Rick Alverson – Podcasting Them Softly

There are some films that just aren’t for everybody, and seem to have even been fashioned to deliberately repel a certain demographic, as if to weed out those unwilling to take a trip down the weird end of the street and serve as a litmus test to determine who will stand-fast. Folks like John Waters, Todd Solondz and Lars Von Trier are prime examples of artists who traffic in such cheerfully provocative, knowingly inflammatory ventures and now Rick Alverson is well on his way with an eerie, uncomfortably abstract mood piece called Entertainment that I saw a long time ago and recently caught up with, and let me tell you it’s just as fucking bizarre as I remember. Alverson wrote this alongside Tim Heidecker himself and their buddy actor Gregg Turkington, who graduated with honours from the proverbial Tim & Eric Theatre Of Shock & Awe and works frequently with the two, so his badge of bizarre was squarely pinned to his chest before churning out this relentlessly off-putting curio of dust-bowl doldrums, against type cameos, agonizing awkwardness, surreal dreamscapes and nightmarish atmosphere. The film follows pitiful nebbish ‘The Comedian’ (Turkington), a would be standup comic with no audience on a tour to nowhere somewhere in the desolate American southwest. His jokes are excruciatingly cringe, his onstage personality is a grating head-scratcher, his doubting manager (John C. Reilly in a hilariously deadpan cameo) subtly begs him to tone the weirdness down, and just overall this guy’s life seems like a dead end that’s swiftly leading to a deader end. His one respite and glimmer of hope is infrequent phones calls where he leaves forlorn voicemails to an estranged daughter that we never see, perhaps because she never existed at all and it’s his last ounce of conviction to cry for help into an abysmal void. He runs into many characters along the way played by the likes of Heidecker himself, Dean Stockwell, Tye Sheridan, Amy Seimetz and Michael Cera as an impossibly creepy dude that he has an icky run-in with in a men’s bathroom. Many will find this to be a frustrating, confounding, empty, disquieting experience and that’s fine, I would be worried if *everyone* liked it. I admit that this particular flavour of weird isn’t typically my bag and that chunks of it were lost on me, like his interminable bouts of caustic and repulsive verbal digression on the standup stage. However, when the perception and focus shifts over to his ponderous meanderings in the Mojave desert and the incredibly effective, soul shaking original score by Robert Donne I got a real sense of this character’s waywardness, disconnect from everything around him and complete, utter loneliness, and on that front I was able to connect with the film. It’s unique, it’s weird, it’s darkly funny in a sort of brittle, curdled way and uses illogical, jagged sensibilities to explore an artist whose work alienates and humiliates him. You will either vibe with this intensely or be wholly turned off, there’s no real middle-ground.

-Nate Hill

A 40-something man wearing thick glasses and an expression of general indifference enters an earth-bound airplane, the interiors of which are wide and desolate. He squats down in the middle of the abandoned vessel and stares out of one of its many windows. Once back outside, it is revealed that the man is on a tour of an aircraft boneyard. So begins ENTERTAINMENT, the fourth feature from writer/director Rick Alverson (and first since his excellent Tim Heidecker-starring break-out, THE COMEDY). A man, deteriorating slowly by the day, walks alongside the remains of the world and its industries, which are disappearing at a much more alarming rate – an integral theme introduced in this first sequence that will compel the rest of the sparse though affecting narrative to come.

Gregg Turkington stars as the man in question, a comedian whose name is only vaguely hinted at a couple of times, but who we can nevertheless assume is intended to be Turkington’s most widely-known persona Neil Hamburger, who is touring the Mojave Desert playing shows in the seediest of venues, bringing along a clown (Ty Sheridan) as his opener and attracting only pure vitriol along the way. But to be fair, the comedian himself invites such outrage; his act is straight-up anti-comedy, and any form of unwanted audience participation is met with projections of his own ugliness. Let’s put it this way: one can hardly blame the woman (Amy Seimetz) who throws her drink onstage following a tirade of the most toxic variety for which she is the sole target.

But this is a Rick Alverson film, and predictably, what we see of Turkington offstage is far more disturbing than what he exhibits to the public. The frequent, unanswered phone calls to his daughter, awkward visits with his cousin (John C. Reilly), dream visions of himself as a cowboy in white, and addiction to late-night Mexican soap operas hardly scratch the surface of this man’s complex psyche. There are insights into what lies within that will keep even the most seasoned horror fanatic up at night, including but not limited to nocturnal encounters with strange men and pregnant women in sleazy restrooms. One may never feel truly at ease in a public place such as this ever again. Where Hitchcock claimed hotels, showers, and mothers, Alverson’s got bathrooms, backyard pools in the Hollywood hills, and comb-overs.

It would be difficult for me to not at the very least admire the director’s unique, even necessary vision. Based on the two features of his I have seen, his approach can be surmised as pushing comedy – and indeed, the notion of what is “entertaining” and what is not – to its breaking point, pushing it so far in that very direction that it becomes an utterly horrifying spectacle. It’s a bit more difficult to pinpoint this one than as was the case with the director’s earlier work, coming off much like a Lynchian examination of self-exile and untreated mental illness, but therein lies the key to accessing its madcap brilliance. It’s not easy, but it is genuinely distinctive.

Lorenzo Hagerman handsomely lenses the comedian’s trek across the barren wasteland, his stunning widescreen frames capturing not only the desert landscape in all its expansiveness and the insignificance of man when posited within it but also the subtle grandeur of Turkington’s naturalistic features when wallowing in the utter dourness of solitude. A single frame can contain so much sadness and even some kind of cosmic terror, absolutely fitting for a film with this much to say but which appears, on paper, to be so much more simplistic than it actually is. Alverson’s history as a musician serves him well once again, with the film’s pivotal moment arriving a little over the halfway point when the comedian ventures out to the middle of the desert to record a video with a couple of young(er) YouTubers, but walks away – into what else but complete and utter nothingness – before the camera can even start rolling. Leah Devorah’s “Animals in the Zoo” scores this scene, which encapsulates what the film is really about as well as its last frame does, and it is one of the most personally affecting I’ve happened upon in recent memories. Without going into too much detail, it leaves me speechless and then some.

ENTERTAINMENT delivers on what we claim to expect out of most movies but in a consistently unconventional manner. It has a few awkward laughs, it’s got bucket loads of tension (Michael Cera’s brief appearance inspires enough pure discomfort to supply an entire, separate film on its own), and even features a sort of empathetic melancholy. I think the reason it won’t sit right with a lot of people is because it approaches cinema as a mirror into the soul, and dares to reveal things about ourselves that we would never hope to admit to. We react because deep down, we understand, and Alverson knows it. Oh, does he ever.

This is as important a study of depression and suppressed anxiety as any, portraying the inevitable breakdown following the latter of the two with such painful realism that it may be wise to take a couple breathers throughout. I sure needed them. As much as this is initially structured to be some kind of endurance test committed to celluloid, it offers more than enough points of resonance to justify the amount of patience that it requires. Many will surely dismiss it as being a film about nothing, or merely a critique of showbiz and the plight of the artist, which is about as redundant as you can get. Alverson’s cinema is about vicious cycles contained within a distinctively American context; the dream is dead, as are we, but we’re still here. Lost souls, wandering about, searching for purpose, and surrendering to ourselves when we find nothing.

The inverse of THE COMEDY until it isn’t; one senses the comedian feels some kind of regret for his actions both on and off the stage, unlike Heidecker’s Swanson who feels nothing at all because he doesn’t have to, but like that character he feeds the void rather than challenging it. The “Animals in the Zoo” scene is perhaps the most difficult because it seems for once that Turkington may be looking inward, and yet in the end he chooses to ignore the notion, and thus “order” is restored. Alverson’s characters have always scraped by sluggishly, only this time, he finds real sadness in the excursion. This is a largely subconscious work of art, open to a certain number of reasonable interpretations that will no doubt transform across a variety of individual spectators, and one with a substantial enough emotional palette to support the full weight of its cynical outlook on the world as we know it. There’s plenty of truth here, and very little of it is pretty. It isn’t often that a non-genre outing is significantly more effective than the majority of horror films, but here we are. At the end of time, the end of emotional honesty, the end of entertainment itself; this is what Trish Keenan must have meant when she pondered where youth and laughter go. And like the late Broadcast vocalist also said, let them know.