First of all, let me say that I didn't enjoy this movie. I mean that as a compliment. It was not entertaining, nor was it titillating or provocative. I do like this movie; I like it very much. It made me uncomfortable. I cringed at some of the things the characters said to one another; more importantly, I cringed at what wasn't said. The overall effect was quite riveting, honestly.

I find it interesting that Alejandro mentions an "affinity with European sensibilities" in an earlier blog post--I did not see this comment until after I'd watched the movie, throughout which I kept coming back to the idea that he had somehow steered his cinematic surfboard onto la nouvelle vague. I usually try to stay away from direct comparisons between newer work and established world classics; doing so, it seems to me, tends to risk either insulting the newer work or reducing the established work to some kind of vacant category. This kind of comparison is also too easily misread as an indirect assertion that there is "nothing new under the sun" (ironically, perhaps, there is to my mind perhaps nothing more tired and devoid of intellectual novelty--read this last word in its most purely latinate sense--than this little nugget of defeatism). I don't feel, however, that such a comparison would have a deleterious effect upon the expression of my opinion in this case, for reasons which I will eventually elucidate, so let me just come out and say it: this movie strikes me as something that might in some alternate history have been written by Rohmer, directed by Truffaut, and edited by Godard.

But that does sound reductive--maybe even dismissive. If that were all I had to say, I probably wouldn't say anything at all.

Yes, there is a kind of European sensibility which permeates this movie. The almost dialectical juxtapositions between sound and video might even be called Soviet-flavored; Vertov would probably have appreciated this movie on a formal or aesthetic level. He might not have seen the humanism in it, though, because it's such an essentially American story, right down to the uncomfortable businesslike interactions between the characters. Vertov might simply not have seen the scared human souls beneath the all but impenetrable shells these characters wear, because the people he knew in post-Revolution Russia wore a different kind of shell. This specificity to milieu, this essentially American, 21st century quality is what makes Around the Bay something much more than the mere masturbatory regurgitation of the 20th century that so unfortunately dominates the prevailing creative (I use this word begrudgingly here) methodologies of our time. I personally loathe postmodern referentiality; I spoke at some length about it in a manifesto that was once a part of my Web site. It's an approach that favors a particularly juvenile strain of cynicism over all other modes of thought, and dismisses the whole of human cultural history with a nihilistic attitude not altogether unlike that evinced by a surly teenager, who when confronted by his concerned parents about his sagging scholastic performance, mutters "I don't care." Practitioners of this sort of thing are too frightened of the implications of our present reality--of history--to acknowledge our culture's past as amounting to anything more than fodder for simpleminded mockery. All of this is, perhaps, an understandable reaction to the dehumanized world which has been born of the unholy marriage of industrialization and world war, but it is nevertheless an unseemly and sophomoric reaction.

Around The Bay's characters inhabit this dehumanized world, but instead of taking the facile approach of letting them wallow vacuously in self-pity, Alejandro shows them to be living, hurting, feeling souls. Wyatt is undeniably a bastard, but the sympathy with which he is depicted here is equally impossible to deny. I don't at all agree with Phillip Lopate's readings of the character or his role within the framework of the movie's resolution; he asks why Wyatt doesn't try to relate to his family--this misses the point of the movie entirely, I think. Wyatt doesn't even know what relation is. He is preternaturally indisposed toward caring for anything or anyone other than himself. Other people are things to him. And yet there is this small spark of humanity that would cry out from within him if it had a voice with which to cry. The presence of this spark is the source of his pain and vulnerability, and the observability of this phenomenon in our culture is what saves the presentation of the character from getting anywhere close to veering toward sentimentality. He's a kind of modern male reincarnation of Emma Bovary, and I must say that Steve's performance and the overall cinematic handling thereof are the two things that really make this movie a complete and refreshingly insightful piece of work--without an understanding of why Wyatt acts the way he does, none of the other characters' lives have any context.

To a large degree, I see the three main characters as three faces of the same archetypal modern American personality--self-involved and only looking for external connections (to other people) on a subconscious level. I don't think it's fair to say that Wyatt's "parenting"--or lack thereof--is what made his children the way they are. In a way, I think Daisy and Noah are Wyatt as he would be at their respective ages. Noah, for example, is no less walled-off from those around him than Wyatt is, but the brutal honesty and openness that comes with his age ("she's not my sister," his continual defiance of others' wishes, his open, yet violent indifference toward Daisy's departure, etc.) will be beaten out of him by the cruelties of "growing up," such that it's not at all difficult to imagine him becoming another Wyatt one day. Again, this is not to say that the point of the movie is necessarily that Wyatt's children will follow in his inauspicious footsteps simply because he is a crummy parent; my reading is that all three characters suffer from the same malaise, that the cause of that malaise is intentionally not made clear because doing so would lower the work to the plane of facile didacticism (more on that below), and that for all intents and purposes, dramatically speaking, the three central characters are only one person, viewed at different stages of personal development. This, I think, is why the multiple-protagonist approach is especially appropriate here.

I find myself especially haunted by Daisy. She seems to be at that point in one's life where one either decides to take control of one's own progress as a human being or else to passively float on the current of the society in which one lives. All too often, I think, this is an irrevocable decision, and one that we all have to make. Among the three, she alone seems to be aware of the dysfunction in the behavior of those around her (as well as in her own). We are not shown any definitive moment wherein she either decides not to end up like her father or else, alternatively, accepts defeat, but we can perhaps infer from everything else we've seen that defeat is in the cards for her. On some level, this makes her the most clearly tragic figure of the three, because we can see that she at least has some kind of choice. I have to say that I sort of have a "crush" on her which goes beyond Katherine's quite apparent physical attractiveness; the character has the same kind of ineffable "lost" quality that pretty much every woman with whom I've ever been romantically involved has had to one degree or another. For this reason, and because hers is the character closest to me in terms of age, I identified especially with Daisy. The similarity between the character and people whom I've actually known and loved is probably the thing that most effectively saved the movie from operating on a purely abstract level, for me at least. The "three-headed protagonist" aspect of the movie gives it a good deal of universality, I think.

I also feel compelled to say, in connection with the above observation about the ambiguity of Daisy's choice, that the ambiguity allows the movie to avoid falling into the predictably didactic trap into which most other directors would have fallen. The avoidance of a central, overarching "moral" is, I would argue, perhaps the movie's greatest success. Daisy's dilemma is substantial, and the fact that she doesn't openly whine and kvetch about it to everyone around her, without the least bit of prodding, makes her a far more substantial character. The nature of her problem is left as ambiguous and as inscrutable as it would be in life. (If the movie had tried to "wrap everything up" more quickly, it might have risked edging into the realm of open exposition, or have lost some of that lingering atmosphere of interiority that prevents the characters' conflicts from coming across as being melodramatic.) But Alejandro goes further than simply slicing off a tranche de vie, too, by making use of those juxtapositions of sound and image I've mentioned before to reveal the tension within the characters. That's a much more effective and intelligent approach than writing and/or coaching forth extemporized whiny dialogue (not to mention that doing so is fundamentally a more cinematic approach). Tragedy requires some indication of free will in the tragic figure's response to his or her situation; it's an idea that goes back at least as far as Aristotle's Poetics.

This movie manages both to move me as a human being and to excite me intellectually. Since I too live in the dehumanized world I've been describing, this is no mean feat.

Jarrod Whaley
www.oakstreetfilms.com