The ethos of The Sweet East, the directorial debut of cinematographer Sean Price Williams, can be traced to the 2010s post-mumblecore corner of New York indie cinema occupied by Alex Ross Perry and the Safdie Brothers. Williams has shot multiple films for both aforementioned parties, typically working in celluloid. With the Safdies, he attempts to capture something close to docudrama, but with Perry, he immerses audiences in the deeply unlikable, solipsistic personalities that appear throughout the director’s oeuvre. The Sweet East, which Perry produced, doesn’t use nonprofessional actors like in the Safdies’ Heaven Knows What, but it does attempt to take a societal temperature of the here and now that’s similar to the directors’ Good Time. In line with Perry’s work, The Sweet East is a 16mm outing where characters are often verbose and prone to smugly rhapsodizing about their niche interests to whoever’s in earshot. However, Williams and his screenwriter —the great film critic Nick Pinkerton—render these portrayals glibber than in Perry’s finest creations (The Color Wheel and Listen Up Philip). The Sweet East is the kind of movie you’re glad exists, but it never really comes together despite being somewhat inventive. In the end, Williams’ debut is shallower than it realizes.
In the film, we first encounter Lillian (Talia Ryder) traveling with her rowdy, churlish schoolmates on an overnight field trip to Washington, D.C. She’s a high school student from “South Cackalacky”—as her kind-of boyfriend puts it—who has a vaguely dejected, outsider-y air but also a sense of discursive curiosity. After the first of a couple public displays of firearms that occur in the movie, her wanderlust quickly compels her to ditch her class. Operating seemingly on knee-jerk instinct and without a plan, Lillian makes her way up the East coast where she comes across a slew of capital-C characters who, taken together, provide a whacky, humorously dispiriting view of modern American adulthood.
Among those Lillian encounters are a young group of commune-living agitators led by a gutter punk named Caleb (Earl Cave); a New Jersey professor with white supremacist inclinations named Lawrence (Simon Rex); an overeager NYC-based filmmaking duo (Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy O. Harris); and a militant Muslim living in the woods in upstate New York (Khalil Amonette). These depictions of fringe cultures are what The Sweet East wants to highlight, capturing something about our fractious, Reddit-brained population. Major cities like D.C., Trenton (okay, only kind of), and New York City are visited by Lillian—seemingly some of the last remaining spaces that allow for centralized community and togetherness. But even these places are teeming with isolated people who harbor ill-informed opinions and often straight up conspiratorial ideas about the world.
Lillian steps in and out of these peoples’ lives in a blank, distantly amused fashion. Ryder, who featured prominently in 2020’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, portrays Lillian’s simultaneous naïveté and penchant for skillful manipulation successfully, but it’s never really clear what impacts these experiences are having on her or how they will shape her later on. It’s not that we need a climactic, confessional scene of soul-bearing, but Williams could have investigated the impacts of the film’s events on Lillian’s personhood in subtle ways. Instead, Williams and Pinkerton seem content to use Lillian as a cypher surrogate through which the audience is made privy to the condescending portrayals of the series of cynics, misguided dreamers and fanatics stationed along the protagonist’s journey.
In many moments, it’s glaringly obvious the film is authored by a middle-aged man trying to write young people. In others, Pinkerton’s script seems overly satisfied with its own dialogue (Edebiri’s line, “The best actress is just a woman who says yes,” comes to mind). More troublingly, you occasionally get the feeling Williams and Pinkerton are endorsing some of the characters’ off-base viewpoints, like when Lawrence tells Lillian, “There is something fine in you that cries out for a civilization to cultivate it. You were born too late.”
There is still strong writing in the film with cleverness and bite, though, like in this exchange between Lawrence and Lillian:
Lawrence: “Do you retain any of the information I share with you?”
Lillian: “Yeah. Something about how he was a Jew.”
Lawrence: “I know you love being grossly reductive, but that’s not scholarship.”
The Sweet East also contains some well-composed sight gags. The shot of Lillian waking up one morning in Lawrence’s swastika-embroidered duvet elicits a belly laugh, as does the purely absurdist, so-small-it’s-almost-throwaway instance where Lillian opens Lawrence’s trunk only to discover the engine of the car is there because it’s an old sports car. Lawrence shoots her an exasperated look as he retrieves the luggage out of the hood of the vehicle, instead.
In large part, though, rather than represent or interrogate the rootless anonymity of Gen Z or the crackpot insanity of aging ideologues, The Sweet East listlessly mocks these generations while never exposing what makes people like this tick. Perry, Williams’ forebear, uses multiple perspectives in his film Listen Up Philip to investigate the fallacies and narcissism of his characters. By contrast, The Sweet East’s surface-level approach winds up making the movie feel as delusional and sociopathic as its subjects.
Photo courtesy of Utopia
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