Delayed Reaction: Black Bear

Premise: A look at a marital struggle through different phases of a film production.

 

This is definitely a movie where I feel confident about my read of it yet I’m equally confident that someone who made it would tell me I’m wrong. I see it as a deconstruction of a marriage told through the stages of film production. Like someone has reverse engineered a relationship. It’s a relationship in trouble in a film for the first hour. It’s then about how the relationship in the movie is informed by the fractured relationship during production. And the film ends with the beginning: Aubrey Plaza’s character ready to take her experiences to inform the writing of the screenplay. It’s a clever movie. Perhaps too clever. Like the filmmaker watched Mulholland Drive too many times and wanted to apply it to a love story.

 

Aubrey Plaza holds it together for me. Her natural sarcasm and willingness to try anything lead her performances in interesting directions. She’s impossible to read in the first half then a raw nerve in the second. Christopher Abbott and Sarah Gadon are fine too, but there’s a reason it’s Plaza on this poster.

 

The first part is overall stronger than the second. It’s just three characters and all three are playing more natural roles. When it shifts to the film production later, it’s more unwieldy. There are so many more characters. Abbott and Gadon don’t seem as comfortable. Even Plaza doesn’t seem fully right until she gets drunk. The comedic tone injected in the second half threw me off too. When it ultimately ends with Plaza about to write the movie, it felt a little self-congratulatory.

 

I respect the effort of this movie. It’s a good idea. It took me a while to get proper footing watching it, which I believe was the point. I’d rather watch this than the more generic movie I thought I was watching at first. It just doesn’t fully work for me. I wish they could’ve found a way to break it into three parts instead of two. Really show of the evolution of the story and the different dynamics in each.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend