“Gabriel”

Rory Culkin stars as a mentally unstable youth convinced that tracking down his first love is the answer to his problems in director Lou Howe’s debut feature.

by Dave Rooney

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival (World Narrative Competition)

Cast: Rory Culkin, David Call, Deirdre O’Connell, Emily Meade, Lynn Cohen, Louisa Krause, Alexia Rasmussen

No rating, 88 minutes.

“I’m just gonna live. Like a normal person.” That simple declaration comes with a painful struggle both for the title character who sets himself that goal and for his anxious family in writer-director Lou Howe’s Gabriel, an intimate glimpse of the solitude, anger and frustration of mental illness. The intense, uncomfortable drama’s downbeat nature is offset to a degree by the sensitivity of its observation, but the film serves primarily as a showcase for the emotionally raw lead performance of Rory Culkin.

Like a lot of American indies from the Sundance fringe and beyond, this one doesn’t entirely escape the trap of romanticizing its melancholia. But there’s also an undeniable authenticity that inches under the skin in the way Howe tracks his central figure’s obsessive journey. His characters and their conflicted feelings are fully inhabited by a fine, naturalistic cast that dips into the pool of strong New York stage actors.

However, the riveting focus is Culkin, who has grown since his tender early appearance in Kenneth Lonergan’s beautiful 2000 feature, You Can Count On Me, into an accomplished actor, capable of exploring every nuance in a role that requires him to be both abrasive and vulnerable.

Handsomely shot in and around New York by Wyatt Garfield in icy-blue winter tones, the film acquires its momentum from Gabe’s mission to reconnect with Alice (Emily Meade), a girl from his childhood. The purposeful determination with which he follows her trail, despite having had no contact with her for years, says plenty about his disturbed state of mind. But the details of his condition, his family history and even the adolescent romance that in his head has become his key to wholeness are shared with judicious restraint.

What we do gather from the start is that he’s out on a trial release from a mental health facility, and that his unsupervised excursions in search of Alice are a cause of instant panic to his widowed mother Meredith (Deirdre O’Connell) and his older brother Matt (David Call), a law student soon to take the bar exam. Despite their concern for him, and their love tempered by fatigue and fear, Gabe blames them for his father’s suicide, a shadow that hangs heavily over the family. And he resents sober, sensible Matt’s progress in carving out a life for himself, with a career path and a sweet fiancee (Alexia Rasmussen).

Anyone with experience of chronic depression and instability in a family member or friend is likely to be touched by Gabriel, which is unflinching in its honesty about the self-imprisonment of the title character’s condition as well as the danger that his unpredictable behavior represents. There’s a compelling volatility to his sudden escapes and his edgy interactions both with people close to him and strangers, often underscored by composer Patrick Higgins’ agitato strings.

Gabe’s quieter moments with his worn-down mother and his grounded, nurturing grandmother (Lynn Cohen) are wrenching. Meredith’s admission that she has lost faith in his ability to function in the outside world is a particularly strong scene, and Howe shows maturity and assurance in his decision to keep the emotional climate mostly subdued, despite occasional threats of violence. Staying consistent with that vein, Gabe’s ultimate encounter with the elusive Alice concludes the film on an effective note of haunting poignancy.

Culkin is terrific, holding nothing back as he quietly plots or frets or mumbles or just stares out with hollow-eyed numbness in probing close-ups.

But while it’s not without suspense, the drama does become somewhat monotonous, even at less than 90 minutes. The tone is just too unrelenting in its moroseness; it could have used a leavening moment or two of humor as a break from the sustained sense of desperation laced with minimal hope. Howe has made a polished, intelligent debut feature that approaches its characters and situations with dramatic and psychological integrity. But it’s more successful as an individual portrait than as a multi-dimensional story, testing our involvement in much the same way Gabe tests the limits of his family’s love.

 

“Time Is Illmatic”

Nas remembers the birth of his extraordinary hip-hop career.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival Not rated, 74 minutes

 

SUPERSTAR MC NAS remembers his humble roots in One9’s Time Is Illmatic, an evocative appreciation of his debut album on the occasion of its 20th anniversary. Though presented concurrently with the inevitable CD reissue (titled Illmatic XX), the doc avoids the prefab feel of many similarly targeted music films, instead offering a strong sense of the neighborhood—New York City’s Queensbridge Houses, the largest public-housing project in the U.S.—that served as both a rallying cry for musicians who grew up there and a constant threat to their lives. While it’s too limited in scope for much of a theatrical life, the film will play well to hip-hop fans on cable.

One of the aspects that keeps Time from projecting an advertorial vibe—its indifference to outside voices—may also leave casual fans wanting a bit more. The director never offers the expected testimonials from fellow musicians and others attesting to Illmatic’s influence on hip-hop (though Cornel West does pop up briefly). We’re presumed to understand the platinum-selling record’s legacy going in, so instead we dive in with plentiful first-person storytelling from both Nas (born Nasir Jones) and his brother Jabari “Jungle” Jones, with crucial input from their father, jazz musician Olu Dara. (Producers who crafted the record’s beats make quick but welcome appearances as well.)

While the star tends toward earnestness—the “who’d’a thought…?” appreciation of someone not taking stardom for granted—Jungle provides much of the pic’s color, getting many of the film’s laughs (in a post-screening concert, Nas chuckled that Jungle was the film’s star) and providing an eyewitness account of what Time presents as the catalyzing moment of the artist’s career: the shooting death of Willy “Ill Will” Graham, the rapper’s close friend and collaborator in early hip-hop experiments. After that tragedy, which happened in their building’s courtyard, Nas threw himself into the creative burst that quickly drew attention from outside Queensbridge.

The filmmakers focus more on storytelling — recounting rivalries between Queens rappers and the South Bronx’s Boogie Down Productions; early support from Roxanne Shante and MC Serch; the rapper’s discovery by and quick signing to Columbia Records—than on making the most of the period’s music. This is not one of those rock docs that makes viewers move in their seats, and it often cuts away from its best performance footage before we’re ready to leave. It’s busy saving space for present-day renditions of songs made famous on Illmatic.

These segments afford little examinations of individual songs—as when Q-Tip cites a couplet from “One Love” that eloquently describes how the mass incarceration of young black men destroys families and communities. But they aren’t as musically thrilling as the vintage footage.

The doc barely talks about how the record was received and what it led to—a career full of multiplatinum records and sold-out arenas—but it wraps up with some time at Harvard, where a new Nasir Jones Fellowship will promote hip-hop scholarship. The Ivy League is an odd place for the film to go in its one request for outside legitimization of the artist’s work. But for a rapper who once lamented that his people are in “projects or jail, never Harvard or Yale,” perhaps it’s appropriate.

 

“Goodbye To All That”

Paul Schneider plays a man reeling from an unexpected divorce in the directorial debut of “Junebug” scribe Angus MacLachlan.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival (World Narrative Competition)

Paul Schneider, Melanie Lynskey, Audrey Scott, Anna Camp, Heather Graham, Heather Lawless, Ashley Hinshaw, Michael Chernus, Amy Sedaris, Celia Weston

Rated, 86 minutes.

 

IN HIS FIRST film as a director, “Junebug” screenwriter Angus MacLachlan goes back to North Carolina for the story of a man blindsided by divorce. Paul Schneider shines in the role, stumbling through a dating world that has changed since his character got hitched, thanks mostly to social media. His turn is a fine fit for the seriocomic spirit of a picture that, while less distinctive than the earlier film, should have little trouble connecting with viewers beyond the fest circuit.way Gabe tests the limits of his family’s love.

Schneider’s Otto Wall is an avid runner who can barely cross a room without tripping on something. After he’s injured in an ATV accident, his daughter Edie (Audrey Scott) asks mom Annie (Melanie Lynskey), “Why do these things always happen to Daddy?” “Because he doesn’t pay attention” is the reply.

While Otto comes across as a very caring husband and father, clearly the film agrees with Annie’s diagnosis. Otto is flabbergasted when she announces she wants a divorce — or, rather, when her therapist (Celia Weston) does, in a comically infuriating scene. The break is official before he can even process it, but a Facebook-enabled discovery that Annie had been cheating helps Otto get comfortable with the idea of dating new women.

Every divorce should be this hard: With seemingly no effort online, Otto has soon connected with three different beauties who want nothing from him but sex. (One of the women goes haywire later, but what’s a breakup without a hot rebound fling with a manic-depressive?) While he certainly enjoys himself, though, Otto’s confused by the lack of interest in deeper connections — something MacLachlan clearly sees as tied to our present mode of friending. His need for something grounded is more pressing in light of his relationship with Edie, who is growing distant for reasons he can’t peg.

Some of those have to do with Annie, and MacLachlan manipulates us a bit in order to make us blind in the same ways Otto has been: Otto’s ex behaves with such cold self-absorption, kicking him out of his home and then expecting him to make everything easy for her, that we can’t help but long for a showdown in which he makes her see how awful she’s being. The film pointedly denies us this gratification, and eventually suggests we were wrong to want it — that although we never witnessed his failures in the relationship, they were real, and his job now is to grow instead of vent his anger.

From this stance, even the most interesting of Otto’s love interests — an old summer-camp girlfriend coping with losses of her own, played beautifully by Heather Lawless — is at best a catalyst, nudging him to be more attentive to the bonds he has before trying to forge new ones. The lesson may be too pat, but Goodbye is gentle in the delivery.