Review: Nights and Weekends

Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig’s efforts seem calculated to discourage enthusiastic amateurs from getting anywhere near a camera.

Nights and Weekends
Photo: IFC Films

Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig’s Nights and Weekends, like much of its mumblecore brethren, operates under the principle that by presenting nothing but the exhausting banalities of everyday conversation, filmmakers are able to get at something deeper in the lives of their characters than would be possible by focusing on explicitly dramatic moments.

It wouldn’t do to suggest that such an approach is completely invalid (after all, something very like this method is operative in many of John Cassavetes’s more interesting films), nor must the characters be the type of people that prospective audience members would relish spending time with, but the central couple in Nights and Weekends (played by Swanberg and Gerwig themselves) is so vapid, their conversation so unrevealing, and their jokes so wretchedly unfunny that the film takes on the feel of a particularly inept vanity project incapable of holding the interest of anyone besides the filmmakers’ close friends and family.

The story of a joyless couple negotiating a long-distance romance (he’s in Chicago, while she’s in New York), the film finds James (Swanberg) and Mattie (Gerwig) dancing around the stresses in their relationship, and it consists of a seemingly endless stream of observational humor, incoherent babble, and frequent moments of whiny huffing. The last is the special province of Gerwig, her character exhibiting the emotional maturity of a particularly disaffected teen.

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Between calculated shows of quirkiness (such as a discourse on the distastefulness of watching people eat bananas), Mattie showers James with random hostility, and all the while he smiles indulgently. Needless to say, it takes considerably more than Gerwig’s mash-up of quirk and snark to create a coherent characterization. But given the filmmakers’ staging strategies (the hand-held camera fixes the leads in continual close-up, the background always neutral or out of focus), all we’re left with are the ramblings of two aggressively inarticulate dullards, perpetually present in front of a camera whose artless framings do them no favors.

If Cassavetes’s films inspired future filmmakers with their DIY aesthetic, then Swanberg and Gerwig’s efforts seem calculated to discourage enthusiastic amateurs from getting anywhere near a camera. Everyone thinks their bull sessions with their friends are fascinating, but Nights and Weekends serves as ample proof that unless you can structure these conversations into coherent chunks of exposition, then these sessions are just bull, plain and simple.

Score: 
 Cast: Greta Gerwig, Joe Swanberg, Alison Bagnall, Elizabeth Donius, Jay Duplass, Kent Osborne, Lynn Shelton, Ellen Stagg  Director: Joe Swanberg, Greta Gerwig  Screenwriter: Joe Swanberg, Greta Gerwig  Distributor: IFC Films  Running Time: 79 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2008  Buy: Video

Andrew Schenker

Andrew Schenker is an essayist and critic living in upstate New York. His writing has appeared in The Baffler, The Village Voice, Artforum, Bookforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and others.

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