Mark Reviews Movies: THERE THERE

There There, Magnolia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 17, 2022

Writer/director Andrew Bujalski doesn't try to hide that his There There is an experiment in editing and acting. The first scene features two characters in bed after a one-night-stand that both, obviously, want to be more, even if they're hesitant to admit as much to each other. Initially, though, one might not care much about the dialogue or performances, because it appears that Bujalski has made a blatant error of continuity. These actors aren't in the same room. The paint on the walls between shots is completely different.

This movie was obviously made during the recent pandemic, and the gimmick here is that, for the entirety of the movie, not a single actor appears in the same shot as another one. Everyone was filmed in different locales, presumably at different times and without the aid of being able to play off each other.

It's a laughable exercise at first, as Lennie James, playing the owner of a bar, moves a glass of water out of frame, only for Lili Taylor, playing a recovering alcoholic who has somehow ended up spending the night with the guy, to have a glass in the next shot. That James is standing in a room painted green and Taylor is lying in bed in a white-walled room is very, very funny—unintentionally so, we have to assume, even if Bujalski's methods are intentionally transparent.

The good news here is that the filmmaker's movie isn't one of those self-reflective, statement-making pieces of pandemic-era cinema. This story exists as a series of somewhat intertwining vignettes, in which we follow one character from the previous scene into the next one and, then, the other character from that scene to the proceeding one.

The scenes are mostly ordinary, as Taylor later talks to her AA sponsor (played by Annie LaGanga) and the sponsor has a meeting with her son's school teacher (played by Molly Gordon), although one is supernatural, as the lawyer (played by Jason Schwartzman) of a morally questionable porn website's owner (played by Avi Nash) is confronted by the ghost of his dead mentor (played by Roy Nathanson). Eventually, everything circles around, while skipping several steps in the relay part of this narrative race, to return to James' character, who may or may not have had his life changed and his outlook on romance altered by his encounter with Taylor's character.

Although it was shot during the pandemic, that situation is never spoken of in this story, and that's slightly refreshing. As for what we actually get, the movie is mostly noteworthy for how the actors make the restrictions on their performances work.

James and Taylor, for example, are charming enough in their scene that, while we certainly notice how they're existing in completely different spaces, we stop caring about the gimmick. That Bujalski eventually tries to stop drawing so much attention to the spatial incoherence, even seeming to use some green-screen effects for at least one scene to make it more convincing, makes us wonder why he bothered with making it so obvious in the first place. If one is going to dare to put Taylor next to a yellow wall and LaGanga adjacent to a wooden building, for example, that filmmaker should at least have the courage to see such absurdity through to the end.

Instead, we eventually have to try to become invested in each of these scenes. They're hit and miss, with the latter mode winning out more often. The first one eventually becomes amusing for the back-and-forth game of two people trying not to seem too interested in each other. The scene with the sponsor is a dead-end joke about the Taylor character's former, much weirder one, and the way the sponsor accosts the poor teacher, a victim of some teenage prank with potentially serious legal ramifications, makes her seem like a completely different person.

Schwartzman and Nathanson have some fun with their morally compromised characters, and unlike the former's scene with Nash, it at least has something to say about how people will twist their conscience to justify themselves and their actions. When James returns with another charming partner in Gordon, there's some promise, only for the entire movie to end with an anticlimactic thud.

There There forces us to think about how movies are made, the illusion of editing, and the skill of actors to re-create some kind of reality out of nothing. It mostly, though, leaves us wondering why Bujalski couldn't see his experiment all the way through and couldn't just keep most of the result to himself.

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