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The poster for this movie reflects the place we are in 2020. Everyone’s a little burnt out. It’s the holidays. Things are meh. You need to do you. Sam Adams from Slate reflected earlier last month on the crisis I’ve been having about watching movies in the age of Video On Demand: the lack of urgency, spectacle, and curation. As we head toward the end of this bleak year for pop culture (with a few notable exceptions, almost all in television), there’s an effort afoot to catalogue the gems in the rough. Black Bear probably isn’t one of them, but it’s not as startlingly boring as the poster may have led you to believe. The premise feels a little bit like an emotional sibling to Ruby Sparks (2012) and Stranger Than Fiction (2006).
A former actress, writer, and director (Aubrey Plaza) goes to a mansion in the woods to get some peace and quiet while trying to come up with the premise for her next big movie. A lot of the conversations in the first act threaten to eat their own tail, especially when Sarah Gadon, the pregnant woman, who lives in the mansion with her boyfriend Christopher Abbott (of It Comes at Night, 2017, and A Most Violent Year, 2014, fame), asks Plaza why she insists on starring in her own movies.
The name of the game in the first act is the cringey back and forth between a couple on the ropes: the halting qualifications and interruptions that overly indicate a pre-marital rift. As per usual, most of the movie seems to be about how three young white people ought to go get jobs instead of living out a tortured artist’s fantasy while their family’s generational wealth foots the bill. The blowout after dinner is the most indirectly sexual conversation about the failings of modern feminism that I’ve heard, echoes some of the awkward conservative mimicry of Knives Out‘s comparable scene. Plaza’s desire to “be a slave” to a man, her willingness to submit in exchange for a release of control send Gadon into apoplexy while titillating Abbott. And the twist at the end of this act with Plaza’s admission is at once seductive and stupid to the point of nihilism.
With the end of act one, we find our attention directed back to a framed narrative, which doesn’t offer very much in the way of advancement of the story or its elevation. The casting decisions for the first and second act are probably the thing that caught most critics’ eyes when they saw this for the first time last week. It’s hard to really discuss the second act in any detail without spoiling some of the splendor of the movie, so suffice it say that the second act is variations on a theme, heavily reliant on mirror scenes, structural symmetry, and mise-en-abyme (that mirror within a mirror feeling you get from the poster). Tell you want, you can fast forward through the movie right now and join me after the jump.
The second act has some recurring slapstick jokes, the stagehand’s diarrhea, the spilled coffee, the non-mellow weed, that sneak up on you, but don’t really shift the story into a consistent, new tone. The relationships between the Big Three have gone through a permutation and Abbott’s nickname–“bear”–throws the audience a bone in terms of reading of motifs. Plaza’s performance of performing is mesmerizing, despite the fact that the director’s plot to trick his star into method acting is a creatively bankrupt idea.
I’m turning my gears about how Black Bear could’ve been improved, and honestly it’s hard to say. The movie is caught up in its structural games and atmospheric choices instead of a single arc of a story.
