Mutual Appreciation
Directed by Andrew Bujalski
Crossover
Directed by Preston A. Whitmore II
Two movies couldn’t be more alike than Preston A. Whitmore II’s Crossover and Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation. Both detail how young people in fashionable social groups—urban sports enthusiasts and urban post-graduates—fumble their emotions. Together, these films provide relative barometers of contemporary ethics. Each movie asks: What is trust, friendship, love? Guess which one received virtually unanimous cultural cachet.
Bujalski has been the focus of extraordinary media adulation while Whitmore II remains virtually unknown. Let’s hope the two directors’ different racial identities are not the issue and realize this media acclaim merely—confoundingly—signifies class approval. Mutual Appreciation emerges from the white middle-class, and is set in hipster Brooklyn, while Crossover focuses on minimum-wage blacks in Detroit’s inner city. These contrasting tales have similar styles: both low-budget features are written and directed with paltry means. Bujalski and Whitmore’s rudimentary techniques take us back to the beginning of cinema; their crudeness—which makes each film somewhat embarrassing to watch—becomes a badge of sincerity. This is not a virtue, although critics have pretended it is in Bujalski’s case—further proof that middle-class bias obscures the mainstream’s sense of what matters.
In Crossover, boyhood friends Tech (Anthony Mackie) and Noah (Wesley Jonathan) hope that their basketball skills will ease them into adulthood. Tech plays the nonprofessional streetball circuit while working on his GED and Noah hopes for an athletic scholarship. Ambition exposes Tech’s deep-seated envy, even when Noah’s good fortune turns bad. In Mutual Appreciation, indie rocker Alan (Justin Rice) reunites with old friend Lawrence (Andrew Bjualski), a young college professor. Their loyalty is tested when Alan’s attraction to Lawrence’s girlfriend Ellie, (Rachel Clift), is reciprocated. These mundane dilemmas are never made compelling; you might infer their significance only because the stories are already familiar—from life, if not from hip-hop and pop albums and other movies. Crossover recalls the ghetto pressures on male friendship that Charles Stone III’s Paid In Full made so vivid. Mutual Appreciation recalls the talkiness and minimalist style of Eric Rohmer movies. But each descends from brilliance to banality; in other words, bathos.
If seriousness or aesthetic excellence were considered, Crossover and Mutual Appreciation would still run neck and neck. Fascination with either is determined by prior interest—in class type or situational matter, hip-hop or indie-rock sensibility. If I give the edge to Crossover, it’s because good actors Mackie and Jonathan are allowed to express emotion while Bujalski and company settle for dim, quasi-expressive “naturalism.” Like the difference between state-of-the-art, innovative hip-hop record production and intentional low-fi indie blandness, Crossover resolves its drama with Old School blatancy while Mutual Appreciation ends as saccharine and twee as a Belle and Sebastian CD.
Bujalski’s deliberate artlessness is a transparent form of hubris. Mutual Appreciation is less obnoxious than his frowzy debut Funny Ha Ha, yet egotism preens through every unfocussed, unsteady composition and every palsied, diffident line of dialogue. It is as far from Rohmer’s exquisite emotional precision as Crossover is from Charles Stone’s rich psychological insight into masculine camaraderie. Yes, Crossover is clearly a throwback. Whitmore’s underpopulated “crowd” scenes, and his almost meta use of stock montages to establish changes of setting, resemble the primitive ingenuity of black silent film pioneer, Oscar Micheaux. Yet Whitmore’s in touch with movie populism. (Note how Wayne Brady’s shady sports agent character evokes the more politically conscious blaxploitation movies.) There’s less to respond to in Bujalski’s elitist choice of non-style, represented as a hipper-than-thou style. He seems afraid of what cinematic eloquence will reveal. Moments that beg for visual expressiveness (such as Alan and Ellie’s night together), simply molder on screen with arrogant slacker lassitude.
In Crossover, Tech and Noah finally grow up, despite the life-expectancy of ghetto males, through trenchant moments that confront the issues of money and gender power games. In Mutual Appreciation, Alan, Lawrence and Ellie stay snug within society’s safety net. They inhabit a Peanuts cartoon by way of Richard Linklater that pretends to be a John Cassavetes art object. Bujalski flatters the media-empowered generation who, believing they invented the way of all flesh, decide to remain sophomores forever. And the sophomoric media flatters Bujalski right back. Primitive griot vs. primitive narcissist. Take your pick.
