Daniel Warth’s 2017 film Dim the Fluorescents occupies the tragic and hilarious gulf between making art and making a living, following two women who have spent years trying to make the former but are stuck in the purgatory of the latter. Yet despite their uninspiring career station, they put all of their considerable potential into the diminishing returns of the corporate presentation.
Warth’s script, co-written with Miles Barstead, begins with what may be one of the least promising opening lines in cinema. Gary, a veteran office manager, addresses a barely awake audience, reading off an awkwardly projected bullet-point list; we catch up mid-sentence: “…which is, uh, why it’s always, uh uh, a good idea, to, uh, personalize your incentives.”
You might already be falling asleep, but that motivational claptrap gets at one of the film’s great themes: how can an artist survive in a 9-to-5 job without losing their mind? The answer is, if at all possible, by personalizing it, and that’s what playwright-actress Lillian (Naomi Skwarna) and her actress-muse friend Audrey (Claire Armstrong) do in the confines of what would ordinarily be a bland presentation.
We’ll consider the lead performances at some length later, but first a word on the character actors; Gary is played by Todd Graham, a Canadian comedian and director with just a handful of credits on the IMDb. But he does a perfect job with this thankless role; one the one hand, he’s so bland he barely registers, his neutral-colored clothing matching the neutral office hues, but he also quickly and unassumingly assumes the position of defeat. He’s been working at this company for a long time, and is a cautionary tale, what Lillian and Audrey most fear: you, too, can be in his shoes and it will be like a moderately compensated living death.
Next slide: DEMONSTRATION
Now it’s time: the screen is raised, the eponymous fluorescents are dimmed, the sparse audience politely applauds, and it’s showtime. A boombox plays ambient office chatter; Lillian and Audrey move prop chairs into position with the professionalism (a word Lillian likes to emphasize) of actors setting up for Shakespeare or Pinter before they play out a dramatized account of…a customer service phone bank.
And it’s beautiful. Dramatic lighting cues, deadpan line readings that make it funnier but with a hint of melodrama that reads as genuine emotion. Audrey leans into her role as a disgruntled caller: “Products have come to me [half a beat] damaged, Catherine!” she pleads, bringing far more than anyone would expect her to bring to this work-for-hire, walking a fine line between drama and camp but stumbling into the cheap seats.
Lillian plays her role as the emotionally (and professionally) detached contractor, while Audrey continues in her barely restrained high dudgeon. “Picture this, Catherine,” Audrey continues. “Picture a middle-aged, slightly frazzled, overworked executive, okay?” While Audrey isn’t an executive, she’s essentially describing herself, and that’s the key to her performance, something that neatly embodies exactly what Gary tries to get across in his lackluster fashion: “personalize incentives.” And it’s that personalizing that Lillian and Audrey spend much of Fluorescents doing, and that’s what drives the movie.
While Dim the Fluorescents is framed by such corporate presentations, much of the film follows Lillian and Audrey in their struggles off-stage, chasing the next show, navigating Toronto’s theater scene in envy of their more successful friend June (Clare McConnell), and maintaining their own friendship and sanity. Audrey is of course the volatile, emotional one, and when she goes off her meds it’s a disaster. But the apparently level-headed Lillian is more complicated than she seems; that veneer of reliability and sensibility clearly weighs on her, and if one expects Audrey to blow off steam in unpredictable bursts, Lillian doesn’t really have any way to process her own anxiety without becoming more vulnerable than she wants to appear.
The personal drama (with subplots that don’t all pay off) isn’t as powerful as what happens on the corporate stage, but that drama feeds into the heartbreaking final presentation. Armstrong, in what was my favorite performance of that year, is a force of nature, her portrayal of Audrey absolutely convincing you both of her talent and her total train wreck of a personality; but Skwarna too handles her tight-lipped role with the right tone, in a movie that masters a tricky tone indeed. And like Graham’s Gary, the smaller roles are all well-played; for all the constraints that Lillian and Audrey face, Warth frequently challenges his cast, giving, for instance, Brendan Hobin, playing an office worker who takes a shine to Audrey, an uncomfortable scene that amounts to a long reaction shot, watching a performance we don’t see.
Warth, who was inspired by John Cassavetes and Jonathan Demme but seems to forge something new out of their example, gives his actors big moments, of course, but the little moments add up too. As Armstrong reads one of Lillian’s scripts, we eagerly watch her interest grow so much that tears well up; the reaction doesn’t make sense at first, since in rehearsals, Armstrong dials down her performance (she casually says, “cry cry cry” as a placeholder for what’s to come) in a way she doesn’t do for the final curtain. But it speaks to the vagaries of acting, and although Lillian herself gets annoyed with Audrey’s insistence on process, Dim the Fluorescents at times demonstrates its own process, and it’s fascinating.
The Fluorescents afterimage unfortunately mirrors its own plot. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance 2017 for Best Narrative Feature, but was not well-distributed (I was going to review it for The Washington Post at one point, but its local run was cancelled at the last minute). Warth has not made another feature since. With a budget of about $300,000, Dim the Fluorescents was made for peanuts, and its seams are not invisible. The pacing and rhythm flags at times, and at 128 minutes, it seems to run just a little too long. But when the final set piece kicks in, everything that preceded it locks into place for a scene that’s everything you want from drama. And it has fewer than 250 views on Letterboxd. Don’t let its light go out.
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