New Yorker, you know what I mean.

He's a quirky individualist who is the tour guide on one of those buses with an open second layer on top, and he rambles with idiosyncratic abandon about different aspects of the city. It would be fun to have him for your real tour guide, but I don't do tour buses, and of course the movie is all most of us have instead, so you do get something here of the man's style and his love of the city. Eventually it becomes more than a weird love letter to New York, and we come to see how a man is coping with being alive in the city and making sense of the systems that he finds insidious (including the justice system, which he once negotiated as an accused).

If you like documentaries, and you like New York, and you appreciate oddball people, this might just be a great little movie. Overall, I found it too narrow, too dependent on liking the main and only character, and too unexceptional (actually) to take off.

"Don't look up until after you're dizzy." This is just after he tells a boy on the bus that it's fun to stand between the twin towers and spin until you get dizzy, and they you can look up and it seems like the two buildings are about to fall on you. In a way, this defines fully half of the man, his boyish lack of restraint, his joy for life. He layers lots of facts about New York City into this zany fun outlook.

I didn't get swept up by his monologues partly because I've known too many people like Levitch, at least in pieces, just by knowing lots of artists and others who want to do their thing and the world can take it or leave it. His freewheeling theories are really not that strange, either, and the self-aggrandizing hidden by a veneer of humility is a bit too much about ego. Listen to me, he says, and we have to listen, even when it's not really so interesting. Don't get me wrong, I find Levitch to be an attractive kind of person, someone who is alive on their own terms, who has theories about how that world works that can't hold water but are functional anyway, and who is actually happy amidst all the grey sadness.

Still, I got a bit restless and bored by the not-so-brilliant after all chatter. Yet, it occurs to me that other people may not have run into these kinds of people, and this movie is a great entry point, and hopefully one that makes you appreciate all of them, Levitch in particular. Really, I wish I was more like him, and maybe in my own way I am, though I lack his unselfconsciousness. But what I mean is we are all secretly wishing we could just throw out all the worries we have and live what seems to be a very simple life, giving people pleasure on these bus tours and therefore seeing New York yourself, and lots of different kinds of people, every day you go to work.

It's not enough for a great movie, but it's unique enough and unpretentious, and filmed with a low-budget accessibility (by the director), you should give it a shot. You'll know after ten minutes what the flavor of the whole movie is, and even much of the content.

This little film could also have been a great story for The New Yorker. When I saw Tim "Speed" Levitch, I thought, Wow, I know this guy! He's every New Yorker I've ever met - tough, effete, gruff, wise, silly, profane, provincial, cosmopolitan, neurotic, eloquent, voluble, accessible, insecure, indomitable...

A few points:

I hope Speed wasn't fired by Grey Line (like he was afraid he'd be) for his choice comments and his non-regulation livery.

Grey Line should wise up and charge a premium for the "Speed Tour" and give Tim Levitch a fitting raise.

More than anything else, "The Cruise" is a portrait of a natural-born poet in his element.