Man on Film: Tar [U.S. Premiere]

Tar--the James Franco-produced project featuring twelve of his NYU grad students'* collected and re-edited short films based on poems found in C.K. Williams titular collection--is an interesting filmic experience. Functioning largely as an elegiac meditation on innocence, both a fond remembrance and a lamentation on the loss of it, Tar is enriched with a lyrical, image-driven presentation of ideas and themes.

*It only seems right to give them their due. In credited order: Edna Luise Biesold, Sarah-Violet Bliss, Gabrielle Demeestere, Alexis Gambis, Brooke Goldfinch, Shripriya Mahesh, Pamela Romanowsky, Bruce Thierry Cheung, Tine Thomasen, Virginia Urreiztieta, and Omar Zúñiga Hidalgo are all writers and directors; Shruti Ganguly is an additional screenwriter.

Much like the film that obviously inspired its look and feel--Franco said as much in the introductory presentation--The Tree of Life, Tar is not a film featuring a traditional, linear, three-act structure. For someone who loved The Tree of Life, this is a style of filmmaking that is at least in part appealing. Now there is an element of feeling a bit reductive, and while it is impossible to not be entirely enamored with Jessica Chastain, it is a bit on the nose to cast her as the identical character that she was in the film that so heavily influenced it. There is not anyone better suited to play the part, so one cannot fault the filmmakers responsible for the scenes of Williams's adolescence for jumping at the chance to let Chastain ply her trade. It does, however, make it feel as though they are shouting the influence from the rooftops.

Largely, though, this is a series of connected short films by grad students from a storied program with a star-studded cast including Franco, Chastain, Mila Kunis, Zach Braff, Bruce Campbell, and Henry Hopper. The near-final product--Franco stated that this was not quite finished, though one has to imagine that it is close to done--works for the most part. Tar is evocative, serving the image and C.K. Williams's words well. It is ultimately 75 minutes culled from roughly three hours worth of short films, feeling mostly like a film with a cohesive vision and having averted the potential trap of clashing styles by establishing a visual style beforehand and employing just two cinematographers to better align the shorts to be better able to synthesize a cohesive film from the shorts. As a film, it is captivating if occasionally disjointed. Tar is much better than one would expect for when faced with the prospect of undertaking the viewing of more than an hour of student films. It certainly has its merits, and coming out of the film, there was an interest in seeing how the separate shorts played themselves out on their own merits, leaving me interested in an eventual DVD/Bluray release. Then again, this is coming from someone who minored in film studies while majoring in English lit.

James Franco also fielded questions immediately following the screening, first from the Alamo Drafthouse's moderator and film programmer, Sam Prime, and then from the crowd. Most of the questions pertained to the film we had just seen, and it was interesting to hear how the experience was for the actors (who were getting back to a purer form (read: non-commercial) of filmmaking with these burgeoning directors) and for the directors (who were actually getting to work with accomplished actors for the first time). I didn't take notes because I'm not "that guy," but he seemed to really love having taught the class, and Tar looks to be the first of many of these projects, the next one being done through the UCLA MFA film program, if I remember correctly.

The Queue Continuum: The High Cost of Living

With the exception of Scrubs* and certain aspects of Garden State**, Zach Braff's resume has been fairly lackluster. Some of this is the result of his awkward presence and its inevitable exclusionary nature in regards to his viability as a leading man in standard Hollywood fare. The other factor sitting front and center is that Zach Braff's film choices haven't been particularly good since Garden State. A quick live-action role run-down consists of The Ex and The Last Kiss. That's it. And that's bad. Both of those films are abysmal.

*If we're being honest here, Scrubs took a precipitous nose-dive once Turk and Carla had a kid. 

**There were aspects of Garden State that really worked. Much of the dialogue (especially the dialogue for Natalie Portman's character, Sam) does not work--particularly that shit about The Shins changing your life; it made it really hard to like The Shins, a band I once liked a lot, because that line and the band became inseparable. Garden State did, however, look great, and Braff did a fine (read that modifier however you would like) job capturing the malaise of "mood-stabilizing" numbness from medication to treat depression. 


Coming into The High Cost of Living, an expectation of anything less than trepidation would likely be foolish. With that mindset going in, Deborah Chow's The High Cost of Living isn't as bad as you would expect. Braff plays Henry Welles, a fuck-up drug-dealing American living illegally in Montreal. While drunk and high driving the wrong way down a one-way street, Henry hits a pregnant woman who is waiting in the street for a cab to take her to the hospital. With no witnesses, he takes off, largely because of his illegal residency status and the drugs he had in his possession. Wrought with guilt, he tracks her down, starting by following her, then befriending her, discovering that the accident ended the pregnancy.

What follows is a story which on the surface is sweet but is acrid and perverse beneath. The result is a mixed bag. The High Cost of Living has its nice moments, particularly the simpler ones between Henry and Nathalie (played capably by Isabelle Blais) in his apartment, and it definitely has the pure intentions of a film trying to give us a morality tale that lives in the gray area of the real world, but its shortcomings certainly temper any positive response the viewer can have coming out of it. For starters, there is something about Braff's performances in general that render the more dramatic moments strained, specifically in such scenes where the drama is driven by dialogue, as he starts speaking in a distracting stilted manner. Then there is his default method of acting which too often finds him falling back on his awkward aping that might work in something a bit broader but not in an indie melodrama. On the narrative side of the discussion, the film tilts the scale a bit on the dull side with its plot being fairly simple and its character-driven nature ultimately falling a bit short on account of its characters not being compelling enough on their own merits to make the audience want to go along on their journey.

While this is better than the reprehensibly bad The Ex or Braff's tiresome and soulless outing The Last Kiss, I don't know that this can be considered good, even if the ending is much more palatable than one would expect.