The word that echoes through Lynn Shelton’s Your Sister’s
Sister is “weird.” Here, for instance, is Sister A talking to
Sister B. “I know you like him, but do you like him like
him?”
Sister B replies, “Yeah, I think I’m in love with him. Do you
think that’s weird? Because of Tom, I think it might be weird.”
What Sister B or Iris (Emily Blunt) doesn’t know, however, is
that Sister A, Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), ostensibly a lesbian, has
already slept with the gentleman in question, who’s called Jack
(Mark Duplass). He’s the brother of Tom, Iris’s ex-, now deceased,
which is why Iris thinks her feelings for him “weird.” Needless to
say, when, Hannah’s awful secret is revealed, her sleeping with
Jack is also said to be weird — although, since she had just
broken up with her long-term girlfriend and both she and Jack were
pie-eyed drunk at the time, it might not seem all that weird to
those of us looking on. We are soon to learn that Hannah has
another motive which makes it even less weird.
But “weird” has a special meaning in this movie, as I suspect it
does in much of the popular culture. It’s not so much “strange” or
“paranormal” (or even just “abnormal”) but more like what a
previous age might have termed “unseemly.” Iris and Hannah and
Jack, too, are all groping in their stumbling and inarticulate way
towards the concept of decorum and, beyond it, something like
decency, but the culture out of which they and so many of their
generation have emerged regards such concepts as outmoded and, they
suspect, vaguely indecent themselves. Any normative principle
applied to sex in particular, whether of morality or good taste, is
automatically dubious, if not forbidden in the post-“liberation”
era, and that leaves “weird” to do the work of a whole spectrum of
terms now regarded as overly “judgmental” — terms ranging from
immoral to indecent to tasteless to disgusting to, well, weird.
Perhaps it is no accident, then, that one of the consequences of
the excessive and excessively vague use of “weird” is that, to
anyone looking on, there is a noticeable absence of weirdness about
these three narcissists, staying in an isolated cabin in the
Washington state woods together for reasons having to do with the
need by one or more of them for “some head space” — a commodity
that their conversation suggests they all have more than enough of
already. Nothing they do can surprise us because they have erected
their moral and linguistic self-limitations precisely in order to
preserve their right to self-validation for whatever they do. If
there is no word of moral disapprobation stronger than “weird,”
then not even Jack’s and Hannah’s self-indulgence is likely to rise
even to level.
To ask if something one has done is “weird” is to invite a
denial. “Weird” can thus be used only ironically. By definition it
is that which lies beyond what one actually chooses to do and which
therefore validates it as non-weird. If there is a certain
calculation behind this particular bit of linguistic poverty, it’s
hard to see the rest of that poverty on parade in this movie as
anything but aphasia cultivated for its own sake, presumably as a
mark of emotional and psychological authenticity. Much of the
movie’s dialogue is said to have been improvised, and it shows.
It’s a mixture of therapy-speak (“buy-in”) and hippy inarticulacy,
as when Jack’s drunken but soulful conversation with Hannah prior
to their coupling descends to his assurances that her ex-lover’s
claim she was “not enough” for her had to have been “f***ing
bulls***” and that “your butt is f***ing awesome.” What girl could
resist such honey-tongued blandishments?
The
Guardian thought this conversation
“effortlessly naturalistic” and no doubt it is, in the sense that
lots of people, especially lots of younger people, do talk like
that. But on my ear it leaves an impression of utter artificiality,
as if the natural expressiveness of people in a state of heightened
emotion had had to be suppressed for fear that it would sound
affected or unreal. Authenticity has for so long been associated
with such deliberate dumbness — alluded to, perhaps, in the
“Mumblecore” movement that both Miss Shelton and Mr. Duplass in his
directorial role (Baghead, Cyrus,
Jeff,
Who Lives at Home) are associated with — that it no
longer sounds authentic. Just as when people say, as someone does
say in the movie, “Is this making any sense?” they expect the
answer that it is, even though it almost always isn’t, the need for
reassurance that the right impression is being communicated is a
sign that it isn’t.
If “weird” is the film’s favorite word, “charming” appears to be
favorite among the film’s critics. The characters are “are
remarkably charming and pleasant company” says
A.O. Scott of the New York Times. The
Guardian headline was “a charming,
insightful examination of criss-crossing relationships that was one
of the buzziest titles of this year’s [i.e. last year’s] Toronto
film festival.” The Washington Post’s
Ann Hornaday ups the ante with “funny, smart, charismatic
friends.”
Mr. Scott makes the interesting point that “You could call
Your Sister’s Sister a group portrait of youthful
solipsists in an era of economic contraction and social malaise,
but that wouldn’t be quite right. Self-absorption is not the
subject; it is the paint.” There’s something in that, but the
subject is no more interesting. It is that perennial Hollywood
favorite the unconventional family, which is now itself so
conventional that it bespeaks a kind of collective solipsism that
is the echo of characters’ self-absorption.
The one break in this bleak landscape, and the only point in the
movie at which there is anyone other than the three main characters
to interest us, is the opening scene of the party for poor dead Tom
on the first anniversary of his death. Tom seems to have been quite
a guy, as everybody agrees — until Jack speaks up as the voice of
“honesty” — a sure sign that something “weird” (formerly known as
reprehensible) is to follow. This is also the only part of the
movie in which Jack has a real connection to anything outside his
own head, but he cannot bear to hear his brother eulogized in the
company of his friends without attempting to impose his own rather
sour feelings about him on their fond memories.
Someone that lacking in a sense of decorum or good manners can
hardly rise to the level of “charming” in my book, even if he could
ever get over himself, which apparently Jack cannot. It used to be
that such a person would have the compensating virtue to this vice
of authenticity, but even that has now gone. He’s as phony as the
boy-girl best-friendship he supposedly enjoys with Iris — which is
another Hollywood mainstay of the meet-cute kind since the late
Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally. He’s as phony as his
self-description to his new-found harem as “emotionally at best
precarious and at worst a cripple.” He’s not an emotional cripple,
but a moral and intellectual one, as are the others responsible for
this movie.
