Exactly what it sounds like, the Pick of the Week column is written up by the Cinapse team on rotation, focusing on films that are past the marketing cycle of either their theatrical release or their home video release. So maybe the pick of the week will be only a couple of years old. Or maybe it’ll be a silent film, cult classic, or forgotten gem. Cinapse is all about thoughtfully advocating film, new and old, and celebrating what we love no matter how marketable that may be. So join us as we share about what we’re discovering, and hopefully you’ll find some new films for your watch list, or some new validation that others out there love what you love too! Engage with us in the comments or on Twitter or Facebook! And now, our Cinapse Pick Of The Week…
Two boys meet on a train. They’re sort of friendly, mostly just acquaintances. Each is holding a stack of records and soon they’re chatting each other up about their collections, discovering a shared taste that they maybe haven’t found with anyone else before. Something is beginning to take root.
Their names are Mick and Keith, and this is the moment they begin to change the world.
Two boys meet in front of a music shop. They’re sort of friendly, mostly just acquaintances. Each ogles the window filled with instruments and soon they’re chatting up about their favorite styles and brands, discovering a shared taste that they maybe haven’t found with anyone else before. Something is beginning to take root.
Their names are Douglas and Eugene, and this is the moment they begin to change the world.
You’ve never heard about the second pair, but they’re the ones that Not Fade Away, David Chase’s overlooked, brilliant film debut focuses on.
Douglas (John Magaro) and Eugene (Jack Huston) do not rewire pop cultural history at the level that Mick and Keith and those of that ilk did, but for the friends and family in their orbit, the joining of these two forces in front of the record store is exactly as seismic a shift. Every moment that follows, every moment of cataclysm or ecstasy to come, is in some attributable to this small, unremarkable instance.
And that seems to be what Chase is chasing (though attempting to boil this film down to a singular simplistic understanding is about as wise a plan as trying to bottle wind, and probably exactly as effective), that sensation of the small moments that you don’t necessarily feel as they uproot your entire existence. He takes a painstaking approach to how he stages and builds these moments, with many scenes often appearing to be non sequiturs before the other shoe drops and squashes everything beneath it.
A girl breaks the side mirror on her father’s car as she backs out of the garage. A family is destroyed.
A guy lets his buddy ride his motorcycle around the block. A dream dies.
Not Fade Away suffers slightly from the sheer ubiquity of its subject matter. There is nothing the Baby Boomers love more than lecturing all us that came after about how goddamn special their music was, and how much their parents didn’t understand, man. And Chase’s script is guilty as hell of playing to some familiar favorites, including a kid getting chewed out by his parents over coming back with long hair. Moratorium on that beat, folks, please.
But where Chase compensates is with the specificity of his vision, and with the all-consuming empathy with which he tackles this story, rendering even the slightest of characters as fully-rendered human beings. Every character here is the star of their own story, and every story is worth telling.
To give you a sense of what I’m talking about, I’d like to talk about one scene in specific. This occurs a little over midway through the film, and might be considered spoilerish, but I think a film as plot-light as Not Fade Away eludes such concerns. But fair warning all the same.
OK, the scene in question is between Douglas and his dad, played by goddamn human masterpiece James Gandolfini. The relationship between the two has been combative from the word go, as Gandolfini’s proud, traditional masculinity clashes with his son, who looks like Bob Dylan without the spine.
Anyway, father and son go back and forth and back and forth, their fights usually dragging in emotionally unstable Mom (Molly Price) and vulnerable little sister Evelyn (Meg Guzulescu). Midway through the film, Gandolfini insists that he take Douglas out for a traditional dinner at a nice restaurant, just the two of them.
You sit there, primed for the sparks to fly. Is Dad going to make a jab about the hair, about the music, about the attitude? Is Douglas going to spit on the old ways and insult everything his father holds dear, burning down what relationship they have left?
The sparks don’t fly. Instead, Gandolfini starts talking to his son, voice quiet. The conversation turns to a recent illness that he has only recently recovered from. He talks about his treatment, about spending time in a clinic with other people going through the same physical, emotional, and spiritual struggle that he was. He admits that he fell in love with another woman.
The movie freezes on that moment. The kid is watching his father, shaken to the core. And Gandolfini, Jesus Christ, James Gandolfini, he watches his boy with those giant, broken eyes of his and quietly admits that he’ll never act on this love he found, that he can’t bring that much grief and pain upon his family.
That, that right there, is one of the single best scenes in a movie I have ever seen in my entire life, a sequence that utterly flattened me the first time I saw it. In under five minutes, Chase PERFECTLY encapsulates the moment that every young adult faces and fears: the moment when you realize that your parents aren’t gods, they aren’t immortal, they aren’t anthropomorphic embodiments of institutions for you to contest with. They are human beings, human beings with flaws and qualities, dreams and broken hearts. Time to be an adult, living amongst other adults. It’s a shattering instance, and Chase NAILS it.
The whole movie is loaded with sequences that hit like that, all gussied up in a package that’s gorgeously shot by Eigil Bryld, and with a soundtrack that is chock-a-block full with classic tunes (even if you hate the Baby Boomers and all their bullshit, they did have a soundtrack to end all sountracks).
Not Fade Away comes in an unremarkable package (which might be why it vanished so quickly, even as Chase’s follow-up to the zeitgeist-defining The Sopranos [which I have not watched beyond the first season, just so you know]), but it is possessed of a quiet power that has continued to sit with me in the time since I saw it. Images and moments flash by like dream, like memory, and I find myself neglecting more recent watches to return back to the spell of Not Fade Away.
I still don’t know what the ending means, though. All I know is that I cheered when it happened. Fucking cheered.
Not Fade Away is currently streaming on Netflix Instant.