Delayed Reaction: Pretenders

Premise: Two friends vie for and emotionally share the same mysterious woman for years.

 

James Franco is a more prolific director than people realize. He’s been directing since 2005 and has made 24 feature films (including some documentaries) in those 18 years. That’s not to mention all his TV work as a director. The reason people don’t realize this is because his movies are mostly small and not that well received. The Disaster Artist is the only one I can say had large appeal, and it feels more like a Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg movie*. Otherwise, it’s hard to name any of his movies.

 

*Rogen and Goldberg were producers on that.

 

Personally, I haven’t heard much bad about his other movies. So, I decided to check one out. Pretenders is…well, it feels like the movie an art student would make after working on the set of The Deuce. And wouldn’t you know it, this came out a year after Franco, who seems to have been in an MFA program for the last 15 years, starred in the first season of The Deuce. Pretenders has a lot of fetishization of the film and film appreciation scene in the late 70s, with the arthouse cinemas showing European classics and there was just enough gatekeeping to the community that everyone had a whiff of trust fund.

 

He puts a good cast together. Weirdly, this is the first time I recall seeing something that recognized that Jane Levy is quite attractive. She tends to either have girl next door or troubled youth roles. It was nice to see her flex some femme fatale muscles. Shameik Moore has been on the verge of a breakout role for almost a decade now. Jack Kilmer didn’t really stand out. I kept confusing him with assorted Shailene Woodley costars. They all feel way more comfortable in the college scenes than the grown-up scenes. James Franco gets in front of the camera for a few scenes and gets the likes of Juno Temple, Dennis Quaid, and Brian Cox to put in some time.

 

I worry that then movie doesn’t realize that it is the very thing it’s criticizing. At one point, a female student (played by another Deuce alum, I’m pretty sure) criticizes Kilmer’s short film about Levy as being pretty to look at but only wanting to examine Levy at the surface level. Pretenders is equally surface level but in the opposite way. It wants Levy to be a mystery: this woman who can never be tamed and never lets anyone get close. When Brian Cox finally appears to explain some of her backstory, he speaks broadly, like he read about her from a book, not like he was a surrogate father. I’d suggest that the movie was being very clever – a genre examination that also is that genre – except the clunkiness of the AIDS story at the end has me convinced that it’s just sloppy.

 

There’s nothing truly egregious about the movie. It’s just very middling.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend