Selling all the art, dad? Why?
One thing I think film can do really well, better than any other medium, is capture the reality of conversations.
In a book, no matter how you lay it out, one piece of dialogue always has to follow another.
You can't simulate people talking over each other,
which is what we all do a lot of the time.
And you can't really capture the rhythm, speed and tone that a conversation has.
Even radio and theater miss some of the nuances that film is perfectly suited to reproduce
Of all the filmmakers working right now,
I think Noah Baumbach,
maybe has the best ear for dialogue
as it really is and an ear is what it takes, because there's a general
disconnect between what we all sound like and what movie and TV characters sound like,
especially the most articulate ones.
You asked me that moronic question and then my world came apart and she came here
And I landed in the tabloids, and I got death threats and my job is constantly in jeopardy and you ruined my life
Yes. That was me
Of course, you don't have to aim at realistic speech
Screenwriters like Aaron Sorkin and Quentin Tarantino have done really great work by writing human dialogue as it could be
Finding music and language the same way that Shakespeare did centuries ago.
But Baumbach on the other hand seems to be committed to a different principle
I think the conversation like this speaks volumes.
In one sense just by looking at it
You can see that
This is a total failure of
communication between father and son.
The two men are on parallel tracks:
Matt is talking about his new business and
Harold is talking about his forthcoming art retrospective
But in another sense, what makes this exchange so heartbreaking and true to life at least for me is that
they really are communicating with each other
just not explicitly.
Matt brings up a major life change and expresses some of the hopes and fears
He has about it
and his father immediately brings up his own major life event and some of the hopes and fears he has about that.
Implicitly, Matt is asking for approval, he's asking for reassurance, and he's asking for consolation.
Harold, on the other hand, is denying approval because he can't bear his son being more
successful than he is, while asking for reassurance of his own hopes
and consolation for his own fears.
It's like the two men are firing a volley of missiles at each other,
some are hitting,
some are missing and some are crashing into each other in midair.
I think Baumbach understands a key dynamic in conversations,
especially conversations with family.
When we speak to others we're often speaking to ourselves,
attempting to frame dialogue so that the person were talking to
will reflect back the things that we want to believe about us
When I was younger I was so invested in his grievances his
anger, the world they were mine too, but now that I lived 3,000 miles away and have my own kid thriving business
I I don't even get angry at him anymore, it's even... just funny
I'm sure a lot of people who just went home for Thanksgiving
experienced something like this.
You feel that you've changed, that you have an updated nuanced idea of yourself
and you're gonna show that idea in one way or another to your family.
It doesn't matter how much money I make
You make me feel like a big piece of shit because you don't care about it
But you also actually do! You're primally obsessed with it!
You know that I beat you
I beat you!
The thing we seem to forget is that
as we're trying to get our family to affirm our sense of self
they're doing the same thing to us,
and the result is often conflict or a conversation that just goes nowhere
Well, maybe not nowhere,
just not where you intended.
This is my favorite scene in the movie
It's a minute and 30 second long take of two half-brothers attempting to connect.
By making it one take,
you get all the elements of conversation that I spoke about before including the body language,
the projected self confidence of Matt
and the nervous insecure energy of Danny, always nodding his head like his father.
They're doing this thing where they agree while also disagreeing
it's a specific kind of non argument that tells you a lot about their personalities and their relationship.
There's so much going on here.
On one level, Danny is trying to connect with Matt by
literally trying to finish his sentences.
He's also trying to challenge him and assert some dominance
by acting like he knows what Matt's gonna say next.
Talk about speaking to yourself, Danny is effectively trying to hijack Matt's sentences and make them his own.
Listen for this the next time you're in a conversation.
People do this all the time.
At this point, Matt and Danny are getting out of sync
which actually makes it appropriate that Danny brings up
'arbitrage'
an investment term for when the same asset is worth different values in different places and
you exploit that price difference for profit.
Exploiting differences in value is a pretty good definition of what it's like to be in a dysfunctional family
or a dysfunctional conversation, for that matter.
And there it is:
a moment of connection.
One minute and 13 seconds into the conversation.
In the Meyerowitz family, moments of connection are few and far between, so
when they happen, they land with a special poignancy
and though this family is perhaps more intense, more insecure than most,
I hope,
There's something that rings so true about this to me.
When we talk, so often we fly around each other, working out our own shit, thinking about ourselves
We try to make our meaning clear, but we can't quite say what we want,
how we want, when we want.
That's because communication isn't easy.
Sometimes movies make it seem like it is
but Noah Baumbach isn't interested in that kind of dialogue.
He uses the medium best suited for depicting conversations to show us the truth about them,
that we miss the mark more often than we hit it
and that it's a beautiful, meaningful thing when we do
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