In the past two weeks, I have driven a total of 18 hours through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee and saw my fair share of the rural South and its tourist-traps (Cajun Encounters, anyone?). All that speeding past identical trees and farmland becomes repetitive if you let it, but I’m always on the lookout for unintentional names created by multiple-city exits (Exit 114 for Georgiana/Starlington), terrifying billboards (“Go to church or the Devil will get you”) and bizarre landmarks (Clanton, AL’s Big Peach Water Tower). Those things may have served as my distractions rather than my destinations, but I still feel as though I have a kindred spirit in Big Significant Things‘ Craig (Harry Lloyd), a twenty-something New Jerseyan on a solo road trip touring all the biggest and weirdest sights the American South has to offer.
But our connection stops with those big, (in)significant things. Craig’s road trip is spurred by a fear of adulthood more than traveler’s curiosity. Claiming that he still has one week left on his current project, the ad exec lets his girlfriend fly to San Francisco alone to pick out their first home while he tools around visiting sites like the World’s Largest Rocking Chair in Gulfport, MS. When Craig buys the store’s consumer model and straps it to his Volvo, writer-director Bryan Reisberg gives us a visual reference for the impending domesticity weighing on Craig’s shoulders. It is an eye-sore that attracts unwanted attention at every rural watering hole Craig visits from that point on as he awkwardly tries to assume the locals’ habits and mannerisms.
In terms of tone and visual language, Reisberg’s film is thoroughly tongue-in-cheek, masking Craig’s disillusionment in comedy. The feel is very much like an intersection between mumblecore and Zach Braff circa Garden State. The cinematography by Luca Del Puppo never attempts to romanticize the highway. Reisberg’s script, however, persists in providing Craig with a romantic interest. He falls in with a group of teenagers by offering free beer and latches onto a bartender until he finds out she has a boyfriend. Lloyd’s role calls for the odd combination of childlike mimicry and pathological lying to the point that this ultimately dubious and unlikable character avoids audience judgment because he has such a changeable identity.
By the third act, the film actively encourages you to dislike Craig. He meets Ella (Krista Kosonen), a Finnish woman whose presence in Mississippi is never explained satisfactorily, but the natural chemistry between Lloyd and Kosonen is undercut by Ella’s minimal characterization, cheap exoticism and shallow function in the piece. When Craig calls a late-night radio line to admit his near-infidelity with Ella and question the psychological reasons for his commitment issues, one caller’s response of “Grow up!” is meant to reflect our exasperation with his antics. But the way Lloyd portrays him, Craig fortunately comes out as more pitifully lost and confused than irresponsible.
It is easy to see Craig’s “uncharacteristic” behavior as the result of him trying on different hats, sometimes very literally. Not that he will discover his true self by mock-impersonating Southerners, but this road trip lands him in unfamiliar territory and forces him to examine who the true Craig is. Reisberg’s goal, for better or for worse, is to present Craig’s experiences as emblematic and his commitment issues like many quarter-life crises. The set-up, then, is not new, but Reisberg makes his film stand out with its engaging minimalism. It would not be exaggerating to say that the bulk of the film is just Lloyd driving across Interstate-10.
Big Significant Things is an admirably self-contained debut from Reisberg that commits to telling the story of a complex emotional crisis simply and without offering solutions. If audiences stick with the film through Craig’s latter half antics, though, they will likely find the open ending incomplete, especially in regards to the San Francisco girlfriend situation. But to fault Reisberg’s script for being directionless puts too much store on too-neat finales. Craig’s arc might not be the storybook 180, but he does grow from the guy in denial who took photographs of the world’s biggest things as souvenirs to that guy who visits the World’s Largest Frying Pan in North Carolina and points out that there are six of them claiming the honor in the U.S. alone. While a full-blown disillusioned protagonist is generally not the goal of a film’s final third, Reisberg is at least brave enough to end there.