Mumblecorner: SILVER BULLETS
We are now entering the third age of Joe Swanberg.
Unlike most people, I do consider myself a fan of Joe Swanberg. Now, when I say unlike most people, I don’t mean to imply that he’s unpopular. I mean to state the fact that probably (and this is a conservative estimate) 95% of the filmgoing public doesn’t know or care who he is. Joe Swanberg is one of the architects of the so-called mumblecore movement, which for brevity’s sake we will describe as “Cassavettes, but with the emotional depth of a poorly educated teenager and the camera and sound recording skills of that aforementioned poorly educated teenager.” Which is, of course, an oversimplification, but useful as a starting point to gauge how far the man has come in only a few short years…
As something like a fan of Swanberg’s work, I was both surprised and intrigued when he announced his first movie with celebrity actors, finally following the Duplass Brothers and his former muse Greta Gerwig out of the mumblecore ghetto. As his latest venture Drinking Buddies hits the big stage, I thought it a good idea to go back and look at his earlier work.
Silver Bullets is not the last work he did before Drinking Buddies (an artist as prolific as Swanberg has probably finished five more movies between when I started this parenthetical and when I finish it), but it seems as good a pivot point as any. It seems like a thesis statement/deconstruction of not only his previous work, but of the man himself. It certainly seems like the end of a creative cycle, and as such is a fascinating work, if not entertaining in the conventional sense. But then, if you’re looking to be entertained, why are you watching a mumblecore movie in the first place?
Before the movie proper even begins, we have a brief scene with Jane Adams and horror director Larry Fessenden, which I believe is the first time Swanberg has focused in on characters out of his age bracket. In less than five minutes screen time, Adams and Fessenden sketch out an affectionate, melancholy portrait of two people who have grown wiser with age, if not any more sensible. And they have almost nothing to do with the movie proper.
It’s an aimless and intimate scene with two characters that barely deserve to be called supporting cast, and in any other movie, this would be a deleted scene, if they bothered to shoot it at all (though I subscribe to the belief that if you have Jane Adams in your cast, you shoot as much with her as you possibly can.) But Swanberg, for better or worse, is almost exclusively interested in the sort of human moments that would be considered extraneous by anyone else.
Once we get into the movie proper, there’s nothing storywise that we haven’t seen before. Kate Lyn Sheil is Claire, an actress who has just landed a part in a low budget horror movie directed by Ben, played by actual horror director Ti West (House of the Devil, Triggerman.) Meanwhile, Claire’s boyfriend Ethan (Swanberg himself) is having pangs of jealousy and an existential filmmaking crisis, though perhaps not in that exact order. You may or may not be able to figure out where things go from there, but I can almost guarantee none of it goes down in quite the way you’d expect, even if you’re already familiar with Swanberg’s M.O.
In fact, moreso than any of the Swanberg films I’ve seen thus far, this one is the one that most benefits from a more than passing familiarity with his filmography. While the themes aren’t that much different than his usual business (Saying that Swanberg’s vision tends to be narrow is somewhat of an understatement), the style he adopts speak volumes as to where he was emotionally and psychologically when he made it. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating snapshot of an artist in flux. In many ways, this sort of thing is exactly what I love about Swanberg, or at least find fascinating as a viewer. Because of his relentless prolificacy, more than any other filmmaker I can think of, you can see the evolution in his art. His average output tends to be two or three movies a year, and because they share similar themes and motifs, it comes off as less the work of a one trick pony and more the work of a man trying variations on a theme, attacking it from every angle.
Which brings us back to the three ages of Swanberg. The first age was the work of an indulgent author, writing what he knew in an indulgent, literally masturbatory (see: Kissing On The Mouth) manner. This evolved into an exploration of the artist, the second age. Swanberg’s attentions turned to the process of creating art, and the friction that can occur when trying to separate life from same. Silver Bullets is the thesis statement of this second age. The point at which he has grown weary of reality, and strives to break free. Every inch of this movie is coated in the tension between his attachment to his sense of himself and what he’s capable of as a filmmaker, and whatever lies beyond all that.
It’s evident in the style, inasmuch as there actually is some. If you watch his earlier films, there is an almost willful anti-aesthetic at work, a defiant need to look as amateurish as possible. And here, now, on the edge of his second age, he actually flirts with the groundbreaking conceit of composing his shots. And on this score, clearly he’s picked up some tricks from his star West’s films, as he manages to create an atmosphere of general unease and unstated tension. There is a chilling recurring theme provided by Orange Mighty Trio, if memory serves, the first ever music used in one of his films.
All this gamesmanship culminates in a finale that seems to break Swanberg’s adherence to reality forever. If the film plays out with the logic of a dream that’s trying too hard to feel real, it ends in a cathartic nightmare, with the very last scene being the morning after, where everything has changed and there’s no going back. Not that Joe Swanberg ever looks back. Relentlessly, he moves forward, always searching for what comes next.
