Wheatpenny

As with most filmmakers who work in themes, you should watch this to see Chase's perspective on the material, not for the story itself. Its seemingly formless structure will throw off some viewers, but it's very much in line with his body of work, being less about the music and the era and more about the effects of the passage of time, specifically the tug of the past on the present and the evolution of character (or not) as the years go by. It's an autobiographical elaboration on the themes in the dark and sad final seasons of the Sopranos, though it does have plenty of the usual witty Chase touches as well, like the kids dancing away the JFK retrospective. There's a pervasive sense of nostalgia because the setting feels realistic, neither idealistic like a Spielberg/Lucas movie nor revisionist like the progressive Pleasantville-type movies whose intention is to show us all how the past wasn't as enlightened as today. The downside is that it's such a well-covered period and milieu (for my generation The Wonder Years is the reference point) that it's hard to find something original to say. But go in with the understanding that it's more complex than it appears and it'll give you plenty to chew on afterward. At one point the lead and his girlfriend are watching Blow-Up and he comments on how strange it is there's no music to tell you when someone's going to get killed, and she replies that the sound of the wind in the trees is the music, which sums up this movie pretty well.

Although this carries a release date of 2009, it looks and sounds like it was shot earlier, a fact reflected by the early to mid-2000's slang and phraseology in the dialog. If I'm right, it may be one of the first mumblecore movies, predating all of them except FUNNY HA HA.

And yet the mumblecore rubric doesn't entirely fit. There's a callousness to the humor reminiscent of the East German "Lustigetote" (humorous deaths) musicals of the 60's made just after the erection of the Wall, indicating to me at least a sociopathy on the part of the director. Although he's assembled an impressive cast, its oppressive atmosphere of institutional insanity brings to mind MARAT/SADE, but with a subversion more cultural than political. Like Springsteen's masterful "Jack of All Trades" this movie's litany of crimes against Michael eventually threatens to overwhelm the viewer unless resolved by violence--of the spiritual kind. I credit director Connolly's no-nonsense directing for this, but I wouldn't necessarily stand in front of him on a subway platform when there's a train approaching.

In short, if the Nazis had made mumblecore movies, they would have looked like this.