Director Andrew Bujalski, known for his hyper-authentic, low-budget 16mm comedies about unexpected subsets of American life, enters the world of mainstream actors, digital cameras, and not-as-low budgets with the romantic comedy Results, but the lo-fi auteur’s most distinct qualities remain firmly intact. The fifth film by the 37-year-old director is unmistakably his, though it’s glossier and perhaps a bit more conventional than the others. Rather than diminish his voice or alter his style, such convention actually widens the director’s reach, opening up new images and scenarios in which the director imbues his own idiosyncratic flourishes. As much as Results feels like a departure, it also feels like an incredible leap forward, a film that’s both the inverse and a spirited advancement of Bujalkski’s previous work.
Fans of the director will feel right at home in the film’s circuitous narrative and talky, character-driven set pieces. Set in the suburban enclaves of the director’s hometown of Austin, Texas, Results follows a love triangle between feisty personal trainer Kat (Colbie Smulders), her entrepreneurial boss Trevor (Guy Pearce), and Kat’s client Danny (Kevin Corrigan), a well-to-do, out of shape former New Yorker living in a sparsely furnished mansion following a divorce. The script is filled with stops and starts, misdirections and anticlimaxes, but it holds together beautifully, indicative of the characters’ fumbling lives and seemingly paradoxical desires. Though their behavior is confusing and often inscrutable, each character is searching for nothing more than happiness, a simple feeling complicated by other uniquely human behaviors like selfishness and vindictiveness. The characters lives are complicated insofar as they make them complicated, and their happiness is a matter of recognizing that they are, in fact, happy, even if they take a while to admit it. For Bujalski, one of American cinema’s smartest and most wry observers of social behavior, the pursuit of happiness it about the pursuit itself.
Single and rich, Danny joins the Power 4 Life gym, a small business owned by Trevor, the Aussie expat hoping to turn his modest operation into a global corporation. Kat, Power 4 Life’s most popular trainer and Trevor’s former fling, gives Danny private at-home lessons, and he quickly falls for her. Her affections stirred, the skittish Kat gives Danny a shot but quickly backs away, leaving him confused and mildly vengeful, so he partners with Trevor to help grow Power 4 Life, which confuses and annoys Kat. At its core, Results is about the way people navigate each other’s personal space, a notion lyrically communicated by the sweaty, handsy world of personal fitness, and these shaggy-dog scenarios–in which people get too close and back away only to get close again–reverberate throughout the film, the director’s way of playing the indie rom-com by his own rules. His films have an undoubtedly modest quality, but Bujalski remains a highly formal director, orchestrating geometric pivots in perspective and flow with elegant slight-of-hand. But where similar narrative strategies built to wondrous conclusions in Funny Ha Ha, Beeswax, and the masterpiece Computer Chess, the denouement here is the sort of shoehorned, improbable quick-fix he previously resisted.
Rushed though the end may be, the characters depart with a feeling of hope, and Bujalski’s brand of sentiment-free optimism is as fresh and welcome as ever. Said optimism once came from the radiant, impossibly down-to-earth performances by his non-professional actors, but his cast of pros acquit themselves nicely. Pearce, known for playing smoldering and enigmatic types in Memento and L.A. Confidential, brings newfound humor and vulnerability to a character struggling to carve his own path in the world; Smulders also plays against type, subverting her nice-girl appeal with attitude and neuroses; and the Walken-esque Corrigan, playing the film’s most traditionally Bujalksian character, anchors the story with humor and pathos. Bujalski’s direction is in lock-step the performers, enough that they seem to be the film’s focal point, but as is the director’s wont, the personal stories are part and parcel with the film’s impeccable craft.
