Released in 2008, My Effortless Brilliance was writer/director Lynn Shelton’s second effort, and within the context of her career, seems like a natural precursor to her even more edgy and provocative third feature, 2009’s uproarious Humpday. Starring the terrific Sean Nelson as an amazingly sloppy and selfish writer named Eric, Shelton’s film centers on Eric’s strained relationship with his close friend Dylan, a pensive Basil Harris, who hits all the right notes of suppressed anger and irritation. It seems that over the course of time, Eric has become a bit of an egotistical ass, and while not purposefully acting rude to his friends, it’s more as if he’s oblivious to his shortcomings. Dylan tells him off, cut to two years later, and Eric, now on a book tour, decides to unexpectedly visit his estranged buddy up at his cabin in the forests of Washington. Shelton sets the mood right away with a fidgety shooting style, with foreshadowing cutaways to the mountains the surround the guarded, wounded characters within the tight narrative. As usual for a Shelton production, there is no fat on this film’s bones, with one scene organically unfolding into the next, creating a smooth passage of content that never gets bogged down with superfluous digressions.
This being a relationship movie about two guys, Shelton astutely guides her actors (the script was improvised by all creative entities) to a point of never fully explaining the row between the two friends, because as everyone knows, men have a fight, and then just leave it there, never delving into it. They drink, they lob insults, they smack each other in the junk, and then they wake up the next day and move on. I loved how naturalistic everything felt, from the sharp and witty dialogue to the manner of speech from Nelson and Harris, to the hand-held cinematography that stressed the physical rigors of the wilderness-set production which fit perfectly with the rocky emotional content. This is an 80 minute film about people and words and their personal problems, so as such, it feels purposefully insular and intimate, and the two performances from Nelson and Harris hit all the right notes of anger, hostility, and finally, warmth. Shelton even gets to thrown in some Terrence Malick-esque shots of nature (the ants on the log was a nice touch), and as always, I’m impressed with how real everything feels in her films; she’s refreshingly free of artifice which allows the viewer to get invested in her stories in a unique fashion. Funny, perceptive, and to the point, My Effortless Brilliance is one of those tiny films made on a shoe-string budget that goes along way due to the creative integrity of all the contributors.
Podcasting Them Softly 