Frownland

Reviews are such a tricky thing. I could construct a hefty list of the reasons why but the most important reason is because you are not me. No matter how similar you think our tastes in awesome things are, you still won't be me and you won't experience things the same way that I do. We all try so hard to to make our friends experience the same feelings we do. When you want to show a movie to a buddy, you generally don't just have them borrow it, you watch it with them so you can see the same emotions it elicited in you boil up inside of them as well and are often disappointed when they take it all in the most slightly different of ways.

Anyway, this is all quite a buildup to say that I really like the movie Frownland and while I am not completely alone, there is a large group of people who do not like it. In fact they hate it. The movie premiered at SXSW and was followed shortly by a few walkouts and a great deal of commotion, the end result was heated discussion from both sides of the aisle and an award for the writer/director, Ronald Bronstein. After watching it this past week at Facets, most likely the most amazing establishment I've ever set foot in, I can see where all this disagreement comes from.

The movie follows Keith, a painfully dysfunctional stuttering short man, who just can't seem to relate to people on the level he wants to. We see him at his depressing apartment in New York City, a one bedroom apartment he shares with a pretentious bully, dealing with his depressing friends, who all treat him worse than even a stranger ever would, and at his depressing job, where he sells coupons door to door. The result is a film that some could say comes off as a tad depressing.

As the movie builds more and more towards the inevitable psychological collapse of this lost soul audiences become quite clearly split. You cannot remain ambivalent about Keith, you can only either hate him down to his core or pity him to the point where you must look away at times. It all depends on how much you see of yourself inside of him. I see Keith not as a sort of plague person that I should try to avoid at all costs, I see him as a cautionary tale. I can clearly see the circles that have brought him to the point where he can barely compose a coherent sentence without falling over his own words and eventually collapsing into a pile of useless apologies. I see the loneliness of a cold city that can strip you of yourself and the things that you used to hold up as a testament to your good character. Keith is not a reality that I expect to ever have to endure, but it is interesting to see where the end of some roads lay.

In the end, the movie portrays a type of person that Hollywood would never dare touch and that is why I appreciate bold films such as this. The story ends up leaving audiences with such a sense of dread and hopelessness that is not hard to understand why the reaction was so varied. Generally we see movies to inspire us or show us a part of life we never knew was there, but this movie shows us a part of life we all know, but have looked away from. To watch Frownland is be force fed desperation while having an intravenous of failure at the same time, and it's a truly glorious achievement.