Andrew (Jason Sudeikis), a professor specializing in pop culture, trucks it up to rural Maine to mine Hannah (Rebecca Hall) for information on her deceased husband, single album indie-folk musician Hunter Miles, and opens with this cruel pitch: “I want to make your husband immortal.” In other words, he wants to write a book, a “monument,” to all the young artists lost too soon and deconstruct the commodification of the creative urge. It’s clear Andrew subscribes to the romanticized ideal of doomed and suicidal artists, and it’s clear that Hannah thinks that’s a load of bullshit (which it is). But exploring the emotional ferocity of quietly brilliant music and the cultish following that early death attracts could be a much better film than the clichéd romantic comedy that Sean Mewshaw’s debut feature Tumbledown devolves into.
Desi Van Til (Mewshaw’s wife) never satisfactorily reconciles the two halves of her script. At the outset, it is a touching portrait of grief. Hannah is a widow unwilling to let her husband go, instead struggling to do justice to his memory and have some say in his legacy by writing the Hunter Miles biography. She knows she is too close to Hunter to be able to write an unbiased biography, though. That’s where Andrew, and the romantic comedy, comes in. To her credit, before capitulating to Andrew’s charms, Hannah forces him to scrap the tortured artist book. But that doesn’t mean that Andrew actually understands the fault in his ways. To him, Hunter Miles – another name to be listed alongside Cobain and Buckley – represents uncharted pop culture territory and the guarantee of tenure.
To its detriment, Tumbledown bases its rom-com clash of personalities directly around this interpretation of musical demise and the memory of Hunter Miles. It’s never going to be romantic (read: not creepy) when you’re trying to win over a woman and pay tribute to her dead husband at the same time. But the obligatory obstacles to love required by the genre (generally easily surmountable) are, here, all valid reservations. Hannah’s immediate disdain for Andrew doesn’t just stem from the fact that he can’t see Hunter as a real person but that he wants to profit from peddling a maudlin story of suicide by cliff-face.
Even after the two inexplicably fall for one another, Hannah regrets giving in to her feelings for Andrew, and their exchange highlights the implausibilities in their relationship. Andrew, for his part, offers the encouraging line, “[Hunter] doesn’t want you to be a puddle of tears the rest of your life.” Hannah’s affront is not only justified but it undermines Van Til’s very ending. “You don’t get to say that,” she smolders, “because it’s a conflict of interest.” His cloying rebuttal of “I’m trying to rescue you” should put an end to the entire affair. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Everything Andrew says threatens his budding relationship with Hannah, yet somehow a rough draft of the first few chapters of Hunter’s biography is enough to put all rational thought out of Hannah’s mind. He must be one hell of a writer.
Tumbledown is ultimately two-thirds of a decent movie that insists on forcing the pairing off of its characters for a neat finale. Mewshaw and Van Til instill the rural setting with plenty of charm and amusing set-pieces (including Thanksgiving with parents Blythe Danner and Richard Masur). And Damien Jurado’s music does wonders in making Hunter Miles truly seem like a talented artist worthy of all this hubbub. Hall does an excellent job realizing Hannah’s grief and her reservations about Andrew. But while Sudeikis is making inroads and proving himself an effective romantic lead elsewhere, here, he gets no help from a script that provides no reasonable excuse for Hannah to see anything beyond Andrew’s propensity toward over-intellectualizing her dead husband.