The prolific Joe Swanberg, whose Netflix series “Easy” has been occupying him for the past few years, has returned to feature filmmaking with a new movie, “Build the Wall,” which has nothing to do with anti-immigrant propaganda and much more to do with Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” a view of a wall and its construction which focusses on differing notions of personal relationships and the force of nature. (The film is streaming on YouTube, under the auspices of NoBudge, a Web site run by the director and actor Kentucker Audley.) “Build the Wall” is more than a return to features; it’s a return to an aspect of filmmaking—cinematography—that Swanberg had left behind when he shifted his attention toward the filming of stars, starting with “Drinking Buddies,” which he shot in 2012.
“Build the Wall” features three longtime collaborators of Swanberg’s: Kent Osborne stars as Kent, playing (as he did in the feature “Uncle Kent,” from 2011) someone like himself in real life, a busy cartoonist and illustrator. Kent lives now in a comfortable but isolated house in rural Vermont, where he busies himself with a wide variety of physical chores, in order to keep active outside of his work. With his fiftieth birthday a week away, he’s awaiting the arrival of a guest, a longtime friend named Sarah (Jane Adams, who has had many major roles in Swanberg’s films, including “All the Light in the Sky,” from 2012), a filmmaker and performer from Los Angeles. Their friendship has hovered over a low flame of flirtation and, though they’ll be working together on a project, he thinks that her visit is also meant to resolve matters between them, to kindle or dispel the glimmer of romance. Yet the intimacy of their week together is menaced by a well-meaning but inopportune surprise: in anticipation of Kent’s fiftieth birthday, a good friend named Kev (Kevin Bewersdorf, a musician who also wrote the score for the film) shows up unannounced to make, in time for the planned birthday party, a hefty and labor-intensive gift—the wall of the title, for Kent’s property, to be built of stones that Kev will haul and hew.
Kent, dismayed at the surprise, explains that there won’t be room for Kev in the house; Kev, undeterred, proposes to sleep in his truck, “bathe in the brook,” and “shit in the woods.” Unsurprisingly, once Sarah arrives and she and Kent gradually, awkwardly, tenderly, and tentatively reawaken their dormant relationship, Kev’s labors and presence become intrusive. Meanwhile, a wide range of minor events come to define the potential couple’s ambiguous bond. With “Build the Wall,” Swanberg films an intimate drama with a discerning eye for the sort of minor but grossly significant moments that prove decisive in a relationship—the kinds of emotionally tone-deaf moments that will come to mind when a couple look back, later, at what they’ve overcome or what broke them up.
The movie’s script is credited to the three main actors, along with Swanberg, and the collaborative spirit is evident throughout. Adams, who’s one of the secret weapons of the modern cinema and isn’t in enough movies (she recently co-starred, to great effect, in Amy Seimetz’s “She Dies Tomorrow”), brings a calm, bold lucidity and an understated vulnerability to her role. Osborne is a phlegmatic actor who’s nonetheless keenly sensitive, investing his role, of a man in fear of aging, with impacted and pressurized pain. And Bewersdorf’s easygoing candor is matched by a ferocious stubbornness that, along with the elemental habits and details of his character’s newfound passion for masonry, suggests a hidden, stifled rage. What’s more, it’s Swanberg’s own cinematography that amplifies—from an observant distance—his characters’ (and his actors’) personal infinitesimals into emotional thunder. His restrained but precise camera work lends these fleeting events their dramatic weight, as in a remarkable scene, of Sarah taking part in an outdoor game—entirely alone—that elicits a mighty torrent of feeling, even more from its elisions than from its displays.
In “Build the Wall,” age shows: in Swanberg’s early films, he developed dramas that arose within his own social circle. The extreme familiarity of the twentysomething hangouts he depicted infused his movies with a sense of his characters’ energetic expansion into new realms of experience and of the self-doubt that plagued them with each step. Swanberg—an old pro turning thirty-nine on August 31st—still develops films from the merest sprigs of experience and still develops their florid implications. The essence of “Build the Wall” is the inner turmoil of the settled life: of ownership, business, property, and of the conflict between those marks of maturation and the total absorption of romantic passion—the primal power of desire that, metaphorically, opposes a wall.
For all its poignancy and far-reaching implications, “Build the Wall” nevertheless omits the expansive reflections that enrich Swanberg’s earlier films. Though I’m leery of interviews that attempt to sell a film by explaining the filmmaker’s intentions, Swanberg’s remarks in an exchange on NoBudge (with Audley) provide a glimpse of what “Build the Wall” could have included. After describing a conversation with Adams that prompted him to film the movie at Osborne’s actual Vermont home, Swanberg adds:
The prophetic foreboding of these remarks could have gone into the film, with a little more definition of the nature of the work that Sarah and Kent are doing together—a line or two, for instance, on Sarah’s involvement with the business side of her art and the discussion to which it would give rise. The title “Build the Wall” suggests a political substance that the movie doesn’t deliver; the sort of reflection and wider-ranging observation that Swanberg delivers in the interview is exactly what his earlier films have featured. The absence of such perspective is what keeps “Build the Wall” just right at a fifty-seven-minute running time; for all the power of its implications, suggestions, and observations, it’s as marked by its absences and omissions as by its substance.
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Review: Age Shows in Joe Swanberg’s “Build the Wall” - The New Yorker
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