A few years ago, Macon Blair came home to find that his New York City apartment has been broken into and his laptop stolen. Having recently relocated to Manhattan, the Virginia native viewed the incident as a sort of urban-living rite of passage. And like most folks whose primary experience with criminal investigations comes from Law & Order re-runs (and whove also logged in a guest appearance on an SVU episode), the writer-director-actor assumed that everything was going to kick into high gear the minute the boys in blue showed up. Im standing in my living room, asking the cop whos been assigned to my case, OK, so what do we do next?!?' he recalls, calling in from his current residence in Austin, Texas. Do we hit the streets, looking for perps? Mug shots? We gonna go look at mug shots now?!?
And this New York City police officer is just looking at me like Im a fucking idiot, Blair continues, laughing. He just says, Look, well either find it or we wont. Nothing is going to happen, man. This aint a cop show. Hes gone through this situation a million times. Meanwhile, Im thinking, Well, what do they do in the movies? Pawn shops! Ive got to check out the pawn shops right away. Im gonna crack this case wide open.'
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The fact that theres an almost identical conversation that happens early on in I Dont Feel at Home in This World Anymore, Blairs award-winning directorial debut that starts streaming on Netflix today, is, of course, not a coincidence. A fixture on the microbudget indie scene hes the man hellbent on revenge in his friend Jeremy Saulniers breakthrough movie Blue Ruin, and Sir Patrick Stewarts squirrelly skinhead sidekick in Green Room the pulp fiction aficionado knew that he wanted to do a severely cracked crime-comedy for his first time behind the camera. Hed already had a loose sketch of a lead character in mind: Ruth, a working-class nurse who was kinda fed up with people in general, he says. It was just a matter of where to put her. Then, after the stolen laptop incident, he wondered, Well, what if she had been burglarized and started playing detective? What if this put-upon, pissed-off woman started hitting up pawn shops looking for her stuff?
And, just for kicks, what if you threw in a metalhead neighbor with a pair of nunchucks, a seedy local criminal underworld, trophy wives, meth-heads, adder-filled ponds and comically excessive amounts of vomit as well?
The idea of putting this character whos drifting through an existential crisis into the middle of, like, a Jim Thompson novel and then letting things get absurd? Id see that movie, Blair exclaims. Drop a person whos on the edge of losing it into a half-ass crime story and see what happens. It just clicked. When we meet Ruth, played by Melanie Lynskey, shes already had to deal with foul-mouthed patients, a bar patron who ruins the end of the novel shes reading (the literary offender is played by Blair) and mysterious piles of dog shit that keep appearing on her lawn. By the time she finds out that her computer and some family heirlooms have been swiped, shes ready to punch the world in the face. I just want people to stop being assholes, she tells a friend, and after the cops blow off her case, she decides to take things into her own hands. A would-be martial artist named Tony (Elijah Wood) tags along for the ride. And down the funny, scary, violent Coen-esque rabbit hole they go.
I loved how angry she was, Lynskey says, citing one of Ruths speeches about how people are so obsessed with getting things why does this person have these things and I dont?' as an example of how the script felt like it was tapping into an inchoate social anxiety that was burbling even before the Presidential elections boiling point. (More on that in a bit.) Theres something very exciting about seeing someone who seems a lot like you, whos frustrated like you, decide that shes not going to take it anymore and go take on some bad guys. She pauses for a second before admitting that, in a scene involving Ruths altercation at a flea market, I was a little afraid when we kicked an old man in the head, that wed maybe gone too far. People dont have a problem with it, however. Im still not sure if thats a good or a bad thing.
Its as close as an overarching statement, as I can make about society right now: Dont be a dick.
Thats the message of the movie.
Blair knew he wanted Lynskey for the main part, in the same way that he knew he wanted that mouthful of a misfit statement taken from a gospel-music compilation that Saulnier had given him as a gift for the movies title. (My producers were like, Were not sure you can fit all that on a poster, Macon,' the director admits. But it felt like something Ruth would say, so we ended up keeping it.) He also knew he that Wood, who Lynskey knew through Peter Jackson and who Blair had met at the Austin-based genre film festival Fantastic Fest a few times, would make a good Tony, despite the fact that, on the page, the socially awkward stoner character seemed a 180-degree switch from the Lord of the Rings actor.
I dont know if Macon told you this, the actor says when we talk the next day, but Tony was originally written to be an older, overweight, kind of schlubby guy. So Im still not sure why my name initially came up. But I understand people who are super-nerdy about stuff like Dungeons & Dragons, heavy metal, karate the sorts of interests that Tony has. I feel like Ive met so many people like this guy. I was such of fan of Macons work that Id do anything he;d ask. And I would get to wear a rat-tail and throw ninja stars. Indeed, Tony does sport the sort of impressive, snakelike strand of braided hair that would be the envy of all heshers, in addition to using a pair of nunchucks and, at one point, a shuriken to subdue the films speedfreak villains. Id say, in terms of accuracy, on a scale of one to 10 Im about a three when it comes to throwing stars, Wood says. The crew and I would practice in between takes and I discovered that, yes, I am, in fact, completely awful at this. But I can throw one. And it may hit something.
As for Lynskey, whose character suffers broken fingers, Percoset hazes and other indignities at the hands of I Dont Feels
sleazy bad guy (played by Jesus Lizard frontman David Yow), she
discovered that her greatest asset was the ability to endure long days
with a fake-vomit apparatus. Yeah, the puking, the actress sighs, upon
mentioning a gunfight sequence in which Ruth cartoonishly throws up
buckets of bile once the bullets start flying and bodies start dropping.
They hook a sort of tube into your mouth and pump this freezing cold,
sweetened coffee creamer out. This went on for days. And it seemed like
an awful lot, but maybe Im just being overly sensitive, since it was
coming out my mouth, so
No, it was a lot, Blair confirms. We shot that scene for a week, and by the end of it we had to go back later and digitally remove some of the vomit because it was just way too much. I mean, this is partially a comedy, but its this intense scene and it looked ridiculous. You never want to have to go back to your producers and ask for more money to digitally erase gallons of puke when youre making a low-budget independent movie. Trust me on this.
Neither copious tides of throw-up nor an overly wordy title, it seems could stop the Sundance Film Festival from awarding I Dont Feel the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, a win which surprised even its creator. But its not that surprising to see the film strike a chord at this particular moment in time, because for all of the Nineties familiarity of its gory-violence-meets-gallows-humor tone, theres a palpable sense of rage that runs through the movies DNA. Though Trump had not yet become President when the production wrapped last year, both the filmmaker and his cast members mention how the sense of class resentment and a scrambling for dwindling pieces of the American-Dream pie embedded in the movie feels oddly attuned to the mess we find ourselves in. The title could apply to almost every character in the film. It is, in many ways, a Tarantino movie for the Trump era.
I mean, if there wasnt an intention to tap that sense of anger and frustration,
its certainly in the movie now, Blair says, choosing his words carefully. But in the end, for all the funny stuff and the shocking stuff, I was making a crime movie
where the detective character Melanies character is really chasing
after the notion that people could maybe, just maybe, be less of an asshole in their
daily life.
On hand, its kinda amusing, the filmmakers says, before signing off. On the other hand, its as
close as a statement as Id like my work to make. Its as close as an overarching statement, as I can make about society right now: Dont be a dick.
Thats the message of the movie. And in that sense, its more relevant than ever.
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