Casual Comment about Laura Linney Reveals Moviegoer Milestone

You know what? In my last post I very casually remarked that watching "The High Cost of Living" reminded me of my first viewing of the actress Laura Linney. Why should such a reference make sense? I wrote it without thinking. Allow me to explain myself: Upon reflection, Laura Linney embodies a particular milestone in my personal moviegoing history (or, moviewatching, to be more accurate - but doesn't that sound bad? should it be my 'filmviewing' history? ugh. at least 'moviegoing' sounds good).

Prior to You Can Count on Me, I was not really a great viewer of independent films. Of course, I had seen some indie films before. In fact, I had seen some really good ones that no one else I knew had ever seen (for example, Afterglow, which was so dear to me that I watched it many times over, yet no one else had even heard of it).

But I was not an informed viewer of independent films; I didn't have any framework to evaluate them; I didn't have any knowledge of the "currency" they traded in. How can one begin to compare such nuanced "slice of life" movies like that when your frame of reference is "Titanic" or "A Few Good Men" or "Steel Magnolias" -- all movies that were very good, but were designed to reach the biggest possible audience?

Laura Linney was probably not the only one who helped turn the key for me, but over time she has become a symbol. A symbol of when I discovered what "good acting by an unknown" can LOOK like, can FEEL like. When I discovered how drama can be subtle. So this is what independent film comes down to for me: Good acting that doesn't rely on its audience. Good acting that is ONLY about the nuance of an emotion, and doesn't even bother with the obvious part of the emotion. Linney's face is capable of many more obvious emotions, as we saw with her hysterical grimace in "The Truman Show," or her collapsing romantic tears in "Love, Actually." But in "You Can Count on Me," the way she talks to her brother when he arrives in town (her judgmental squeals of "you did what?!" upon hearing he's been in jail and the little nods, nods, nods of her head when he asks for money as if to say "of course, of course, this is why you're really here") -- her actions in this scene do NOTHING to reveal the true nature of the character (who later in the film goes on to commit adultery with her boss and make all sorts of moral blunders, allowing her brother to witness her own confusion in a kind of role reversal) -- i.e. she does nothing that is obvious, nothing that is expected, throughout the entire film. It's not clear why the character does what she does and she, the actress, Linney, does not gauge her ability to perform a scene by how obvious it's going to be to you, the viewer. You might even watch the whole film twice through and never feel like you "get" the character she plays. But the character is intact and real, with or without you, and Linney knows that. I tend to think of independent film this way.

Well, I could go on and on about that one movie alone, but I won't. The point is that it marks a time in my life when several emotional 'filmviewing' doors were opened. And without Laura Linney's performance there, I'm not sure I ever could have understood some of the indie movies I came to relish later in life, like Swimming Pool or Waitress or Off the Map. (Or a hundred others.) I just kinda want to say "thank you" to Laura Linney for opening up my world!

The High Cost of Living

This film was absolutely beautiful, both inside and out. I was really moved. It reminds me of the way I felt the first time I watched Laura Linney, in You Can Count on Me, except this was a better film. That feeling of getting to know and care about people so deeply in only 1 1/2 hours -- that feeling of understanding the world of the characters almost as if they were real people; your world and theirs become one; you become enclosed together in sensation -- it was that, plus, it was a REALLY engaging story of an ethical dilemma. So many times the movie critics go on and on about "a real human story," or a character facing "tough choices," but the movie itself won't live up to the description. In The High Cost of Living, Zach Braff is so skilled that his character's ethical dilemma becomes your own. I also think the title of the movie is completely fitting. What does it cost to be a human being? What kind of pain or sacrifice is required to connect (truly) to other human beings around us?

That's what it's about. (Not only death, which the title suggests, although yes, there is a death in the film. But I think the title means more and the film carries more meaning.)

Including this one, I have now seen Zach Braff in two very touching movies. The first one was Garden State, which many of us of a certain generation could relate to. The typical sort of Generation X movie. (I mean my generation, otherwise known as "those who grew up in the 1980s" - a group of us born mostly between the mid 60s and the late 70s - a group of which I was on the tail end - also considered the generation that followed the baby boomers.) It was filmed almost 10 years ago. Zach Braff was a lot younger then, as was I. He did an excellent job portraying a young man in his 20s who is smart, handsome, capable, and yet rather lost. That word, "lost," describes how a lot of us felt in our 20s, and maybe beyond... Walking around, almost silently, the character of Andrew carried an inner burden and an inner universe of feeling, but did not know what to do with it. Where to put it. There seemed to be no place for it in the post-1970s superficiality that denied us the passion of our birthright. "Garden State" was also about human connection, about how to strip life down to its tiniest and most essential details, and how actually to share those with another person (!). It was a love story, despite appearances (there were a few standard tropes in there that made several people shout 'bildungsroman!' like a knee-jerk reaction).

But getting into his late 30s now, Zach Braff is a grown-up man. He's different; he seems to own himself. He's got facial hair and looks mature. And he's gotten even more skilled as an actor. He brings a gentle roughness to the character of Henry ("High Cost of Living"), lets us know that Henry is not a bad guy, not a scary guy, even though he's a drug dealer and clearly walks on the wrong side of the tracks. Braff also lets us know, subtly, that Henry is a lonely person. He's not out there advertising his loneliness; he's not desperate, but he sure could use a friend (someone who's not strung out). He's actually quite...normal...almost, except for the drug-dealing lifestyle. What went wrong with Henry? We won't know exactly, but Braff will let us know that it wasn't irreversible. In Henry's encounter with an upper-class, quite lovely, pregnant housewife named Nathalie (in French-speaking Montreal) we begin to see his real soul emerging. Is it too much? Some of the critics have laid into the sensitivity of this movie.

There are some potentially risky elements that might weaken the impact were they not so beautiful. Montreal as location suggests internationalism and cultures colliding, because Henry is "American" (i.e., from the United States) and these people speak French. There is also the class conflict between the couple, (Nathalie and her husband), who are enchantingly well-off and reside in a very good neighborhood, and Henry, dweller of the urban jungle, selling drugs on the street and in ratty back bathrooms and in basements. You get the idea. So when Henry collides literally with Nathalie, and it changes his life, the movie says "now his real soul begins to emerge..." Is it too much?

For me, it struck just the right note, not only because I feel a generational kinship with the actor, but because of people we've lost, like David Foster Wallace, who believed that it was not possible to write real emotions simply and straightforwardly anymore, in this age of commercials. Or like Heath Ledger, whose blunt-edged emotions in "Brokeback Mountain" were a stunning sight to behold, like watching someone fall from a cliff. We need more of this. We need beauty and humanity, and beauty in humanity. Quite frankly. We just do.

And Zach Braff - who would seem from the outside to be not the right person for the job (he's so little-known as a serious independent film actor, and for years worked an awkward part in a lame television slapstick serial) - does it perfectly. This movie is beautiful, and he carries the meaning of it just beautifully.