THE WORLD TO COME

Katherine Waterston     Vanessa Kirby     Christopher Abbott     Casey Affleck 

     An admirable feat of artistic production, The World to Come takes us on an unexpected journey through two marriages in the 19^thCentury full of grief and ineptitude lit up by an uncommon love.  The two couples live on isolated farms in New York.  We first meet Abigale (Waterston) and Dyer (Affleck) who live a seemingly ideal life on a mostly prosperous farm with their young daughter.  Well, it’s not really ideal; Abigale, a writer with keen sensitivities, finds her reticent, mechanically minded husband rather dull.  She is nurturing, and he values her care and tells her as best he can, but she clearly feels something missing, especially after the loss of their daughter.

     Then one day her closest neighbor Tallie (Kirby) visits unexpectedly, and the two strike up a friendship.  Their conversations are typical of housewives of the time, and inevitably touch on their husbands.  But there’s a spark, a spark that is felt not only just between the two women, but it reverberates outward through their small group.

     The writer Jim Shepard is known for his wide-ranging research of subjects he’s interested in as well as his fascination with difficult-to-explore emotions. Most striking in The World to Come are the number of times husbands and wives cannot seem to express what they’re feeling.  For the women, it’s circling around without committing too much; for the men, its terse monosyllabic utterances.  The way out in this story are the poetic musings of the women when they talk with each other when they’re alone.  And by the excitement the women feel when they meet contrasted with the pedantry characteristic of the men’s conversations when they converse and even when they talk with their wives.  Much of this production’s success lies in Shepard’s capturing the emotional valence among the characters, leaving the viewer in suspense.

     Director Mona Fastvold’s skillful assemblage of actors and crew for the production should earn her a place among the up-and-coming filmmakers, along with her sense of pace and sustaining suspense in the plot.  Katherine Waterston, Vanessa Kirby, and Casey Affleck are by now well known for their skill and attraction as leading actors, and they with Christopher Abbott deliver the kind of performance called for by the script. A significant contribution is lent by the musician Daniel Blumberg, with his dirge-like ominous tunes alternated with Andre Chemetoff’s  beautifully rendered pastoral sequences to capture the landscape and give us some relief

     This could have been a totally depressive film, but the lyrical—sometimes elegiac—dialog and cinematic crafts elevates it to something beyond, something more like a tonal poem.  It’s certainly not tied solely to a 19^thCentury story; it speaks to our wonderings and speculations about marriage today.

 

This is a film for lovers of art and poetic expression capturing psychological truths about human nature through the ages.

 

Grade:  A                                    By Donna R. Copeland

BLACK BEAR

Aubrey Plaza     Sarah Gadon     Christopher Abbott

     In a rather tangled two-part plot, writer/director Lawrence Michael Levine explores some version of the “life imitates art” juxtaposition.  To illustrate his point he uses a recurring image of the main character in a meditative position surrounded by nature.  The first scenario is presented with certain actors in certain roles followed by those same actors and characters enacting a different story.  

     In Part One, Aubrey Plaza plays the role of a director (Allison) seeking inspiration at an isolated retreat owned by Gabe (Abbott) and Blair (Gadon), an unmarried couple expecting a baby.  One of the first evenings with them is disturbing—for the viewer, as well as for Allison—by the couple’s constant bickering and by Blair’s jealousy toward Allison.

     Suddenly, in Part Two, a movie is being shot, with the plot being somewhat the same as in Part One, but with the characters shifted around.  Here, Gabe is a movie director married to Allison, the star of the movie.  That is, “Gabe” and “Allison” are the married couple, and “Blair” is a rival of Allison.  Living up to what Allison has claimed in the first movie—that she was an actor difficult to work with, Allison portrays that character in the movie, being late to the set and arguing with her husband (the director, now, in the movie being shot) about the script.  Lying is a sub-theme throughout both parts of Black Bear.

     The movie demonstrates Aubrey Plaza’s skill in portraying a chameleon personality who can act out a scene on the spur of the moment and thus has some mystery about her.  Christopher Abbott and Sarah Gadon, her co-stars, likewise show very different personas, depending on what is called for in the script.  

     As intriguing as this might be for those informed about anti-mimesis (Oscar Wilde’s belief that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”) and the notion that we only see what artists have taught us to see, I think most viewers of this movie will not be entranced by it.   I appreciate what writer/director Lawrence Michael Levine has tried to do, but figure that such esoteric content will be lost on most, and that they will see the movie as a bit of a jumble.

     On the other hand, I figure that actors themselves will love the script, which embodies what they have to do on a regular basis.  It also reflects the constantly changing relationships they see every day in their own lives.

     The symbolic significance of the black bear of the title is more difficult to determine. If it refers to William Faulkner’s “The Bear”, I can only relate it in terms of Falkner’s equating the bear in his story to nature or to the wilderness and its death.  The last scene of the movie is Plaza’s character encountering a big black bear with interest and a glint in her eye. Is she encountering the bear as something of nature to which she needs to get reconnected? Or is it about nature on its road to destruction?

 

This is a film primarily for those in the business of filmdom or to those who ponder humans’ relationship with nature.

 

Grade:  B                                    By Donna R. Copeland