Tape
With Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard, and Uma Thurman.
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Part of what’s off-putting about Linklater’s live-action Tape is how different it is from his animated Waking Life, which was released a few weeks ago. Both are talky, but Tape lacks the humanist aspect we generally expect from Linklater, insofar as none of the film’s three characters is particularly sympathetic. In a way he prepared us for this by linking Tape in some of his interviews to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope–another film based on a play with predatory characters that’s set in one room and unravels in real time. This led me to expect a film with minimal editing, but it’s far from that; as an exercise in analytical decoupage–the French term for a “breakdown into shots,” which effectively combines the meanings of mise en scene and editing–it shows Linklater’s unmistakable flair for interpreting and inflecting the story’s main lines of force as well as its dramatic peaks and valleys, for slithering around the characters to frame them from unorthodox angles, and for briskly swinging back and forth between them in aggressive whip pans. (The whip pans have irritated many reviewers, who apparently expected Linklater to chill out around these unpleasant people.) It’s an intimate way of framing people who claim to be intimate with one another but are really, spiritually speaking, miles apart: that’s the paradox this movie is concerned with, and it works endless variations on the idea.
But this characterization is far from complete. There’s also a nasty power struggle between Vince and his “best” friend since high school, John (Robert Sean Leonard), a small-time filmmaker who’s about to show a feature at a festival in Lansing, Michigan, where the film’s action is set. The movie is mainly concerned with this struggle, and the woman, Amy (Uma Thurman), is the focus of it, even though she turns up relatively late in the action. She’s the former girlfriend of Vince, though she never had sex with him, broke up with him senior year, and then had sex with John shortly afterward, and she’s the main threat to their pretense of friendship.
If these guys are best friends, one wonders whom they’d classify as their worst enemies. Viewers might decide early on that, apart from morbid fascination, there’s no clear reason to stick with these creeps; Vince spends most of his time reacting to John’s yuppie hauteur, while John reacts to Vince’s studied oafishness. But Hawke and Leonard do fine jobs of making them seem not only believable but typical: partners in a competitive relationship built on mutual abuse. By the time Thurman’s Amy enters the action, we’re ready for someone to put each character in his place. She certainly succeeds in doing that, but she winds up coming off only slightly better than they do–no surprise given that she chose to hang out with them ten years earlier.
