There There (2022)
Directed by Andrew Bujalski
Andrew Bujalski’s new film There There may go down as the definitive COVID-era production. While Steven Soderbergh produced a couple of lowkey bangers in No Sudden Move and Kimi, those were productions composed in spite of COVID-19. Other films like Rob Savage’s Host or Sam Levinson’s Malcolm & Marie were direct responses to the pandemic, but utilized frameworks that were familiar; for every Host there’s (the vastly superior) Unfriended, for every Malcolm & Marie there’s a litany of (vastly superior) chamber dramas. What Bujalski does in There There is not quite like anything I’ve seen before, though admittedly it’s an experiment with a limited purview. But I think it’s an admirable effort, realized with great aplomb through Bujalski's remarkable humanism.
Divided into a series of vignettes involving unnamed characters, the film opens with a lyrical morning-after conversation between a clinician (Lili Taylor) and a bar owner (Lennie James). Their one-night stand is a little more than either of them bargained for, with James delighting Taylor with his verbal repartee. It’s a sweet exchange of pillow talk that has an eerie quality to it. The lighting within the scene is peculiar and the editing pattern defies your typical back-and-forth, match-on-action sequences. And then you realize: these people are not in the same room. It’s a parlor trick with Bujalski making no effort to conceal the idea that these two individuals are performing in front of an iPhone, having this profoundly intimate conversation with one another. The exchange ends with a note of melancholy before we see a musical interlude involving The War on Drugs’s Jon Natchez playing a variety of instruments.
The next sequence involves Taylor again, this time with her AA sponsor and friend (Annie LaGanga). Akin to the first story, Taylor and LaGanga open with some rather banal platitudes and the excitement of Taylor’s sexual escapade with James before delving into matters of spirituality and the importance of connection. Again, Bujalski stitches the sequences with no effort to conceal the scars of the edit, but instead highlights how these conversations remain prescient and vital to those having it. The gravity of it, by design, feels a bit lost in subsequent sequences involving Jason Schwartzman, which lean more comic and are focused on Zoom/FaceTime conversations, where the interaction is deliberately told through artifice.
Bujalski has always maximized what he can do with what little he has. The mumblecore movement that he spearheaded is defined by their shoestring budgets. But whereas his contemporaries have drifted to streaming television or vanished altogether, Bujalski’s capacity to adapt has been notable. Whether it’s the experimental vigor of Computer Chess or the familiar but nevertheless warm qualities of Results and especially Support the Girls, it’s this tangible kindness that he brings to his work that transcends genre. And with There There, shot as the world was forced into isolation, I’m moved by the casual insights of his experiment. I’ve never had a serious long-distance relationship but now I think of someone living far away, someone I admire and enjoyed conversing with, whether it was through choppy FaceTime exchanges or hours on the phone. It was a connection that felt powerful until it didn’t. There There, in the time of ‘rona, suggests that our connections do not take into account physical distance; there are people who will have a positive (and in some cases, negative) affect on your life and it’s up to you to decide how to weave them into the tapestry of your being. Sometimes it will clash with the background. And sometimes, it can provide you with a life worth living.