NOT KIDS’ STUFF {BY AL HOFF}
DIRECTOR KELLY REICHARDT’S VISUAL STYLE REMAINS UNASSUMINGLY ELOQUENT
In Gillian Robespierre’s sweet, offbeat rom-com Obvious Child, aspiring standup comedian Donna (Jenny Slate) is unceremoniously cut loose by her boyfriend in the nightclub’s unisex toilet. (“Stop looking at your phone while you’re dumping me.”) Later that night, Donna meets Max (Jake Lacy), who’s not really her type. Still, they enjoy a drunken hook-up during which Donna gets pregnant, and later she has an abortion. Because that happens.
DAMMED
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Street meet: Jake Lacy and Jenny Slate
CP APPROVED
But this hot-button issue is the catalyst for the film’s larger narrative, a sometimes raunchy, rough-edged but heartwarming coming-of-age story about a bright but unfocused twentysomething. It’s a journey that involves parents, friends, work, romantic relationships and, yes, Planned Parenthood. The punny title comes from the bouncy Paul Simon tune, and refers not only to the pregnancy but also to Donna’s transitional state, as much a girl as woman. Set in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, comparisons to Girls will be inevitable, but Robespierre’s characters are warmer and more normally flawed. Onscreen this summer, we will see men fight aliens, be James Brown and pretend to be cops. Entertaining, if highly unusual events, but finally, there’s a no-drama, frequently funny and subversively informative film about a common fact of modern American life: Lots of women have safe, legal abortions. While not a polemic, Obvious Child breaks the taboo of talking matter-offactly about abortion, which in its own way is a political act; Donna understands this power and speaks openly about her decision with her bestie (Gaby Hoffman), her mom (Polly Draper) — who has her own unique historical perspective — and even her nightclub audience. Unplanned pregnancies are standard fodder in films and television stories, and in the more self-consciously “modern” tales, abortion is presented as an option — before being rejected. (TV’s Friday Night Lights was the rare recent exception.) Sure, pro-lifers will hate this film, but let them spend the summer adding up all the zillions of other onscreen “deaths,” before watching Knocked Up again. (Same set-up, decidedly less-typical outcome.) Folks who want to see amusing and provocative movies about relevant real-life topics can start here. Starts Fri., June 27. AMC Loews and Manor
{BY BILL O’DRISCOLL}
On the fence about direct action? Jesse Eisenberg portrays an eco-activist
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IGHT MOVES is a thriller about ecosabotage and its aftermath, but it’s also a Kelly Reichardt film. So while necessarily plot-driven, it’s simultaneously the kind of low-key, almost observational character study you’d expect (and ardently hope for) from the director of the sublime Old Joy, arthouse favorite Wendy and Lucy and provocative, bigger-budget revisionist Western Meek’s Cutoff. Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) and Dena (Dakota Fanning) are young activists for whom protest marches seem laughably inadequate to address the global environmental crisis. Drawing on the explosives expertise of Josh’s buddy Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), they plan direct action: blowing up an Oregon hydroelectric dam that blocks a salmon run. The film’s first half is substantially a procedural, but in Reichardt’s hands it never feels that way. There’s the drama, for instance, of acquiring ammonium nitrate for a speedboat-borne fertilizer bomb. Yet characteristically, Reichardt and long-time writing partner Jonathan Raymond are
equally concerned with exploring characters through meaningful silences. Key background information often appears almost casually, in a lone line of dialogue. And symbolic resonances — like a scene with a dead pregnant doe on a roadside — abound, as do such deadpan ironies as can be found in a suburban mansion stocked with nature videos, or a wordless sequence in a mountain-country landfill.
NIGHT MOVES DIRECTED BY: Kelly Reichardt STARRING: Jesse Eisenberg, Peter Sarsgaard, Dakota Fanning Starts Fri., June 27. Regent Square
CP APPROVED Reichardt’s visual style, meanwhile, remains unassumingly eloquent. Consider the eerie nighttime shot as the bombbearing boat approaches the small but imposing dam (which, perhaps significantly, already has a crack in it). Reichardt’s characters are always com-
plex and intriguingly inaccessible, and Fanning, Sarsgaard and a brooding Eisenberg give potent performances. If the film’s second half is slightly less satisfying, it’s because Reichardt moves the target a little: The first half (recalling last year’s Brit Marling thriller The East) seems to want us to ask whether such sabotage is moral or effective, while the second act perhaps rigs the game with tragedy. Josh, explaining why he wanted to destroy the dam, says, “People are gonna start thinking. They have to.” Reichardt clearly disagrees with the saboteurs’ approach (even if she sympathizes with their larger environmental concerns). But what direction would the drama have gone if — spoiler alert — the protagonists had chosen an act of sabotage that didn’t risk human life? On the other hand, maybe this otherwise fine film is Reichardt’s exploration of the wages of extremism. As in Meek’s Cutoff, she demonstrates a healthy mistrust of people who are too sure they know what’s right.
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