Frownland is a film whose synopsis screams, "Avoid at all costs": a picaresque New York indie about a socially inept, emotionally damaged, stuttering motormouth named Keith Sontag (an insanely ambitious, almost fully-realized performance by first-time movie actor Dore Mann). The hero endures a crap job selling coupon books door-to-door, muddles through a dysfunctional not-quite-relationship with a pathologically shy young woman named Laura (Mary Wall), all but stalks a co-worker (David Sandholm) that he wrongly considers a close friend, and fights with his roommate, Charles (Paul Grimstad), a musician-wannabe who mocks Keith's fractured speech patterns and performs Vangelis-with-a-head-injury soundscapes at top volume. In every surface aspect, it's a textbook New York underground indie (though shot on 16mm film rather than video), enamored with repellent details (Laura is introduced mid-crying jag, blasting a mucus strand from her nose and reflexively snorting it back in) and sporting just-get-it-done technical credits.
Yet the movie's energy is so peculiar, its vision of socially maladjusted loners so scathingly funny and its creative choices so uncompromising that the result is not just memorable, but haunting. Brooklyn writer-director Ronald Bronstein's debut feature—which is being shown Saturday, Nov. 17 and Monday, Nov. 19, as part of the Museum of Modern Art's mini-festival of noteworthy undistributed American indies—announces its intent in an opening scene in which Keith stares at a televised clip of Frankenstein's monster clumsily crushing a violin, then clarifies it with voyeuristic, zoomed-in, hand-held pan shots of our inarticulate, socially inept, ostracized hero stalking around New York, pathetically trying to light a bent cigarette while the analog synth soundtrack plays distorted ooo-EEEEE-oooo riffs you'd expect to hear in a mid-'70s slasher picture. It's a horror film about everyday life in which characters who fail to recognize their own freakish aspects behave monstrously toward others: Marty by way of Eraserhead.
Bronstein, a projectionist by trade, shot Frownland in sequence, and it shows. The first few minutes—a meandering encounter between the distraught Laura and the frazzled Keith, who fakes empathy while angling to get laid—are rough going. But the movie becomes more assured as it unreels. In a therapy scene deep into the movie, Keith stutters and grunts through an anecdote about how he always thought his dad had a lush, full head of hair until his mom revealed it was a toupee by yanking it off. The story is the sort of masochistic confession that made Albert Brooks' early comedies so striking, and the therapist's follow-ups take a straight razor to psychoanalytic cliche. (He asks Keith questions for which there are supposedly no wrong answers while steering him toward the only answer he'll accept.) But what raises the scene from amusing to exquisite is its staging. It's played in an unbroken close-up that creeps closer and closer to Keith. The therapist remains off-screen throughout, his questions muffled; he sounds like one of those unseen teachers that used to interrogate Charlie Brown. The cinematography (by documentary cameraman Sean Price Williams) likewise gets better and ballsier, too. Early on, the interiors of Keith and Charles' apartment are awkwardly shot, the lighting boringly harsh. Later, the place is lit and shot with more nuance—and when Charles fails to pay the electric bill and the roommates bicker by candlelight, it's primordially lovely.
Frownland leavens grotesquerie with tenderness. At first there seem to be two kinds of characters, assholes and their maladjusted victims. But we eventually figure out that this movie's assholes are maladjusted victims, too; they're abused by the same status-mad, beauty-addled society that batters Keith. Keith is such a basket case that his main goal is to get through the next 10 minutes of his life without baffling or offending someone. He has adopted preemptive groveling as social insurance. (His signature phrase is, "I really appreciate this," usually spoken to someone who's treating him like dirt.) But Charles is not just Keith's tormentor. When he leaves the defining context of their apartment, hoping to find a job so Keith won't kick him out, he's revealed as a freak himself.
It's hard to say what's saddest: the waitstaff application that Charles can't fake his way through; the subsequent, brief shot of Charles in an arcade, lost in a game of Robotron (!); or the sequence where Charles takes the LSAT to earn a job as a test administrator. Probably the last one. Charles tries to bond with the only other person taking the test that day—a curly-haired, agitated, smug fellow who listens patiently to Charles' complaints about the test's weird questions, then informs Charles that he had no trouble answering them himself and would like to know why a man who professes to see through the scam of standardized tests would seek a job administering them. Charles is a snot who poses as super-competent, then reveals flaws that make Keith seem comparatively functional. (At least Keith has a job and pays bills on time.) Yet in this scene, you still feel for him because, shades of Keith, he made a good faith effort to connect with a fellow human being and got used as a verbal punching bag. This is the way of the world in Frownland, a film in which power relationships turn on a dime. One scene's bully is another scene's schmuck.
Did I mention that the movie is as cuddly as a cactus, as charming as an eel? "Look, I've tried to listen to you month after month," Charles excoriates Keith, in a late scene where he really should be kissing Keith's ass, "and I've tried to decipher what you come to me with. But these are unmanageable jumblings that you come to me with, I mean, this mangled syntax, and frankly, I don't have the energy to continue to meet you four-fifths of the way just to try to figure out what you're attempting to communicate." You may feel the same way about Frownland, but it's a mangled rant worth hearing.
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Matt Zoller Seitz is Editor-in-Chief of The House Next Door.
I'm very surprised at the size of the bandwagon that Frownland is managing to attain. I did enjoy your review, though, since you actually explained WHY you felt it was worth seeing. I saw the film, enjoyed it for the most part, and I don't regret seeing it. But I just don't seem to buy into the hoopla about how this movie is uncomfortable, and it's supposed to make you uncomfortable, and oh, this director is brave and unrelenting! It seems to me that people believe that since the director stuck to his "vision" of making people uncomfortable, automatically Frownland is a good-to-great film. I don't think one follows the other.
Again, I enjoyed the film, and laughed a lot. As you mentioned, Matt, it is uneven, but not only in the beginning. I think the ending sequence is too much of a departure from the rest of the film. How so? Well, I'll try to explain some of what I mean.
All I know is that I liked the beginning, but you're right, it was rough and in a different groove than the middle part of the film, which I believe is when the film found itself. Then all of a sudden we're switching to Charles's point of view for a while, and then finally back to Keith.
Then we're hit with that colorful sequence at the end. To me, we were watching this film that made us uncomfortable through the characters — the shy, the socially inept, the snobbish — and then for the grand finale, the director resorts to loud noises and flashing lights. On one hand, it makes sense for a film like this to make left turns like that, but on the other hand, it had me saying, "hey, I liked what you were doing before."
I wouldn't say that unrelenting and uncomfortable automatically equals brave, and in any case, the movie's not a total popped zit in the audience's face for every minute — there are some scenes that are somewhat quiet and introspective. Now that you mention it, yes, there are three movies here, and the middle one is the best. The switch from Keith to Charles is what raised it from interesting to compelling, because it really clarified the idea that to some degree, everyone is a Keith, and we treat people like shit in order to convince ourselves we're not. Everybody in this movie feels superior to somebody, except the hero, who's such damaged goods that he can't possibly have any illusions about who and what he is. The idea of Keith's literal inarticulateness (or maybe hyper-articulateness undercut by a mouth that can't keep up with what his brain is spewing out) seems too much of a signifier of people's inability to communicate and connect, but the performer sells it, as does Bronstein in his depiction of the other characters. (The manager of the LSAT administration test was even interesting — I found myself wondering what his issues are.) Even Keith's therapist seems to have a need to control people, as evidenced by that great bit I mentioned in the review.
No, not a great film by a long shot, but I think there's real potential there. The hardest thing for a filmmaker to do — harder than anything except inventing new ways to tell a story — is to develop a distinctive and real sense of humor, one that's not just fitfully amusing but that illustrates the human condition. "Frownland" does that, and I'd like to see him try it again with a different story, having had what appears to be some very fruitful on-the-job training as a filmmaker.
Also, regarding the finale, it was probably a touch too "Taxi Driver" or "Naked" — the movie kind of unravels along with the main character. But I think it works and is necessary. Bronstein has presented a world in which people are so boxed in by their myopic fearfulness and sadomasochistic impulses that there really isn't any hope of transcendence. Having the film end as it did — great final shot, at once beautiful and depressing — sold it. Also, the whole thing reminded me of Frankenstein's monster running through the woods like a hounded animal, an image telegraphed in that opening scene. Maybe it's too neat, but I liked it, and there's a twist: the villagers don't hound the monster, they ignore him, and somehow that's worse.
I just came back from seeing FROWNLAND at MOMA and it blew my mind. It's weird to read you make so many great comments about the movie and yet still say it's not a great movie "by a long shot." Frownland isnt perfect but perfect movies are boring anyway.
How long before the Mumble-ites try to claim this as one of their own? This is the movie Bujalski and Swanberg and Co. always think they're making, except there's one thing that separates Bronstein from the others: Courage. Frownland has it in spades. It's a movie that doesn't feel like a calling card to the opposite sex or a way of finagling a place with the Literati Branch of The American Hipsters Union. This movie is a stream of vomit on a pair of topsiders.
for me the messiness only adds to Frownland's greatness (yes, i think Frowland is straight-up great). for someone who has tried to make a feature film, to discover a work that is screaming from someone's heart and brain so directly (or should i say uncontrollably) is an absolute thrill. i think that's why people are responding to it with such passion. having watched it again at MOMA on Saturday for the third time, i can confirm that it's a thrill that keeps on giving.
as for the label of it being 'uncomfortable,' i happen to think it's invigorating and exciting and compelling. if i had to use a word with potentially negative connotations, i would choose 'unsettling' maybe. what separates Frownland from so many other films that get (rightly) cornered by the 'uncomfortable' tag is that watching Frownland i never once got the impression that the director was trying to be antagonistic or make the viewer feel uncomfortable. as opposed to a Von Trier or a Haneke, where you can almost see them grinning behind the camera, with Ronnie Bronstein the motivations aren't manipulative or calculated or superficial. the characters and situations and humor are all coming from a sincere, honest place. not to mention a very, very funny one. that's a very important distinction to make, and it's one that i think people would agree with.
so it might not be a 'perfect' movie in many senses of that word, but i think it attains greatness for it is clearly the work of an individual who has managed to express himself in a way that not many others can. i'm sure the blessing of ignorance helped contribute to this magic, but having watched Q&A's with Ronnie Bronstein, i firmly believe that his next film is going to be several times more distinct and mind-blowing than Frownland. which is saying a lot. (tully)
Matt, will this be available through netflix?
Eventually, for sure.
Michael,
I think one of my problems with Frownland (and I will say again, I enjoyed the film overall), is that I DID feel that the director was trying to be "antagonistic", purposefully trying to make his audience uncomfortable (especially with that last sequence. By the way, I love the final shot, just not the final sequence). Maybe he really was, maybe he really wasn't, but the point is that me, a viewer, watching the film, felt that he was. Sometimes that's a turn-off for me, but obviously it wasn't too much of a turn-off, because, again, I still enjoyed the film.
Another thing that might be a matter of personal opinion is that I didn't necessarily think the film or director was that "courageous." Part of that is probably due to my perception that the director may have been antagonistic just to get a reaction. That would bring on the thought, "What's so courageous about trying to make me uncomfortable?" I do admit there's some guts on display, and I do believe that the director is being true to himself, but the perception I was getting from a lot of bloggers was: perceived courage, concluded from the fact that they were made uncomfortable, equals "great film."
Now, Matt, I know you say it may not be a great film, and I can get how you can praise it and recommend it for what it does, even if it's not perfect or even necessarily "great." I think it's just that I see a lot of extremely positive and admiring comments made about the film (which is a good thing), but sometimes it feels like they're blindly made (blind to the films flaws, that is), and I personally am not jumping on the bandwagon.
But again, I put the disclaimer: I did like the film.
Pacheco: "What's so courageous about trying to make me uncomfortable?"
Making people uncomfortable does not, in and of itself, a courageous film make. But there's something to be said for showing the troll that lurks inside everyone (all the characters eventually reveal that aspect) without patting the audience on the head by showing that deep down they're all nice people (which is what a more traditional indie would have done). The hero is perhaps the most socially inept and perhaps hapless character in the movie (though his cutter girlfriend seems equally fucked-up, though we see less of her), but the director doesn't do any special pleading on his behalf. He's passive-aggressive and in most ways spineless. He and all his fellow characters get the chance to be victims and the victimized, and the movie's masterstroke is that they don't seem cognizant of which role they're playing when they play it.
I also didn't get the sense, as I often do in Todd Solondz' nails-on-a-chalkboard movies, that the director was just pulling the legs off little bugs. I sensed a genuine attempt to understand the miscommunication and antagonism between people and spotlight it, without pretending to have the answers as to what causes it.
I think we agree more than we disagree. Bottom line: this is a notable movie by a notable new filmmaker who obviously went to film school on the job and is only going to get better. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if his second film (should he make one) turns out to have the freaky energy of this one, plus a sharper focus and a more professional (if not necessarily slicker) style.
Or he could disappear up his own asshole. You just never know. Wait and see, I guess.
Saw Frownland at MoMA last week and it floored me. I can't tell you the last time i saw so many people clustered outside the museum after a screening to debate a movie. It's a dizzying piece of work and embarrassingly I made a beeline for the internet as soon as i got home just to try and get on top of it. Your review was extremely helpful in this regard. I'm compelled to respond to the one poster who keeps insisting that he likes the movie, but then feels obliged to slag it in reaction to some supposed Frownland "bandwagon". Talk about trigger happy. This is an undistributed film that, as far as i know, has only screened a handful of times and has earned way more pans than raves. A simple google search will confirm this. Anyway, i think it's a little too early for the hipster backstabbing to begin.