Like many other film critics of my generation, I learned the ins and outs of my unpaid trade at film school (Emerson College in Boston, to be specific). Being thrust into a snake pit of not-yet adults competing against one another with their poorly constructed ideas sharpens you in a way that merely watching films cannot, so I am optimistic about film criticism’s future. If, however, you are unable or unwilling to attend film school, but would still like to know exactly what I’m talking about, I suggest that you get your hands on a copy of the film …Around. While it’s not an especially good movie, it is perhaps a perfect representation of the so-called ‘film school instinct,’ or that youthful artistic compulsion that causes so many misguided, unilluminating, self-indulgent short films to be made. Except this isn’t a short. It’s a whole damn movie.
Written and directed by David Spaltro, …Around follows the journey of Doyle Simms (Robert W. Evans), a typically disaffected, sarcastic youth who makes his way from the streets of Jersey City to those of Manhattan to attend film school. Along the way, he struggles to keep himself afloat financially, has family problems with his mom (Berenice Mosca), and hangs out with a wise homeless man (Ron Brice). He also has the requisite difficult relationship with a struggling actress in the city (Molly Ryman), which moves from irritation to friendship to romance in such a predictable way that you’d think that this movie had six writers. But nope. Just one.
Checking the imdb trivia page for this film confirmed one of my immediate suspicions upon watching this movie: it is a roughly autobiographical take on writer/director David Spaltro’s own experiences in film school. It’s hard to say what exactly drew me to that conclusion, but the more the film went on, the more inescapable that it became. Maybe it was the way that the script kept finding ways to glorify the rather unexceptional main character, which just happened to be a guy struggling through film school (at a screening of one of his sort-of terrible movies, the audience breaks into a totally sincere applause). Maybe it was the way that the main character lacked any real depth or ability to change, the way we like to see movie star projections of ourselves.
In all likelihood, though, it was the fact that the film was so clearly the product of a culture that it openly ridicules and tries to apologize for. Several times in the film, our hero interacts with the broadest, most ridiculous stereotypes of ‘artistic types’ that we’ve seen this side of a Woody Allen movie (one of them even cribs an accent from Rocky and Bullwinkle’s Natsha). Stupid ideas are defended, indecision is passed off as frustrated brilliance, and mediocrity is extrapolated in a hopeless attempt to make it sound like anything but. The humorous potential is there, for sure, but it’d seem a whole lot funnier if it weren’t exactly what the filmmaker was doing himself. Doyle spends his entire time on screen either wisecracking or waxing hipster on the topic of love or failure or some mixture of the two. This is a mopey, mopey movie. Granted, he does get called out on it towards the end of the movie, but by that point, the movie has spent so much time indulging him that it doesn’t feel the least bit convincing.
According to the imdb, the film’s budget was $200,000 (put in perspective, that’s half of what Napoleon Dynamite cost), and that may be its most redeeming feature. The unashamedly grainy, pixilated quality that the entire movie has prevents it from ever seeming cynical or calculated in the way that a larger film such as Garden State would. Unfortunately, that doesn’t prevent the film from feeling clichéd, indulgent, and entirely misjudged, with a cast of actors that seem entirely lost in the material and a story that doesn’t have anywhere to go.
The film’s most obnoxious moment may come at the end, when the protagonist is told that “there’s nobody like him.” We all probably know a million guys like this. And we've seen their movies.
"...Around" opens December 31, 1969 and is rated . Indie. Written and directed by David Spaltro. Starring Berenice Mosca, Robert W Evans.
