The announcement of a Duplass Brothers film conjures up the image of a certain kind of indie fare, one that leans heavily toward low-key examinations of interpersonal relationships and, more recently, has the potential to flirt with the line between honesty and discomfort in its comedy. Rainbow Time, the Duplass Brothers-produced film written and directed by and starring Linas Phillips is an extreme of the latter. At its core, it has a noble goal: to portray a character with developmental disabilities in such a way as to not mollycoddle them or make them a punchline. Phillips’ Shonzi is a high-functioning 40-year-old, but that doesn’t change the fact that his crude behavior and sexual desire becomes a way by which the film forgives a host of misogynist attitudes.
Lindsay (Melanie Lynskey) proves to be the audience’s foil in Rainbow Time, as she meets Shonzi by way of her boyfriend and Shonzi’s younger brother, Todd (Timm Sharp). Todd explains Shonzi’s disability—also noting that he accidentally ran over him with a car once—but doesn’t prepare Lindsay for Shonzi’s caricaturish understanding of masculinity, worshiping the Fonz and none too subtly suggesting Lindsay’s character in his new movie be inexplicably topless. Lindsay, however, is more than willing to forgive Shonzi’s discretions because of his disability. It’s Todd’s behavior that she has a problem with, and rightly so.
Despite agreeing beforehand to decline his father’s (Tobin Bell) invitation to spend the night when they visit, Lindsay and Todd break down and stay. But while Lindsay is giving Todd a blowjob, Shonzi is outside their bedroom window recording it on his phone. Todd is furious. Lindsay is mad at Todd for punching his brother. And Shonzi nonchalantly reminds his brother of the videos he made and watched to pleasure himself with a previous girlfriend, Todd later admitting that the physical videos make him feel like he “owns” a piece of his partner. Lindsay’s initial reaction to this is to express her discomfort both with the idea of being recorded and pornography in general. But Shonzi only knows about those videos because Todd showed them to him in an effort, he says, to make Shonzi feel “normal.”
Lynskey is not only the best actor here, but her character keeps the film grounded in the idea of relationships as balancing acts. She doesn’t step in to change Shonzi so much as to mother him, which has its own problematic connotations. Yet she rightly views Todd’s actions not as normalizing Shonzi but teaching him that inappropriate, even offensive, behavior is acceptable (ostensibly allowed because of his disability). Shonzi twice spies on intimate moments, and perhaps the second is even worse considering he’s watching his niece and her high-school boyfriend. And this is after he works up a quick, sexually suggestive drawing after just seeing her in a bikini by the pool. Lindsay’s naively optimistic solution is to take Shonzi out on the streets to interview women about their experiences with catcalling and being sexualized by strange men. It seems like Shonzi is beginning to understand the dangers of his libidinous objectification of women. But when he straight-up tells his next door neighbor she’s not pretty like those hot girls, it’s clear he has a long way to go.
The best indication of both Shonzi and Todd’s continued obliviousness, and the film’s ultimate disconnect between its script and its dreams of addressing equality, is the fact that Lindsay comes across as a non-character whose presence and attempts at enlightening the men around her are all in service of their warped concepts of masculinity. Since she has these inconsistent new-age characteristics, she is never preachy, but even a character who isn’t totally self-aware grows tired of Shonzi’s man-child act. And that’s truly the flaw in Rainbow Time‘s depiction of middle-aged developmental disabilities; Shonzi can’t be equated with any other man-child in a similar dramedy, but Phillips wants to be able to structure his story around the same narrative beats and end with the same vaguely optimistic fade into the sunset. Developmental disabilities aren’t explored with any depth and can’t serve as anything more than the fulcrum of Rainbow Time‘s gross-out humor.
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