Andrew Bujalski makes films that are seemingly the epitome of “minor works,” until they very much aren’t. The first three (and parts of the fourth) of his off-the-cuff, blatantly low-budget films were shot on that most sneakily trenchant of formats — 16mm. The writer/director/editor’s most recent three movies have been digitally photographed, which also can communicate a certain nonchalance. This is certainly the case with his latest, There There, which is so aesthetically low-key it can verge on the ramshackle and even ugly; decidedly not how Bujalski’s previous films would be described. Perhaps it was attributable to the stream quality of my screener (oh the privilege, I know), but the images in There There are frequently muddy, with bleeding colors and characterized by a general splotchiness. Occasionally, the movie does happen upon a striking image, such as an early abstracted vision of light dancing off a reflective surface, but more frequently, the movie just looks soupy, which is disappointing for an artist whose past films, in line with their quietly affecting emotional cores, would more consistently remind you of their smart compositions.
Perhaps the most visually notable thing about There There is that from its first scene, a morning-after exchange between two middle-aged new lovers, the slightly neurotic recovering addict played by Lili Taylor and the too-charismatic-for-his-own-good restaurant owner played by Lennie James, no two characters appear in the same frame together. There’s a tension to watching the nearly 15-minute opening sequence unfold, as with each passing cut, we wonder whether or not Taylor and James will enter into one another’s — distinctly painted, I should add — spaces, despite the fact that they’re talking back and forth seamlessly. Their dialogue cannily gets at the discomfort and passive-aggressive attempts to feel out a situation between two people who have recently become intimate but don’t quite know who they’re dealing with, but they’re still never shown side by side.
Indeed, the entire film is a patchwork of the lives of overlapping characters, each extended scene a two-hander between a pair of actors where we’re denied the two coming together or touching, lest they break the invisible force field that has been constructed around them. One presumes that this is probably due to Covid-era production restrictions, but if you’ve paid attention to filmmakers’ accounts of pandemic filmmaking over the last few years, you know that because of the multiplicity of crew members required for even a shoot as bare-bones as this one likely was, both the number of actors and potential of actors coming into contact with one another are less high-stakes than one might think. Simply put, shooting a movie in the first place, no matter what type (unless it’s all entirely over Zoom), is risky regardless. So one supposes that maybe Bujalski is just trying to evoke the sensation of being sequestered and isolated, either literally or figuratively, in which case the film sort of succeeds. Only in one set-up — the second conversation, located at an outdoor cafe and between Taylor and her sponsor, played as irritable and borderline malicious by Annie LaGanga — does the conceit play out as downright stilted and choppily mismatched. A candidate for the best segment, between Jason Schwartzman, perfectly cast as a hopelessly self-involved lawyer, and Avi Nash as his tech bro client, goes the more obvious route of unfolding over FaceTime and makes you wonder for a second if maybe Bujalski should have made an entire film in this more direct, pandemic reality-referencing fashion.
And yet, as biting and funny as that first Schwartzman exchange is (he gets a second, less fully realized segment after), conversely, part of There There and by extension Bujalski’s skill are their facility with underplaying things. Or rather, the fact that for the majority of the segments, the characters’ separateness isn’t called attention to nor explained holds a mysterious and unique kind of value. Likewise appreciable is that while the movie trains its focus on an interconnected web of people, it unceremoniously follows a character as they move from one realm to another in their lives, inevitably bumping into someone else who we’ll subsequently follow for a couple of vignettes. Which is to say, this isn’t a Paul Haggis-, Alejandro González Iñárritu-, or Magnolia-style, everything-is-connected head thumper. It merely uses its choice to separate its character duos as a way to get at the little miscommunications, barriers and divisions that can arise between people. Emphasis, for better and for worse, on “merely.”
Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
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