« Media Times | Main | "Nannies Gone Wild," or Ivan Tribble, Meet Helaine Olen »
July 17, 2005
Urban Ensembles, or How to Cultivate Community in the Age of Terror
2005 is starting to look the year of the Urban Ensemble movie. The two most prominent films in this cycle are Paul Haggis's Crash and Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know. Haggis's Los Angeles film was, in my opinion, terribly reductive in its treatment of race relations, to the point that some unexpected weather was the only means of resolving the city's tensions. July's film, set in another, less-polarized corner of Los Angeles, offered what I regarded as a more convincing treatment of individuals desperately longing for community. More recently, two other Urban Ensemble films have been released, and both films seem caught up in the genre's more significant pitfalls, specifically the overly contrived or schematic plots that rely too heavily on coincidence.
Don Roos's Happy Endings (IMDB) focuses on a group of loosely-connected Angelinos who are confronting a variety of sexual problems. Lisa Kudrow's Mamie plays an abortion counselor in her early 40s. As a teen she became pregnant after having sex with her step-brother, Charley (Steve Coogan), who is now gay and partnered with Gil. Charley and Gil become suspicious that their best friends, a lesbian couple, may have been artificially inseminated with Gil's sperm. We learn early in the film that Mamie, who claims to have had an abortion, actually gave birth, putting the child up for adoption. All of these stories interweave with Maggie Gyllenhaal's Jude seducing the gay drummer of a rock band (Jason Ritter), in order to meet and seduce his father (played by Tom Arnold, in the film's most explicit stunt casting), presumably to cash in on the family's wealth.
While I enjoyed Roos's playful storytelling style in The Opposite of Sex, the film's constant attempts to wink to the audience, uisng split-screen images accompanied by white titles on a black background, were ultimately grating. Unlike Manohla Dargis, whose review is almost entirely to blame for my spending $9.50 (plus Metro fare) to see this film, I was somewhat unsatisfied with the film's navigation of the question of community these films often address. Dargis argues that "Mr. Roos doesn't pretend that a collection of spiky, selfish, self-serving individuals, even a group as white and comfortably situated as the one he has concocted, necessarily makes a community. In a lot of ensemble films, the moral of the story is that everyone is lonely, but at the end of the day and those empty nights, no one is alone. Mr. Roos doesn't peddle such off-the-rack comfort." However, the film's final scene, at a wedding between two characters I won't identify and even with the ironic use of a Billy Joel song, retains this deep-seated desire for community. Roos has made a well-crafted film, one that does navigate sexual politics in a thoughtful way, but Happy Endings retains many of the qualities of the Urban Ensemble.
Another recent urban ensemble, Heights (IMDB), focuses on the experiences of five New Yorkers over the course of 24 hours. Like Happy Endings, the film focuses on characters whose stories are related in various ways, their interactions often produced via chance or coincidence, though by the end of the film, a kind of tentative community is produced. I found Heights to be generally unmemorable, outside of Elizabeth Banks' performance, and the film never strays far from the opening sequence monologue by Diana (Glen Close), a stage performer who is directing Macbeth, in which she urges her actors to get in touch with their passions. But the coincidence of watching these films on the same weekend has left me contemplating the recent emergence of this cycle of films. It certainly seems connected to the desire for safety and community after September 11, but there also seems to be something else going on. The films are, of course, set in global cities, centers of culture and commerce most explicitly associated with urban isolation, an experience that is explicitly underlined in Heights. I'm inclined to think there's something significant about the form of the films, about the narrative complexity of juggling multiple characters and storylines (perhaps Steven Johnson's comments about audience sophistication are relevant here), something that Happy Endings sends up in its playful use of titles (some reviewers felt these titles were condescending, but I read them as parody). I don't have any final interpretations here, but I am curious about the cultural work that these Urban Ensemble films are supposed to be doing.
Update: This is several months after the fact, but I came across an interesting blog post by Amy H. Konig on ensemble films and didn't want to lose the link.
Posted by chuck at July 17, 2005 1:54 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.wordherders.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.fpl/4235
Comments
Me and You and Everyone We Know is set in the San Francisco area.
Posted by: burritoboy at July 21, 2005 5:38 PM
Oh, thanks for the correction. I have no idea why I thought it was set in Los Angeles (maybe one of the reviews I read??).
Posted by: Chuck at July 21, 2005 5:40 PM
Hmmm...the Village Voice review has the film set in Los Angeles.
Posted by: Chuck at July 21, 2005 5:45 PM