CIFF Review: Alexander the Last
Alexander the Last (2009)–****
Mumblecore king Joe Swanberg told the audience at the 33rd Cleveland International Film Festival that he develops his stories after spending a week living with the people in his films. They bond, tell stories, and collaboratively develop the relationships, and thus the scenes, in the film.
Alexander the Last, which follows an actress and her musician husband as they try and maintain their marriage when their arts strain the relationship, is the first Swanberg picture to apply this method to professional actors. Some of the actors, who have actually worked on “real” movies, thought he was crazy, Swanberg confessed. But with these pro players, Swanberg, for the first time in his rather short, but revolutionary filmmaking career, has created a picture that forces the audience to consider, if not understand, what he does.
So what does he do? Swanberg has given a voice, or if you prefer a mumble, to a generation by allowing his cast’s personality to dictate the direction of his films. These actors, mostly twenty-somethings (like myself), allow Swanberg to create a voyeuristic experience that many people, including a lot of twenty-somethings, find a little too real.
Swanberg makes us think about our own realities with Alexander the Last. Instead of just confronting us with uncomfortably intimate scenes as he did in previous efforts, here we watch as actress Alexander (Jess Weixler) rehearses for a stage play that attempts to mimic intimacy. Her body, and the body of her co-star Jamie (Barlow Jacobs), is twisted and contorted for the ultimate dramatic effect. Stage pieces are shifted. Action is choreographed. She rolls around on the stage with the play’s director (Jane Adams), who wants a specific motion from Jamie as his character and Alex’s share a moment of passion.
One of these rehearsals is interwoven with scenes of Jamie having sex with Alex’s sister Hellen (Amy Seimetz). Heavily improvised as most scenes are, the sex is raw, playful, and yet more passionate than anything an audience, especially one not familiar with Swanberg’s work, is used to seeing on screen. Alex watches as Hellen eventually tosses Jamie aside, just as Alex begins to confuse her stage relationship with something more real.
Of course it is real to her much like the drama in most of our media feels real. When I caught Gerado Naranjo’s Voy a explotar at the CIFF the other night, he explained the idea of how the media influences the way Mexican people act in life in concrete terms, that his film was, in part, about the telenovelas that dictate the reactions to dramatic situations. Swanberg’s improvisational style feels more fluid, making his film appear more critical.
Swanberg’s collaborative filmmaking (he even gives writing credit to the players for their scenes) makes me believe that the actors in Alexander the Last had much more to say about the matter than Swanberg himself. I love the scene where Hellen is photographing Alex and directing her to achieve the ideal image. Later in the film, when we see Alex’s unkempt hair or her eyes, puffy and red from crying, we get a chance to see Alex as Alex. If you apply the above explanation of how these scenes are developed, you begin to experience the actors’ ambivalence toward their profession.
But that’s the artistry in behind all Swanberg’s films. His lens and his stories are used to explore the experiences and point-of-views of his casts. It’s not unlike many of the other new American realist films that have illuminated the experiences of immigrants and marginalized peoples in films like Chop Shop or Sugar. Swanberg’s mostly all-white, mostly all-straight casts get to tell their stories in a way that is rarely realized even in our ethnocentric, heteronormative mainstream entertainment. With that, Alexander the Last proves to be a sometimes sad, sometimes goofy, but ultimately illuminating cinematic endeavor, easily one of the best of our time.
Alexander the Last, directed by Joe Swanberg, starring Jess Weixler, Barlow Jacobs, Amy Seimeitz, and Justin Rice as Alex’s husband, was screened at the 33rd Cleveland International Film Festival. More at www.alexanderthelast.com.
Catch Swanberg’s Web series Young American Bodies at IFC.com.
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