The mumblecore era mostly passed me by. The movement within American indie cinema that birthed folks like Joe Swanberg, the Duplass Brothers, and of course its most prominent graduate, Greta Gerwig, is curious to me but I haven’t gone into it much personally. These super low-key movies with extremely naturalistic dialogue about millennial relationships had an important role in shaping a particular indie cinema identity that has gotten far more resourceful and professional. But its spirit lives on, especially in a movie like Matt and Mara, which comes from the equally low-fi Canadian indie market, though it skews a little older and wiser.
It is the fourth film from Kazik Radwanski, and depicts the relationship between two thirty-somethings -formerly best friends with some possible sexual tension between them- who reunite and perhaps mistakenly rekindle aspects of their previous friendship. Mara is played by Deragh Campbell, a prominent star of the Canadian indie scene, while Matt is played by Blackberry director and co-star Matt Johnson -whose character shares his exact name.
In the mumblecore tradition, they’ve got a fair bit of easy chemistry -he the more outgoing, opinionated, direct and sarcastic one, she considerably more reserved and inconspicuous, but very sharp and surprisingly playful when in the right circumstances. And Matt has a way of bringing about those circumstances for Mara -his presence opens up a slightly more flamboyant, impulsive side in her. It’s evident in their conversations relative to those with her husband Samir (Mounir Al Shami), in his sitting in the back of her classroom -she being a university creative writing teacher, and in a scene where he is with her while she gets a passport photo taken and going along with the photographer’s supposition that they are a married couple.
Certainly they have that kind of a rapport and there are some feelings there, lingering from long ago before Matt went off to New York for several years. At the same time, both Mara and the audience can detect that Matt isn’t a very reliable or perhaps even trustworthy person in spite of his charms and genial demeanour. And he’s not the most thoughtful guy. While Mara’s writing dreams have taken a hit, Matt is a published author who gives her a signed collection of his short stories with the inscription that he owed her it because ‘half the ideas were hers’. He intends it as a compliment, but clearly can’t see how it might be perceived as his stealing her creativity. This attitude and his philosophy against self-censorship in writing, which he discusses as a guest lecturer in her class that comes off as an almost anti-PC diatribe, feel like red flags to a friendship as much as anything more. He’s quite reminiscent of Anders Danielsen Lie’s comic artist boyfriend Aksel in The Worst Person in the World -smart, but not discerning, and a little full of himself.
But Johnson plays him well and with measured nuance as to the nature of his personality. His insulated worldview and inability to assess the implications and ramifications of his behaviour. The movie never takes his perspective, but at the same time through Mara we are encouraged to understand him and the certain liveliness he brings out in her. He is clearly someone detached from his emotions -a pitiful thing and bad sign that we first glimpse on a visit to his father, in a coma and dying in hospital, and how Matt doesn’t show any signs of emotional vulnerability in front of Mara, despite the insinuation it is affecting him. Campbell's understated performance is fully engaging too, as she quietly meditates the state of her life as a rare exciting prospect -giving a speech at a New York state university- approaches, amid a certain malaise in her relationship with Samir and her young daughter.
Both these performances and much of the dialogue exchanged between them and other characters is apparently improvised. Many a conversation is so naturalistic in rhythm there is no way it could be scripted; such as an argument in their car where Matt and Mara frequently interrupt and cut each other off with a half-formed thought or rebuttal so like a real disagreement -the camera views them from behind so that we are transported to the back-seat as though in real-time witnessing this awkward fray. Every scene of Mara's friend (Emma Healy) reads as documentary tangent in her extremely loose way of talking and organically reaching her points. She’s the one who alludes to Matt’s writing belonging to a specific outmoded style of Canadian literature.
Though for as intimate as Radwanski makes you feel in proximity to the characters, he keeps at arms length the finer nuances of Mara and Matt’s relationship where it concerns something more than friendship. And it is here where the film’s subtleties get in the way of clarity in a fashion that doesn’t connect like much of the rest of the movie does. The last act concerns this trip to New York, which Mara makes with Matt, whom she’s only barely confided her reconnection with to her husband. It is along this stretch, totally removed from any customary context, that subdued inhibition rises up over ration and emotion. Not in much a dramatic way but consequential enough. Yet neither of them is open through it, much as Mara specifically is moved; and a typical catharsis is denied. This on its own isn’t an issue, but the choice in how Radwanski resolves or eschews resolution isn’t very interesting -honest though it may be. Yes, we know how this sort of thing ends, but what does it leave for its characters -Mara especially? A rather uninspired solace in what she takes for granted?
I think one of the recurring flaws of mumblecore, and many may attribute this to a greater trend of disaffected indie dramas more broadly, is the characters’ seeming lack of investment in their own lives. Campbell is a good actress, but there is a degree of this that comes off in Mara some of the time, while Matt is just broadly cynical and an unserious person. And that’s sort of the note that this movie leaves you on, ascribing on the audience how to feel about the state of things to such an extent its emotional core character feels rather hollow. It’s not an original sentiment -like much of the movie’s tone it feels borrowed from the similarly subdued tendencies of Éric Rohmer (the creep of a male lead in Claire’s Knee also came to mind in Matt’s character); but those I don’t find much effective either.
Still, Matt and Mara is an interesting little work of cinema vérité, and one with some keen insights into long relationships and certain behaviour types. Both Campbell and Johnson capture exceptionally well their very specific types of characters, both of whom many of us have encountered in real life. At the movie’s TIFF première, Johnson talked about the lack of ambition and self-imposed limitations of the Canadian film industry, and Matt and Mara is a more curious film than a lot of what the powers that be like to promote as Canadian film identity. He and Campbell and Radwanski are sharp voices -and I hope they are encouraged.
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