Baghead: Comedy-drama. Starring Ross Partridge, Steve Zissis, Greta Gerwig and Elise Muller. Directed by Jay and Mark Duplass. (R. 82 transactions. At Bay Area theaters.)
The beauty of the Duplass brothers ("The Puffy Chair") is that, on the surface, their movies seem as though the filmmakers are just stumbling about, extemporizing and being informal and slothful, just like the characters they portray onscreen. In fact, their movies ar tightly integrated, and these guys always know what they're expression, why they're saying it, and where their motion picture is leaving.
Their attack rewards both casual and attentive viewers. If you just want to let the moving-picture show wash o'er you, "Baghead," their latest, is an amusing fallal, about 4 youngish (only not that young) adults who go to a country cabin and, lo and lay eyes on, start being menaced by someone away the cabin wearing a paper suitcase. But keep your eyes open, and there are lots of other, subtler things going on.
For one thing, pay attending to the precision with which the characters and their excited needs, delusions and self-images are delineated. The moving picture tells the story of Matt (Ross Partridge), a would-be thespian and filmmaker in his late 30s, whose career just isn't happening. He attends the premiere of a low-budget film and gets the idea that he and some friends should go up to a cabin, that night, and spend two days writing a movie for themselves.
Anyone not paying attention could easily blur the laid-back style of "Baghead" with its boilers suit design. The camera work is free-and-easy, the hoi polloi are everyday and scenes are allowed to play out, languorously, with tons of dialog. But Matt is panic-stricken of failure. Chad (Steve Zissis) is in love with Michelle (Greta Gerwig) - slavishly, longingly, miserably - and she's too kind (or manipulative, or naive) to come out and tell she's not interested. And Catherine (Elise Muller) is kidding herself that her on-again, off-again relationship with Matt isn't really off for serious.
The Duplass brothers won't hit the audience over the head, but trey of the characters ar desperate - too sure-enough to be living like people in their 20s - patch the youngest, Michelle, is confused, and could very well be an alcohol-dependent in the making. Thus, the to the highest degree easy conversations are accented ever so subtly by the characters' life terrors, which ar real sufficiency even in front the baghead starts viewing up.
The baghead could be one of a number of things, a criminal, something supernatural, something the protagonists are causation or something they're doing to each other as a put-on. The salutary news is that, by the finish, the Duplasses aren't playacting games. Like "The Puffy Chair," "Baghead" gets somewhere.
Actually, it goes to a
