existentialism

Kaufman’s least immediately legible film, and potentially his most rewarding for it. I didn’t clock how the Jake scenes and the janitor scenes connected until the credits rolled, which may be the point or may just be me being slow—either way, I want to come back to it, just not yet. I suspect a lot more clicks if you’ve got the full reference shelf to hand (David Foster Wallace, Pauline Kael, Wordsworth, A Beautiful Mind, the musicals, etc), rather than catching half like I did. Buckley and Plemons are fantastic, and Collette and Thewlis match them on a fraction of the screen time.

I don’t entirely know what I just watched, and I think that’s the point. It opens like a coming-of-age film about two kids bonding over a Buffy-esque TV show, then quietly stops being that and becomes something stranger. The Lynch comparisons are well earned. Schoenbrun shoots suburbia soft and pink, and the Alex G score sits underneath everything like static you can’t quite tune out. The broader soundtrack, Caroline Polachek and yeule especially, is great. What stays with me is how patient the film is about not naming what it’s actually about. For anyone working through questions of identity and dysphoria, I suspect this will matter for a long time.

Bill Murray is doing something precise in the early scenes: playing a man who thinks he’s too good for his surroundings. The film’s quiet argument is that Phil is wrong, but not in the way you’d expect. It’s not that Punxsutawney is secretly wonderful. It’s that contempt is a kind of blindness, and the loop forces Phil to look. David Thomson described Murray as “the obdurately sensible persona responding to orderly madness,” which is exactly right. Phil isn’t heroic. He’s competent and irritated, and the film’s engine is watching competence and irritation gradually lose to something harder to name—attention, perhaps. Care. The kind of knowledge you can only acquire through repetition. Phil’s arc from contempt to mastery to something like grace mirrors what happens when you watch anything often enough: you stop watching the plot and start watching the texture. I have seen this film perhaps fifty times. I’ll watch it again soon.