A movie about a movie about people.
Reposted from the groovy BAD ART newsletter
American Movie won the the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in the late 1990s. It went on to become a cult favorite. I didn’t know any of that before watching it.
I’d only seen reference to American Movie as a precursor to The Disaster Artist, the more recent movie about the struggles of aspiring filmmaker Tommy Wiseau. “Oh hi, Mark.”
The trailer presented American Movie as this kind of slapstick comedy of errors. “Hilarious,” it said.
I hate laughing at people. I can’t watch people get humiliated like they do on reality shows. I’ll climb over the back of the couch first. So I wasn’t up for laughing at the people in this film trying to make movies with basically no resources whatsoever while living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. But I felt like The Disaster Artist didn’t laugh at Tommy Wiseau, it presented him as a real person, warts and all. And that’s what made it a worthy viewing.
I had to stick with American Movie and let that whole slapstick hilarity idea wear off. For about the first third it just seemed like a study of incompetence. But it was unvarnished and honest and frankly kind of uncomfortable, so I stayed put.
The longer I listened to its protagonist, aspiring filmmaker Mark Borchardt, speak on his projects and philosophy and interact with his tiny circle of family and friends, the deeper in I got. Here was a person living in Milwaukee in the 1990s, with no money and very limited prospects, making films. And drinking a lot. And hanging with his best friend, who also drank a lot. There’s a lot of drinking and drug references.
At one point Borchardt takes a job doing maintenance at the local cemetery. He’s driving around, as he does often in the film, going on about his thoughts (okay also just check out the 1990s car interiors). He talks about how the graves in the ground are all next to each other, but in the mausoleum they are stacked up. “It’s a vertical business, man,” he says.
The movie (and it was incredibly easy to forget that this was a documentary with a film crew following these people around) stayed honest. It didn’t try to contrast its subject with any sort of standard definition of “success.” It didn’t try to make any statements. It let the subject stand, which is what great documentaries do. It didn’t lay on a layer of popular culture or archetypes or predigest any of it for you.
I love when a film doesn’t try to feed you what to think about it (not sure why all the eating/digestion analogies. I haven’t had breakfast yet though). Another film that does a fantastic job of unvarnished human life is Eighth Grade. For days you can just have your own thoughts on it. I love that.
I stuck it out with American Movie and I’m glad I did. Just don’t go into it expecting a full-on comedy. Even though the scene when they are trying to film a dude’s head getting rammed through a cabinet door when they’ve failed to score the thing properly first is pretty damn funny.
May you find fabulous indie movies to watch during the holidays, may the good news be yours, won’t you be my neighbor?
Betsy Streeter is a cartoonist and artist who writes about art, bad and otherwise.
