The Color Wheel

I watched this movie yesterday night and I have been thinking about it since then. It is unconventional and difficult to describe without giving spoilers.

It is an indie black and white movie, taking place over a period of two- three days. The characters are on the road, changing places and meeting new people. Everyone they meet is ordinary but they come out as weird and crazy in their own ways.

There is a lot of dialogue which is absurd, funny, in a clerks kind of way, but still realistic. Unlike some reviews here stated, it is scripted and not improvised.

The characters are going back and forth between cynical nihilism and idealistic romanticism. It is a requem for the end of youth, they have to settle down to petty adulthood which they despise. Yet the movie is life-affirming, like a tragedy, which makes it good.

There are many themes in the movie: love, heartbreak, sexual attraction, transition from youth to settled adult life, family, self-image, ideals and realities. The success of the movie is in the way it shows how these themes effect each other in each individual in a very realistic way. There are many connections weaved in a very economical way.

At the end everything, all the dialogue comes together, and the way they acted is justified and accounted for. It is tragic: kind of a sad story but it doesn't give up on life. No loose threads. It is incredible the way they were able to convey so much about these characters in such an efficient way, I felt like I watched all and everything relavant to their story.

The Color Wheel is a truly awful movie. Let's start with the simple fact that the title has nothing to do with the movie, which was shot in black and white for an unknown and almost certainly completely pointless reason. A 'slacker road trip' film, I can buy the idea that the filmmakers were trying to capture some Clerks like magic and failed miserably.

It's the story of a brother and sister on a road trip, played by the couple who made the thing, which gives it a very weird vibe off the bat. The dialog is all improvised, which can be a good thing if the people doing the improvising have talent. This couple does not. If you've ever been stuck on a long car ride with people who think they're witty and won't stop bickering until you have the urge to put an icepick into someone's head (possibly your own) then you have experienced this film. The big Shock! Twist! ending is so unmotivated, and the characters are so unlikeable, that it feels painfully forced and falls flat. And if you haven't walked out of the theater by that point in a vain hope that it might get better you will be thoroughly disappointed. Stay home and watch reruns of the Simpsons instead of subjecting yourself to this mess.

By the end of viewing "The Color Wheel", I was unsure what Alex Ross Perry wanted to say about Colin and JR - the siblings at the centre of his second film. I was unsure what to think of what they had done, what they had been through, and who they are. I think some people might consider that a failing but I think it's his style. He deviates from the norm but not letting us know what we should think. He didn't forget to include the speech in the penultimate scene that would sum up the meaning of the movie. Nor did he accidentally leave out the music that would tell us how to feel about this pair. He left it up to us. And that is harder to deal with.

This is a road-trip film that follows the estranged siblings as they go to pick up JR's stuff from her professor/boyfriend with whom she has recently broken up.

They keep being thrown into situations which are awkward, cringe, and wierd. Often the people they meet are just as weird and alienating as our duo but the magic of cinema means our empathy is with the characters with whom we share the POV. We want better for them. We recognise they might be shallow, lazy, and narcissistic but that doesn't mean they don't deserve happiness. (I mean, thank God.) It's just very hard to understand what happiness might be for these two. The much-discussed climax feels both un-surprising and shocking, totally wrong but maybe the start of something like healing.

Despite this sophistication of theme and character, there are some jarring tonal mismatches that hurt the film. A scene with a motel clerk plays like a bad sketch from the 70s about backwards rural types, and there's a party scene that is aiming for a sort of chaos, but ends up feeling stilted and disconnected, and like none of the other guests are real.

These flaws are easily overlooked. This is difficult viewing, and it won't be for all, but it is smart and interesting and full of something like life.

Alex Ross Perry's The Color Wheel is proof that indie narcissism can occasionally pull out the goods.

Filmed on grainy 16mm, it's a meandering road movie about two underachieving, alienated siblings. After she splits up with her professor-cum-boyfriend , aspiring news anchor J.R. (Carlen Altman) begs her shlubby younger brother Colin (played by director Perry) to help her back up the remnants of her miserable life and move on to the next. The journey across the States causes quite a stir, with the pair constantly berating each other in that conventional brotherly-sisterly banter way. It escalates to a harrowing final ten minutes, where the familial relationship is tested and it's clear that, if they weren't to have each other, they wouldn't have anything.

Like many a-mumblecore movie before it, The Color Wheel consists of verbal sparring and excruciatingly awkward long takes. Unlike those insufferable predecessors, Perry and Altman's script moves with great acerbic force, audaciously treating the blackly comic as flippant light humor. It's quite similar in tone to Rick Alverson's The Comedy, starring Tim Heidecker, only the two loathsome characters here are presented with more compassion, actually having a narrative arc to follow right up to the film's bitter end.

Whilst the scenes shared between the two are close to Alvy Singer>Annie Hall style perfection, The Color Wheel loses it's spark when the pair are backed up by cliché filler characters – the sorority bitch, the dumb jock, the rich kids – during a horrendous dinner party. It's the only time when the amateur acting and forced dialogue reflect it's minor budget production qualities.

With improvised dialogue, a roaming plot, grainy 16mm stock and Sean Price Williams' artless cinematography, The Color Wheel absolutely stinks of Husbands-era John Cassavetes. Not that it's a bad scent, but it permeates throughout the film and leads the homage into unwarranted pastiche, and ultimately externalizes us from the drama.

Even still, this minor tragicomedy, is a minor triumph for Perry and star in the making Altman. For fans of all things awkward, this unassuming movie sets the m-m-m-mumblecore wheel back in motion.

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Alex Ross Perry's The Color Wheel is one of the most marvelous directorial debuts I have yet to see, wickedly witty and self-assured, and also a candidate for one of the funniest comedies of the current decade. It combines sarcastic humor with abrasive, often cut-throat dialog, as if a filter has been lifted between characters so they speak their minds at all times, and blends the lines between being a part of hipster/millennial culture and attempting to satirize it seamlessly. It's some of the most fun you'll have being surrounded by people you probably wouldn't want to associate yourself with in real life.

We follow Colin (Alex Ross Perry), a softspoken dweeb who lives with his girlfriend in his parents house because the low cost of living, to him, is "smart business." Colin, despite opposition from his parents, agrees to step outside of his comfort zone to embark on a road trip with his sister JR (Carlen Altman), who needs to move out of her professor-turned-lover's (Bob Byington) apartment. An aspiring broadcast journalist, JR is having difficultly trying to piece together what kind of path she wants to take for her career, leaving her in a place many millennials currently find themselves - inert and unsure of their options.

However, being that these two haven't spoken nor seen each other in years, they manage to resurrect an icy chemistry upon seeing one another that feels like they haven't stopped fighting since they gained the ability to speak. The two travel through New England, running into old classmates and revisiting family problems whilst staying in places like an eerie motel run by a bleeding-heart Christian, with JR planning to give her old professor an earful and Colin hoping the trip will end as soon as possible.

The first of many reasons The Color Wheel works so well is because of its desire to take its characters off of a tightly wound leash and allow them to meander through the film without any sort of situational guidance. Perry, much like this film, is assured in that both JR and Colin can carry a film, thus he doesn't concoct any outrageous circumstances or any raunchy scenarios. There are awkward moments, made only more awkward by the way JR and Colin handle them, but nothing is played for theatrics or for the sake of desperate comedy. Perry allows these characters to carry their own film, never restricting their spirits and, in turn, almost creating a stream of consciousness style of filmmaking (only elevated further by several shots that focus on characters walking or simply existing).

Secondly, Perry and Altman have such natural, refined chemistry here that they might as well be brother and sister in real life. Perry's Colin has the true sensibilities of someone who walks into someplace new, immediately scopes out every possible exit, and runs through a list of excuses or alibis that could get him to leave early without getting a second look. His simple mindset of being by himself, or with his girlfriend, avoiding anything and everything new, is ripe for comedic jabs and that's why we have Altman, a thoroughly hilarious and beautiful actress who has mastered the art of delivering a comeback with sarcasm. With the two together, Perry gears his conversations between himself and Altman as a brother and sister who have no filter, saying the first thing on their mind to each other and not caring if the other person likes it or not. In a mainstream effort, or a film by lesser talent, every time a brutally honest encounter would occur between two characters, one would leave in tears and we'd be presented with an anticlimactic five or ten minute sequence of whining and moping. Not Perry and not in The Color Wheel; the first conversation had between JR and Colin is Colin saying to JR that brightly scribbling and decorating posterboard with her hopes and dreams to make allegedly make them more obtainable is unfounded garbage. This comes right before he decides to shift everything on the dashboard of her Honda Accord to the floor in a bold and fearless display of authority by someone who doesn't very often claim any.

It's this constant unpredictability between scenes that allows for The Color Wheel to be so surprising but also remarkably fluid and natural. We can't often predict or foresee what life has for us, so this sort of unevenness paradoxically works for the film while it could hurt another comedy of similar merit. It also helps that Perry is, again, so confident in his material, simultaneously embracing the millennial culture of self-discovery and the methodical pursuit of happiness, that he can adhere to its conventions yet blatantly call out its shortcomings and eccentricities.

The Color Wheel is shot with extremely grainy black and white videography in a way that reminds of the scuzzy cinematography that made Kevin Smith's Clerks look like it was recorded with the surveillance cameras in the very same convenient store in which it was set. The black and white adds to the essence of the film, and is only fitting for the style and the film's content. This is a film made up of scenes, vignettes, and conversations instead of cinematographical or thematic details (if you can understand the constant duality and plurality of sibling love and the general concept of disillusionment, The Color Wheel is anything but complex thematically) that can distract us from the picture at hand. This is a thoroughly beautiful film, rich with unfiltered, unabashedly blunt dialog, awkward scenes that are played off in a boldly comedic fashion instead of humbly dismissed and segwayed past by an unsure director, and two sublimely dedicated performances at the film's core. If contemporary indie comedies, or the mumblecore movement needed a voice, it would find it by showing this film at a festival and holding a discussion with a panel upon its completion.