Cold Weather (2011)

Yep, Cold Weather is a movie.

Now before you start hailing me Captain Obvious, allow me to assure you that that sentence is actually pretty high praise for a mumblecore film. For those of you not familiar with the genre, here’s my understanding of it: A listless, underachieving 20-something dude meets a listless, underachieving 20-something chick or maybe another listless, underachieving 20-something dude. A shaky handheld digital camera clumsily zooms in and out as they walk. Or they drive in a car, preferably an early-80s model VW Rabbit. In, like, Portland. Or Austin. They discuss “real” stuff like dental hygiene. Or lounge chairs. Or gin rummy. And they drink a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Then they drive some more. Fade to black.

All right, I’m being a little facetious. But, to me, mumblecore is emblematic of a young, hipster sensibility–as nebulous an idea as that is–in its attempt to convince audiences that neither the filmmakers nor performers really care about whether or not they make what might properly be called a movie. “Plot? What plot? We’re just being real, man. Life doesn’t need a script.” True. But movies do.

It’s the mere existence of a plot that makes me say Cold Weather is a movie. In it, Doug (Chris Lankenau) drops out of college, where he was studying forensic science in the hopes of being the next Sherlock Holmes, and moves in with his sister, Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn), in their hometown of Portland, Oregon. The two are neither particularly close (Doug doesn’t know that his sister has just gotten out of a six-month relationship) but they’re not particularly distant either. They’re happy to sit at their newly constructed IKEA coffee table and play gin rummy.

Joining them at the card table are Carlos (Raul Castillo), a part-time deejay who works with Doug at an ice factory, and Rachel (Robyn Rikoon), Doug’s ex-girlfriend who is just visiting town. When Rachel fails to show up for one of Carlos’ deejaying gigs, despite promises that she would, Carlos enlists Doug’s help in super-sleuthing the details of her disappearance. Both Carlos and Gail play Watson to Doug’s Sherlock, with Gail even taking him to buy a pipe and some tobacco to help him think. Using low-tech methods and a pretty poorly scripted expository scene, they mostly figure out the mystery. The film almost climaxes and fades to black.

I said it was movie. I didn’t say it was a particularly good one. At least, though, veteran mumblecore writer-director Aaron Katz (Quiet City, Dance Party USA) bothers to present a story with a legitimate beginning, middle, and end, which is more than I can say for the prevailing method of the genre and even larger-budget imitations of it, including last year’s Greenberg and Cyrus.

In the process, Katz allows his cinematographer Andrew Reed to capture some beautiful tableaus with his non-shaky (hurrah!) Red Digital camera. The most striking of these is a scene where Doug and Rachel stand on a bridge–he is slightly slumped in a grey-green parka, she is ebullient in a bright, yellow raincoat–with an almost magical, misty waterfall rushing behind them. Reed also does interesting things with less dramatic, everyday objects.

But the focus on those everyday objects–starting with the rain droplets that open the film and running all the way through the cassette tape that ends it–is pathological and crippling in Cold Weather. That focus means that, for nearly an hour, we watch Doug and Carlos pick up bags of ice and move them from one side of the room to another. Seriously, other than a game of rummy and a discussion of a Star Trek convention, that’s all that happens for the first 40 minutes of this film. It’s one thing to underscore the monotony of a certain kind of existence, it’s another to ask audiences to pay $13 to watch a pair of actors pick things up and put them down.

That’s especially true when one of those actors is Lankenau with his slouched, wet-noodle physicality. Of the film’s cast, he is the least compelling to watch and the least natural or “real” performer. On the flip side, Castillo has the most bounce in his step and the scenes that exclude him suffer for it. Both actresses are equally nothing special.

So Cold Weather is a movie. But it’s not one worth leaving the warm confines of your apartment to see.