by Spitz, Marc
With the heightened attention, of course, came the inevitable backlash. “For a lot of people, those movies sucked,” says Swanberg. “I didn’t really absorb that hurt until much later—I think it was shocking. We’d been in a little bubble of the cinephile world, but basically for a week owned the New York film scene. It felt like a big deal to all of us, and then within a couple of days it felt like everyone hated it and we all had targets on our chests.”
“I do think the term is a bit limiting now,” Duplass says, “and maybe doesn’t apply to the disparate styles we all have. It’s almost come to be synonymous with ‘microbudget,’ which is just too broad to be useful. Most importantly, I think the term sounds downright artsy-fartsy. And I’d hate for any viewer to stay away from one of my movies because they think to themselves, ‘Mumblecore? Dumb word. Sounds pretentious. I’ll skip that one.’”
Some audiences avoided mumblecore or anything that smacked of it as a nuisance at best, a rip-off at worst. “It’s amazing to me the currency that word has had,” says Bujalski. “I remember the moment in 2005 when I repeated it to a journalist. Then it kind of lay dormant for a couple of years. When Swanberg was getting the most hype around Hannah Takes the Stairs, it just exploded. The last thing I ever thought that my movies would be was provocative—it shocked me that they could drive people to anger.”
Others, of course, embraced the movement as a kind of salvation, seeing characters just like themselves on screen for the first time. The films were short and easily screened on laptops. They were funny, sexy, and bore the fingerprints of their creators. These fans ran to mumblecore openings at top speed. “I thought it was sort of an umbrella term that was used by programmers and publicists and film-festival programmers to promote these movies,” says Karpovsky. “And that’s great. It got them more attention than they would otherwise, and I think that’s wonderful.”
Mumblecore was proving adaptable. The Duplass brothers transposed the subgenre’s smart, talky, low-budget qualities onto genre films: in 2008 they made Baghead, a kind of Blair Witch Project for smart people. It takes place in a cabin in the woods, where a bunch of Indie filmmakers “hole up to write a feature film that stars us.” It’s both a satire and a viable product that expands what a mumblecore film can be. Gerwig costars as one of the would-be victims of the titular Baghead. Was it a joke? Baghead literally wears a bag over his head. And if it was a joke, who was it on?
“Jay and I are plot whores,” Duplass says of the difference between a Swanberg free-form experimental film and a Duplass production, which feels more conventional and “movie-like.” “We love to keep our movies moving forward inside of a genre with plot pumping along, rather than a more navel-gazing, dialogue-driven structure.”
Similarly, Lynn Shelton delineated herself by having excellent sound, a tight sense of plot, and wry scenarios that would fit nicely with any smart Hollywood comedy. Simply put, the once-amateurish school was becoming more sophisticated.
Swanberg, an outsider to the end—though friends with both the Duplasses and Shelton—worried that Gerwig was getting stars in her eyes.
“Greta picked up a lot of bad habits from other actors on that movie [Baghead],” says Swanberg, who reunited with Gerwig to film Nights and Weekends, which would be released in 2008. This would be a full collaboration, with Gerwig cowriting and directing the story of a breakup, but the divergent ambition of Swanberg, who wanted to stay Indie, and Gerwig, who was hearing the call of mainstream Hollywood, was palpable. It was a fraught production with multiple stops and starts even as the two filmmakers continued to tour Hannah Takes the Stairs around the country to adoring film-festival crowds.
Humpday, Shelton’s follow-up to her debut My Effortless Brilliance (starring Harvey Danger front man Sean Nelson as a pretentious author), appeared in 2009 and concerned Ben (Mark Duplass) and Andrew (Josh Leonard, a veteran of the actual Blair Witch Project), another pair of estranged old buddies who entertain the notion of filming a gay porno movie as an art project. Ben is living in middle-class comfort. Andrew is freewheeling and calls his friend out on his lifestyle. For an uncomfortable moment, Ben takes the bait for the sake of the creative breakthrough. “Google ‘porn.’ It’s all been done. There’s not a lot of dude-on-dude who are not gay,” says Andrew, goading his friend.
Shelton’s commentary on bored and restless privilege was much needed at the time, as if to say, “Just because it’s cheap to make a film these days doesn’t mean we have to film everything, people.” “Something just hit me,” Ben admits before the deed is recorded and uploaded. “I think we might be morons.” Critics adored the absurdity and the fresh sense of existential confusion that hadn’t been seen since the days of The Graduate. Similarly, Breaking Upwards, by Zoe Lister Jones and Daryl Wein, finds a New York couple, also privileged and also bored. As an experiment, they decide to take a consensual break from each other and date other people. The film was shot for only $15,000 but features name actors—Olivia Thirlby, who would later star in Juno and Bored to Death, as well as acclaimed Broadway actress Julie White—and a relative lack of improvisation. As it went with Michael Stipe after a few R.E.M. albums, the mumblers were beginning to enunciate.
“In terms of the postmumblecore universe, yes, our attention to production value, scriptwriting, and trained actors was a definite choice,” says Lister Jones. “I think we felt frustrated that DIY filmmaking had come to mean a lack of all of those things, and we set out to prove that a microbudget could still account for narrative arcs, dynamic actors, artful lighting, and muscular dialogue. Breaking Upwards was also a response to the way in which our generation was overwhelmingly portrayed on film as meandering, lost, and mopey. We didn’t feel represented, and so we wanted to shine light on a world of driven, neurotic, emotionally articulate twenty-somethings instead.”
Meanwhile, Swanberg and Gerwig were quite literally meandering, lost and mopey, trying to complete Nights and Weekends under the pressure of following up their hit Hannah Takes the Stairs. “We were not on good terms,” Swanberg says. “It was a terrible experience. Through the process of making Hannah Takes the Stairs, I became completely infatuated with Greta. She felt the same about me as a director. It made my relationship uncomfortable and her relationship uncomfortable. It’s the thing about these kind of movies. Because there’s no script, it’s self-generated. The shooting atmosphere and the way the movie is put together is always really intimate. And it definitely bleeds into real life.” Sexually explicit and raw, it’s hard to watch Nights and Weekends and not feel a little creepy, like you are witnessing an actual rift. “At the time I was very gung ho about having this very freewheeling artist life. I was happy to have the movie and real life mixed up. That’s the power of the movie. It’s what I was going for.”
Gerwig, by contrast, was becoming more and more removed from the process and more and more professional. When they’d get together to film, Swanberg noticed her becoming increasingly mannered. “It was really different. She had all these tics and new things she was doing. I was excited about her in Hannah. She was totally unformed and un-actory. We got into a lot of arguments.”
“There isn’t a normal dynamic between us,” Gerwig admitted in 2008. “Our entire relationship is based on work, and because of that, it’s sort of like we don’t know how to be any other way than completely intense and absorbed with one another. It’s never really been like, ‘Oh yeah, let’s just go grab coffee for an afternoon.’ It always ends up with, like, screaming accusations.” Perversely, the film itself depicts the two actors in near-pornographic sexual congress.
Ironically, it would be through Swanberg that Gerwig would meet the director who would give her a breakthrough “movie star” role opposite a proven box-office king. “I’d gone and seen Margot at the Wedding, which I thought was awesome,” said Swanberg, perhaps unsurprisingly, of Noah Baumbach’s most polarizing film. He sent Baumbach a fan letter and discovered that the older director had been a fan of Hannah Takes the St
airs. Baumbach had made something of a proto-mumblecore film in the late ’90s following the production of his second film, Mr. Jealousy. Highball, shot on a low budget with a bunch of friends and regular actors like Annabella Sciorra, Dean Wareham, and Justine Bateman, had an improvised script, no context, and was never meant to be released. “It was just a ditty,” says Joel Kastelberg, producer of Baumbach’s first two, “proper” films. When it was released, the director had his name removed from the credits. Still, the freedom of creating a film on a borrowed set with nothing but a loose story line appealed to him. In the mid-’00s, he’d been observing the mumblecore movement from outside, an established director for over a decade, with major movie stars in his films. Swanberg and Baumbach would collaborate briefly on an off-the-cuff ensemble piece about a play production, Alexander the Last. “I remember at some point in the summer of 2008 we all hung out together,” Swanberg says of how Baumbach came to cast Gerwig in his 2010 film Greenberg. “It was a period when everyone was interacting. I certainly didn’t sit them down together and introduce them.”
Baumbach, married to Fast Times at Ridgemont High actress Jennifer Jason Leigh at the time, may well have been fascinated by Gerwig, but more likely he was energized by the speed and honesty of mumblecore-style filmmaking. Baumbach’s subsequent films, from Greenberg to Frances Ha, would both star Gerwig, by then his girlfriend and creative partner, and create a sort of genre offshoot that would marry mumblecore lightness and speed to classical screenwriting and filmmaking techniques.
Gerwig soon disappeared from Swanberg’s orbit for good. “She did almost zero promotion for Nights and Weekends,” he now says. “That was the last period of time that I really talked to her or hung out with her.” Not exactly bitter, Swanberg isn’t a fan of this postmumblecore hybrid either, the union of Hollywood and the digital Twee cinema.
Of course, it’s hard to classify Greenberg in any way as a sellout. It’s a difficult film, beautifully shot in sunny, smoggy L.A. and almost cruelly unsparing in its treatment of the Kicking and Screaming college kids reckoning with forty. They are no longer rehearsing or becoming anything. This is it. If they didn’t make it (in Roger Greenberg’s case, as a rock star), they aren’t going to. Those who have kids are parents. Those who don’t . . . won’t. Greenberg (played by a subdued Ben Stiller), fresh out of a stay in a mental hospital after a nervous breakdown, is fine with that, as he is committed to “doing nothing.” His plan is that he will drift through the rest of his days and wait around to die, swallowing pills to keep the demons away. Then he meets Florence (Gerwig). In lesser hands, she’d be a manic pixie dream girl, that well-established Hollywood cliché of the younger, plucky woman who lifts the spirits of the usually older, lost hero. But Florence is as screwed up as Roger is. When they fall in love, it’s plausible. They fit. He’s terrible, borderline abusive to her, but he also makes her mix CDs. “Hurt people hurt people,” she tells him, and it’s somehow illuminating. Greenberg, which also features Duplass in a small role, is both a commentary on postmumblecore preciousness and a beneficiary of its energy. “All the men out here dress like children and the children dress like superheroes,” Greenberg observes.
At the film’s climax, Stiller’s sad hero, once a would-be rock star and now driven to the nuthouse with anxiety and regret, is wired on a line of coke and surrounded by twenty-somethings at a house party. They snicker as he compliments them on the quality of their drugs. “You’re mean,” he says. “The thing about you kids is you’re all kind of insensitive. I’m glad I grew up when I did. Your parents were too perfect at parenting. All that baby Mozart and Dan Zanes songs. You’re so sincere and interested in things . . . There’s a confidence in you guys that’s horrifying.” If Kicking and Screaming is Twee’s restless Easy Rider, Greenberg is its resigned Lost in America.
Critics were divided yet again. It was definitely a love-it-or-hate-it offering. “Greta’s amazing in that movie, but I think it’s not good at all,” says Swanberg. “I don’t feel this way anymore, but at the time, I thought, ‘Why would you spend eight million dollars to make this? If you’re going to try to shoot a little handheld movie in natural light, why cast movie stars and spend all this money? Ben Stiller looks like a guy that’s had plastic surgery, not the kind of real person that these movies were sort of about. But Greta is amazing.”
Gerwig found herself at a crossroads after Greenberg. She was hot, but it was a slippery slope. Following in the footsteps of Chloë Sevigny, she opted to work with established auteurs, filming a small part in Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love and taking a lead in Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress. She made a play for major movie stardom alongside Russell Brand in an unnecessary remake of the Dudley Moore classic Arthur (in the Liza Minnelli role) that cooled both stars’ careers for a time.
When Lister Jones and Wein were given a relatively large budget to shoot the follow-up to Breaking Upwards, they cast Gerwig as Lola in the title role of Lola Versus, a sort of updated version of her searching, urban Hannah character, without the same freedom. “Well, we went from fifteen thousand dollars to five million, and we thought we had hit the jackpot,” says Lister Jones. Debra Winger and Bill Pullman play Lola’s parents. “We took a pretty brutal beating with critics and trolls alike,” Lister Jones says. “I think there is always a backlash when Indie goes corporate, because people can sense the tension between the two in the work itself. And they feel betrayed by something being represented as Indie when it has a number of super-commercial elements. The wolf in sheep’s clothing. There’s no way to avoid it, especially in this technological age when everyone is a critic, and those critics who are established have to be cruel in order to get an audience. It’s sad. But Woody Allen said something like, ‘If you listen to them when they love you, you have to listen to them when they hate you.’ So I guess the trick is to never listen to them at all.”
Gerwig returned to Baumbach as his collaborator and muse in 2013 for Frances Ha, another young-woman-in-the-city film that fared much better with critics. Meanwhile the Duplasses, and to a lesser extent Lynn Shelton, joined Richard Linklater and Spike Lee in attempting to work within the studio system with major movie stars while not dispensing with their Indie ethic or compromising their vision completely. Mark Duplass seemed able to pivot from appearing in big-budget studio films like Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty and generating, with his brother Jay, charming, no-budget comedies like The Do-Deca-Pentathlon (which features two rival brothers and the childhood athletic competition they cannot let go of) with real aplomb.
“Jay and I always wanted to make money writing in the system, kind of like John Sayles,” Mark Duplass says. “We thought we’d write for money, take that money, and make little films. We’ve found that we can exist a bit more peacefully inside the system as filmmakers as well. Also, my acting career has really brought in some great awareness and income to make the movies we want. But, yes, in the end we always hoped we could exist in the system enough to make a decent living, own a house, and have a family without starving.”
Today, each of the Duplasses’ new releases is a kind of event for film critics, and ironically, it may have been their example that convinced holdouts like Swanberg and Bujalski to dip their toes into the Hollywood pool. Swanberg’s Drinking Buddies, released in the summer of 2013, featured Olivia Wilde, star of the mega-budget flop Cowboys & Aliens, as well as Anna Kendrick of Twilight and Jake Johnson of New Girl. “I’ve felt it’s time to not just be a self-absorbed filmmaker,” Swanberg told the New York Times upon the film’s release. “It’s about time that we grew up a bit.” As with his other films, Drinking Buddies is improvised, and, discounting the explicit sex (now long gone), it’s not that far removed from Hannah Takes the Stairs.
“It’s still the same kind of movie I’ve always been making,” Swanberg swears. “The actors are well known, but they still have to show up every day and make up the dialogue. What’s gone forever is the need to have to be best friends with the people I�
�m making a movie with.”
Bujalski’s Computer Chess is only slightly more plot driven, but the white-saturated home-video style did not appeal to anyone beyond the art houses when it was released in the late summer of 2013. It remains firmly in the context of his older work: documentary-like, wry, talky, and sweet. That he worries it might be a bit more commercial somehow is part of Bujalski’s considerable charm. Still, most of the mumblecore school of the new century, many of its practitioners now in their thirties or early forties with families to support, are inevitably headed into the mainstream. “I kind of can’t put that off any longer,” Bujalski told the New York Times when Computer Chess was released. Will they keep their Twee stubbornness, innocence, and “shoot till you can’t shoot anymore and cut until you find the truth” methods intact? We will have to stream and see.
Chapter 14
It’ll Change Your Life
2002–2008
In which Indie’s three-decade-long, slow and steady rise toward commercial and cultural dominance is manifest, and Brooklyn emerges as its taste-making center, thanks in part to a film . . . about New Jersey.
Rock and roll at the start of the twenty-first century wasn’t very sexy, and then it became sexy again, and then it became resolutely unsexy and stayed that way. As the 1990s ended, rock was the province of either thudding mooks who ripped off the Pixies’ loud-quiet-loud motif, like Limp Bizkit, or sensitive singer-songwriters, new James Taylors and Dan Fogelbergs, like Chris Martin of Coldplay and John Mayer. Then, in the fall of 2001 and into the winter of 2002, bands like the Strokes, with their skinny jeans and Chuck Taylors, along with their “garage rock” contemporaries such as the White Stripes, Interpol, and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, did what seemed impossible: they brought late-1970s Punk rock to yet another phase. This modern rock renovation was one informed by the digital “modern age,” pop savvy in that plugged-in, fully-informed-fan way, but with a firm footing in the past and its gloriously rudimentary primitivism. Black leather jackets were the uniform again, now cropped and tight.