Chaos Theory
Directed by Marcos Siega
Against the rank ineptitude of Leatherheads and the shameless stupidity of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, an excellent American romantic comedy has blessedly appeared. Chaos Theory, starring Ryan Reynolds, confirms the underground vision of screenwriter Daniel Taplitz, who has re-imagined the screwball comedy in original terms. Working outside of mainstream chick flicks (You've Got Mail), hipster flicks (Before Sunrise) and chump flicks (Knocked Up), Taplitz has pursued questions of attraction and commitment through personal language and neurotic obsession. His previous films—Commandments and Breakin’ All the Rules (which he also directed)—are among the most compelling overlooked movies of the last decade.
If Taplitz was a jazz musician, he’d be praised for his ability to swing. Chaos Theory starts like a familiar American Pie skit: A post-adolescent couple panics just before their wedding ceremony. The bride (Elizabeth Harnois) wonders if she’s a “slut in white” and the groom (Mike Erwin) frets about her recent one-week final fling with a different guy. The fears are blunt and the talk is MTV brazen. But then Taplitz suddenly changes key to explore the sexual mores that his over-privileged nearly-weds take for granted.
Shifting to the bride’s father, author and corporate lecturer Frank Allen (Reynolds), who demands a last-minute talk with the groom he pities, Taplitz raises the romantic-comedy stakes. Chaos Theory digs deeper into the sexual ethics we inherit but don’t examine. Frank Allen narrates his own marital history as “Full of ups and downs. Dazzling extremes. Certainty, Doubt, Deceit and Truth.” This isn’t the dorm-room jabber Richard Linklater’s groupies mistake for intellectual articulation. It announces Taplitz’s exploratory system: Frank is an efficiency expert who thinks he’s figured out how to control destiny, and Chaos Theory illustrates each phase of his wake-up call.
Flashing back to how he came to marry the bride’s mother, Susan (Emily Mortimer), Frank advises his future son-in-law on the meaning of love and commitment—a confession that is also a confrontation with the confusion that followed the sexual revolution. Frank and Susan were 1980s party animals, but other than a few minimal song cues, Taplitz isn’t interested in exploiting nostalgia; his screenwriting gift limns the timeless gests and feints of love-hungry men and women. His dialogue is openly psychological; it’s the exposed language of ardent pussy-hounds and husband-hunters whose desperation opens them up to farce. The method by which Susan, when tipsy at a New Year’s Eve party, declares that she is going to marry one of the men in her circle is an audacious Taplitz joke—funny even if you don’t think about it, humbling if you do. Taplitz understands how sex inveigles as much as it delights.
This humorous sense of what confounds people in their most personal interactions—the way Frank uncovers Susan’s sexual history and his own feelings of masculine camaraderie—links Taplitz to the screwball classicists that critics typically dredge up when writing about modern comic filmmakers. Even Reynolds’ controlled mania suggests Joel McCrea rather than Cary Grant, befitting a subtler screwball sensibility. Although Taplitz shows smarts to match Ernst Lubitsch and Samson Raphelson’s Continental sophistication, that’s not it. Neither does Frank’s stern lecture repeat Billy Wilder’s annoying mixture of cynicism and sentimentality. And Preston Sturges’ wild verbal dexterity isn’t it either. Taplitz stands alone, uniquely charting the insecurities of post–Production Code sex. That’s why Commandments satirized old-time morality to test modern-day fidelity. And why Breakin’ All the Rules dared subvert the stereotype of black sexual freedom in the story of Jamie Foxx and Gabrielle Union sending each other conflicting signals. When Frank talks about phallic “Truth,” or the decor of his hotel assignation features vaginal Rorschach paintings, Taplitz is clearly on singular terrain.
Taplitz isn’t a clinical adventurer like France’s Catherine Breillat or Jean-Claude Brisseau; he respects the screwball convention because he’s a romantic. Anyone who suffered through Ira Sachs’ dismal Married Life with its phony frank sex-talk should appreciate that Taplitz’s characters aren’t selfish misanthropes; they long to understand their longings. “Do you love her?” Frank asks his potential son-in-law. “Wonder why it isn’t pure and constant?” Just because filmmakers haven’t asked these questions since those Broadway-to-Hollywood farces Under the Yum Yum Tree, Good Neighbor Sam, Sunday in New York and A Period of Adjustment doesn’t mean the worries—the crises—aren’t pertinent. Through Frank’s temperate spiel on whim and chance (“I’ve decided to never make another decision again”), Chaos Theory deals with the phenomenon of blended families and complicated choices that are a reality of our open-sex society. Taplitz makes screwball comedy less screwy.
Director Marcos Siega makes Taplitz’s script look terrific. Chaos Theory’s elegant design is part of Siega’s sensibility; he puts Taplitz’s ideas into felt images. A tangerine motif extends from martinis to a hotel room, even cohering with the traffic sign of a man falling off a cliff reflecting Frank’s dejection. And when Frank cracks up and streaks at a hockey game screen-left, it’s balanced screen-right by his best friend (Stuart Townsend) suffering a profound realization. The guys’ one fight happens on a suspension bridge where Frank is left sagging—a perfect image of lonely friendlessness. This is apposite filmmaking—what goes underappreciated in Sturges. Siega builds on the craft he showed in Pretty Persuasion, that exemplary satire of hip cynicism. With cinematographer Ramsey Nickell, Siega gives beauty to a comic genre that Judd Apatow consigns to TV-style blankness. If you can appreciate the difference, see Chaos Theory.
Directed by Marcos Siega
Against the rank ineptitude of Leatherheads and the shameless stupidity of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, an excellent American romantic comedy has blessedly appeared. Chaos Theory, starring Ryan Reynolds, confirms the underground vision of screenwriter Daniel Taplitz, who has re-imagined the screwball comedy in original terms. Working outside of mainstream chick flicks (You've Got Mail), hipster flicks (Before Sunrise) and chump flicks (Knocked Up), Taplitz has pursued questions of attraction and commitment through personal language and neurotic obsession. His previous films—Commandments and Breakin’ All the Rules (which he also directed)—are among the most compelling overlooked movies of the last decade.
If Taplitz was a jazz musician, he’d be praised for his ability to swing. Chaos Theory starts like a familiar American Pie skit: A post-adolescent couple panics just before their wedding ceremony. The bride (Elizabeth Harnois) wonders if she’s a “slut in white” and the groom (Mike Erwin) frets about her recent one-week final fling with a different guy. The fears are blunt and the talk is MTV brazen. But then Taplitz suddenly changes key to explore the sexual mores that his over-privileged nearly-weds take for granted.
Shifting to the bride’s father, author and corporate lecturer Frank Allen (Reynolds), who demands a last-minute talk with the groom he pities, Taplitz raises the romantic-comedy stakes. Chaos Theory digs deeper into the sexual ethics we inherit but don’t examine. Frank Allen narrates his own marital history as “Full of ups and downs. Dazzling extremes. Certainty, Doubt, Deceit and Truth.” This isn’t the dorm-room jabber Richard Linklater’s groupies mistake for intellectual articulation. It announces Taplitz’s exploratory system: Frank is an efficiency expert who thinks he’s figured out how to control destiny, and Chaos Theory illustrates each phase of his wake-up call.
Flashing back to how he came to marry the bride’s mother, Susan (Emily Mortimer), Frank advises his future son-in-law on the meaning of love and commitment—a confession that is also a confrontation with the confusion that followed the sexual revolution. Frank and Susan were 1980s party animals, but other than a few minimal song cues, Taplitz isn’t interested in exploiting nostalgia; his screenwriting gift limns the timeless gests and feints of love-hungry men and women. His dialogue is openly psychological; it’s the exposed language of ardent pussy-hounds and husband-hunters whose desperation opens them up to farce. The method by which Susan, when tipsy at a New Year’s Eve party, declares that she is going to marry one of the men in her circle is an audacious Taplitz joke—funny even if you don’t think about it, humbling if you do. Taplitz understands how sex inveigles as much as it delights.
This humorous sense of what confounds people in their most personal interactions—the way Frank uncovers Susan’s sexual history and his own feelings of masculine camaraderie—links Taplitz to the screwball classicists that critics typically dredge up when writing about modern comic filmmakers. Even Reynolds’ controlled mania suggests Joel McCrea rather than Cary Grant, befitting a subtler screwball sensibility. Although Taplitz shows smarts to match Ernst Lubitsch and Samson Raphelson’s Continental sophistication, that’s not it. Neither does Frank’s stern lecture repeat Billy Wilder’s annoying mixture of cynicism and sentimentality. And Preston Sturges’ wild verbal dexterity isn’t it either. Taplitz stands alone, uniquely charting the insecurities of post–Production Code sex. That’s why Commandments satirized old-time morality to test modern-day fidelity. And why Breakin’ All the Rules dared subvert the stereotype of black sexual freedom in the story of Jamie Foxx and Gabrielle Union sending each other conflicting signals. When Frank talks about phallic “Truth,” or the decor of his hotel assignation features vaginal Rorschach paintings, Taplitz is clearly on singular terrain.
Taplitz isn’t a clinical adventurer like France’s Catherine Breillat or Jean-Claude Brisseau; he respects the screwball convention because he’s a romantic. Anyone who suffered through Ira Sachs’ dismal Married Life with its phony frank sex-talk should appreciate that Taplitz’s characters aren’t selfish misanthropes; they long to understand their longings. “Do you love her?” Frank asks his potential son-in-law. “Wonder why it isn’t pure and constant?” Just because filmmakers haven’t asked these questions since those Broadway-to-Hollywood farces Under the Yum Yum Tree, Good Neighbor Sam, Sunday in New York and A Period of Adjustment doesn’t mean the worries—the crises—aren’t pertinent. Through Frank’s temperate spiel on whim and chance (“I’ve decided to never make another decision again”), Chaos Theory deals with the phenomenon of blended families and complicated choices that are a reality of our open-sex society. Taplitz makes screwball comedy less screwy.
Director Marcos Siega makes Taplitz’s script look terrific. Chaos Theory’s elegant design is part of Siega’s sensibility; he puts Taplitz’s ideas into felt images. A tangerine motif extends from martinis to a hotel room, even cohering with the traffic sign of a man falling off a cliff reflecting Frank’s dejection. And when Frank cracks up and streaks at a hockey game screen-left, it’s balanced screen-right by his best friend (Stuart Townsend) suffering a profound realization. The guys’ one fight happens on a suspension bridge where Frank is left sagging—a perfect image of lonely friendlessness. This is apposite filmmaking—what goes underappreciated in Sturges. Siega builds on the craft he showed in Pretty Persuasion, that exemplary satire of hip cynicism. With cinematographer Ramsey Nickell, Siega gives beauty to a comic genre that Judd Apatow consigns to TV-style blankness. If you can appreciate the difference, see Chaos Theory.
