Abnormal Exposure

Joe Swanberg stood naked in front of a crowded room.

Ordinarily, such a dramatic hook would solely function as a figure of speech, but in this case it contains near-literal connotations. Swanberg, a 27year-old, Chicago-based filmmaker closely associated with one of the latest trends in DIY creativity, had just premiered his fourth ultra-low budget feature, Nights and Weekends—in which he appears unabashedly nude—at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin. That was March 2008. At the time, Swanberg was already a staple of the festival, which dared to show his sexually explicit and defiantly non-commercial work when few other places paid any attention. This week, he returns to Austin for the premiere of his fifth feature, the Brooklyn-set Alexander the Last.

Swanberg co-directed Nights and Weekends with his vibrant muse, Greta Gerwig, an expressive young actress whose face rose to prominence in the output of Swanberg and his peers. Now, roughly a year later, Gerwig and Swanberg find themselves in wildly divergent creative spaces, with one central figure connecting their work: Noah Baumbach, the predominant custodian of cinematic discontent. Baumbach cast Gerwig in Greenberg (scheduled to release in 2010), alongside co-star Ben Stiller, and is the producer of Swanberg’s Alexander.

Baumbach, the Oscar-nominated writer-director of The Squid and the Whale, works on the cusp of Hollywood by making studio movies with stars while maintaining his own particular world—one generally populated with chronically dissatisfied personalities—in each project. His interest in Swanberg as a filmmaker comes into focus when considering the lucid tones of frustration in Nights and Weekends. In the movie, Swanberg and Gerwig play such a convincing couple (read Gerwig's take on working with Swanberg here) that it’s hard to believe they’re not actually together in real life (Swanberg’s wife, Kris, also makes movies).

During the intentionally awkward closing sequence, Swanberg and Gerwig—portraying two former lovers vainly attempting to ignite the flame of their failed relationship—writhe together in bed, graphically naked, with disastrously non-sexy results. At the premiere, members of the audience seemed utterly baffled. Even those intrigued by the drama would not soon forget the odd feeling percolating throughout the room during the unavoidably discomfiting post-screening Q&A, where questions mainly focused on the purpose of the uninhibited display. Needless to say, nobody mistook the movie for pornography.

“It’s one of the least sexy movies about sex I’ve seen by an American filmmaker,” says erstwhile SXSW producer Matt Dentler, whose decision to program Swanberg’s work boosted the filmmaker’s career. “It’s tricky, because I’m friends with Joe and Greta, so that was a very hard movie to watch. It’s full of tension and sex, but it’s not a movie to get off to. It’s about the tensions couples go through, and how sex is a real way of communicating—even when it’s destructive.” Later, one critic described it to me as part of Swanberg’s willingness to show himself growing up onscreen.

Gerwig admits to a certain uncomfortable intimacy engendered by the production. “My experience with Joe was completely unlike any I’ve had as an actor, and I will probably never work that way again,” she says. “It was a specific moment in both of our lives that just isn’t reproducible.”

And yet they remain intertwined—professionally, at least. We’re about to witness the defining moment when they shift from the microdynamics of the DIY filmmaker and actress to more complicated terrain.

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After seeing Baumbach’s 2007 dramedy Margot at the Wedding, Swanberg contacted the filmmaker through a mutual acquaintance to let him know how much he enjoyed his film. To his surprise, Baumbach wrote back with selfsame praise, professing his appreciation for Swanberg’s lighthearted Gerwig vehicle, Hannah Takes the Stairs. Swanberg sent him a rough cut of Nights and Weekends, and the two began an ongoing email correspondence.

At the time, Baumbach expressed interest in producing a movie called Save the Date that Swanberg hoped to direct. When that project fell through, Swanberg presented the idea for a smaller production, Alexander the Last, about two sisters competing for the affection of the same man. With Baumbach and Teeth star Jess Weixler still involved in their respective roles as producer and actress, the completed project premieres at SXSW March 14, with IFC Films simultaneously making the movie available on national cable.

Baumbach’s involvement may help Alexander the Last play to a larger audience than the one that turned out for Nights and Weekends, but the filmmaker insists that his usual improvisational rhythm hasn’t evolved much. “It wasn’t about trying to change the process,” Swanberg says of Baumbach’s involvement. “It was about having an idea and finding a way to actualize that through working with the actors.” Meanwhile, Baumbach has mined Swanberg’s talents, hiring him to shoot a recent offbeat sketch for Saturday Night Live that Baumbach directed several weeks ago.

Whatever the outcome, Baumbach’s interest in fostering Swanberg’s talent has a sort of logical connectivity. The disaffected and comically unstable protagonist played by Nicole Kidman in Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding feels vaguely Swanbergian—suggesting the cleaner type of product Swanberg might produce in 15 years. But to look that far into the future, it helps to take a look at the past.

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In the beginning, there was mumblecore. Of course, that’s not even a remotely accurate assessment, but neither is the term that began circulating around 2006 to describe the work of a tight-knit group of white, educated twentysomethings, including Swanberg, Andrew Bujalski (Mutual Appreciation), the Duplass Brothers (The Puffy Chair) and Aaron Katz (Quiet City). Whether or not it held any validity, the mumblecore wave received much love from the media and helped bring a new level of exposure to the lo-fi clique. It was subsequently killed off by Amy Taubin in a cantankerous eulogy for Film Comment in 2007 when the she derided “the clueless narcissism” of the personalities in Swanberg’s work.

Taubin’s decision to separate Swanberg from the divergent styles of the others in the so-called movement made sense. Unlike his colleagues, Swanberg relentlessly focuses on two central motifs: sex and technology. The young urbanites in his movies use laptops and IM communication almost as often as they engage in face-to-face discourse. Typically, technology informs the sex, and vice versa. Ringing phones and Internet distractions disrupt naked couplings; and sometimes, that’s the end and the means of the scene.

Reactions range from disgust to disinterest, and even committed viewers may find it tough to slog through every single one of Swanberg’s creations without reflecting on whether all the excess chatter and unclothed bodies are really necessary.

For example, in his first feature, Kissing on the Mouth, Swanberg filmed himself jacking off in the shower, an infamous moment that unfolds mainly as a distraction from the character he’s ostensibly portraying. (A Chicago Reader critic complained about the “uncomfortably close, warts-and-all intimacy.”) Likewise, Swanberg’s web series Young American Bodies, which has streamed on Nerve and IFC.com, generally centers on random exchanges between unclothed characters as if the director simply wants to entertain himself. Although Swanberg intends to capture sexual language rather than eroticism with the series, the idea grows repetitive. That’s the problem with connecting to Swanberg’s movies all at once: The recognition of consistency overwhelms the acknowledgment of any deeper intentions taking place below the surface.

Swanberg’s best accomplishments either avoid making a thematic overstatement or cleverly riff on it: LOL observes technological obsession as a Gen-X social code, while Hannah Takes the Stairs spends time in the company of goofy blogger types unable to comprehend—or at least enjoy—the vanity of their aimless lives. With Alexander the Last, Swanberg has attained a more polished, aesthetically impressive result than anything yielded by his previous features. Those viewers sick of Swanberg’s queasy handheld camera work will gladly embrace the calculated miseen-scene: The set-ups frequently serve to underline a claustrophobic reality for Weixler’s character, an actress named Alexander who develops a thing for her co-star (Barlow Jacobs) in a local play while her musician husband (Justin Rice, frontman for the Brooklyn indie rock group Bishop Allen) hits the road on tour. Surprisingly enough, nearly every shot seems imbued with heavy significance. Compared to Swanberg’s usual slapdash approach, hardly any of the film looks amateur, and none of the main actors are unprofessional. The director says he noticed too many other recent projects utilizing a casual camera style and decided the time had arrived to improve his technique. “I was very conscious with my early movies about the ways I shot them, but it looks too familiar now,” he says.

For all the tweaking of Swanberg’s method in Alexander, the on-screen fucking most definitely has not gone away. Weixler, Jacobs and Amy Seimetz (Alexander’s confused sister) all get a scene or two of naked exuberance—the siblings both act on their crushes for Barlow’s character— but the sex comes across as motivated by the plot. And yet uninitiated audiences may wonder if it’s all, well, appropriate to get the idea across.

“You have to be very prepared for Joe’s movies,” says Dentler. “He depicts sex in a way that’s very realistic, and that is not always a comfortable thing.”

Swanberg claims the explicit nature of his stories stemmed from a dissatisfaction with the presentation of sex elsewhere. “It’s frustrating for me to see very little sex in other movies, or to see it done in such a Hollywood way,” he explains. “If suddenly a ton of movies had really good sex scenes, I’d probably stop doing it.”

Still, Swanberg doesn’t avoid culpability when it comes to the risks of forcing actors into intimate situations. In Alexander the Last, the director of Weixler’s play (amusingly portrayed by Jane Adams) encourages the actress to pursue her extramarital attraction to her costar in order to enhance the performance. “I have probably been that director and given that dubious advice,” Swanberg admits. “Obviously, I want everyone to be happy and comfortable...but when I made this movie, I couldn’t be sure that something wouldn’t develop between the actors.”

Weixler confirms Swanberg’s edgy position. “Joe’s art ends up being the most important thing to him,” she says. “He does what’s best for the project. It’s hard to put a moral stance on it.”

For those in the position of selling Swanberg’s work to audiences, the sex represents only one part of the equation. Andrew Grant, whose DVD label Benten Films released LOL, emphasized the movie’s technological insights. “We tried to position it as a very up-to-the-moment portrait of how people in that age group deal with problems of communication,” he says. This narrative value moves through Swanberg’s films, with buzzing cellphones and online conversations serving as dramatic devices.

But it’s not easy for everyone to see that value amid the sex and purposeless chatter. IFC’s Arianna Bocco, vice president of production and acquisitions, says the company hopes to expand Swanberg’s audience to women and older viewers with the upcoming on-demand release of Alexander the Last, but admits it’s not a simple trick to pull off. “Joe’s audience is limited,” she says. “Not everyone is going to like his style, and that’s OK.”

Among the particularly vocal critics of late is film critic Glenn Kenny, the author of a recent blog post about Swanberg’s “slackness.” Kenny complains that Swanberg “gives me more grief than aesthetic bliss.” But staunch defenders, like The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, come to the rescue: “Swanberg gets intelligent people...to talk intelligently,” he recently wrote. “[He] lets uncertain people seem uncertain, and provides just enough governing structure to turn the meanderings of his smart, searching set into engaging and heartfelt drama.”

A New Yorker mentality may provide the ideal framework for Swanberg’s work, especially when one considers that Baumbach himself often contributes to a part of the magazine called Shouts & Murmurs. It’s no stretch of the imagination to view the section title as an alternative term for “mumblecore.”

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