Sophie and Jason are being boring in "The Future."
(Miranda July, 2011)
September 1, 2011
by Joel Crary
Miranda July’s “The Future” is a relationship movie lacking an interesting relationship. July offers up two people we don’t care much about and asks us to find the universal in them. I looked, and saw a series of attempts at observational humour undercut by deadpan cries for help. I spent most of the movie waiting for its doe-eyed characters to say something honest and was disappointed when they came up short. A shame, because in the midst of the film’s too-broad execution, there lies the promise of a brand new type of love story.
July opens things as the slight voice of Paw Paw, a crippled cat living out what could potentially be the last of its days in an animal shelter, intoning words of feline existentialism and loneliness. Its last hope is dance teacher Sophie (July) and tech-support flunkie Jason (Hamish Linklater), a hipster couple in their mid-30s who decide to adopt the animal knowing full well it isn’t long for this world. When they find out that Paw Paw could live for another five years, they start to panic about where they’ll be at 40 and back off, ultimately deciding to take 30 days to evaluate their ability to commit. “Don’t be late. We euthanize,” the veterinarian adds pointedly.
“Forty is pretty much 50, and after that it’s just loose change,” Jason pontificates. It’s a condition of the young to associate getting older with the evaporation of livelihood, though he and Sophie seem a little too young to be experiencing a midlife crisis. Both seem miserable from day to day, rarely bringing their mouths to smile, talking in oddly naive phrases as if somewhere in the back of their minds they’re shocked that their ironic t-shirts haven’t solved all of their problems by now. What expectations are being defeated here? “I always thought I’d be smarter,” Jason offers. “I wish I were a notch prettier. I feel like I have to make a case for myself with every new person I meet,” Sophie delivers, gazing longingly into a mirror.
These people are dull. Their unrest seems to sprout out of a boredom with ennui that Godard would roll his eyes at. One day, rather than simply walking by a Greenpeace-type petitioner, Jason decides to stop and help. He discovers a new sense of purpose in canvassing for the environment, and meets an elderly mentor (Joe Putterlik) whom he returns to for advice simply because it affords the opportunity for July to outfit the character with new, bizarre traits. Does Jason want to end up like him? Meanwhile, Sophie resolves to perform 30 dances in as many days for an imagined online audience, but a debilitating fear of failure prevents her from completing Day One. Through a set of unlikely circumstances, she begins a tryst with an older man (David Warshofsky) with a young daughter (Isabella Acres) and gets an eyeful of the kind of domestic life her relationship with Jason will never afford. Is it really what she wants?
“The Future” unfolds as though it began as a series of visual ideas, with July working backward to unite them into a relationship story. Some of the ideas are inventive. July comes out of performance art, and one intriguing dance sequence set to Beach House’s “Master of None” deftly communicates the kind of desperate longing for a former relationship that often arrives in the form of little more than a recalled in-joke. Another sequence involving Jason’s ability to “stop time” cuts to the quick of the devastation one experiences at the moment a break-up occurs. We all become trapped in those moments occasionally, wondering if a different set of decisions may have altered the course of things, and July lays it out with flair.
Both Sophie and Jason meet their potential “futures” with a kind of stunted-growth whimsy foisted upon them by a society that caters to the individual ego. Chief among July’s concerns is technology’s effect on a young person’s consciousness; Sophie’s insecurities are characterized by her obsession with her coworker’s popularity on YouTube, and the couple’s decision to “unplug” from the Internet comes off as a modern equivalent to drifting as a means of self-discovery. “The Future” is certainly a modern film in many ways, though it desperately needs characters who can provide insight into their feelings rather than simply let their feelings beat them into submission.
I liked July’s previous feature “Me and You and Everyone We Know” well enough. While that film was similarly capital-C Cute, her filtering of human nature through quirk fared better when spread out amongst an ensemble. Shifting her focus to two people, July doesn’t get deeper than the quirks, and that’s a mistake. Sophie and Jason are caricatures, and pretty ingratiating ones, with their shared mopey personalities serving as the only groundwork for their relationship. Too bad they’re in a movie that treats them so seriously. “The Future” could have worked well as a darkly funny send-up of 21st-century self-absorption, but instead it’s mostly self-absorbed.
