Living in Oblivion
Indie comedy about indie moviemaking; very funny and very much from a place of love.
Living in Oblivion (1995). Grade: B+
Steve Buscemi has been cast in the role of “weird-looking oddball” so many times that one tends to forget that he’s actually a very handsome fellow. By normal human standards, he’s quite good-looking, with piercing eyes and a warm, sensitive face. It’s just that, compared to the average Hollywood supermodel, his features aren’t traditionally “perfect.” And that it’s hard to come across as “handsome” when your character is murdering people (Reservoir Dogs, Fargo, Boardwalk Empie, etc.)
In Living in Oblivion he’s playing a low-budget movie director, who’s got to massage the egos of everybody on the set — especially the actors. If I were an actor, I’d have an incredibly fragile ego. I’m already nervous enough about typing stuff that might be foolish, wrong, and/or dull. How much worse would it be if it wasn’t just your words being judged, but your face! No wonder some talented performers (Andy Serkis, Doug Jones, Jade Quon in Jules) enjoy performing in heavy latex or makeup; the latex itself is a total pain in the butt, but the freedom to NOT have people judging your face must be refreshing.
When Buscemi is showing how kind and patient he can be with the actors, he’s extremely attractive. Who wouldn’t be drawn to this guy? He’s interesting and he’s interested in YOU. It’s very romantic.
That is, until he completely loses his s**t over everything and utterly flips out. Which isn’t attractive… but it’s very funny.
The writer/director here, Tom DeCillo, said that “Most people think of independent directors as these cool people. But that’s never the case. Never. You’re always one inch away from complete hysteria, no matter how much control you have.”
If a big Hollywood movie runs behind schedule, that pushes the budget upwards — more time shooting = more money. That can get a filmmaker a bad reputation, or, in rare instances, get them fired (like what happened to Richard Stanley filming The Island of Dr. Moreau). But, generally, on a big-budget movie, if a movie goes over schedule, it will, still, be finished.
On a low-budget movie, if the money’s gone, it is GONE. You no longer have the money to buy film or pay people (if you are paying people — sometimes, people work in low-budget movies for free because they like the idea of the film). So every time something goes wrong (and something always will), that’s putting the entire movie in jeopardy.
When I started this little writing project, one promise I made to myself is that I would never crap on a low-budget movie. Not a really low budget one, one made outside the studio system. Because just getting those movies finished at all is a major achievement in itself. I’ve tried it and failed at it. And since starting this blog, we HAVE seen some low-budget movies that really, weren’t very good. So I don’t write about those. There’s usually good ideas behind a low-budget movie; you don’t make something with your own money unless you’re passionate about what you’re trying to do. It’s just that sometimes, those good ideas don’t make it to the screen. It happens.
Living in Oblivion is about all the many, many things that can go wrong on a movie set. You can have a beautiful acting moment ruined by a mistake in camera focus or a boom mike suddenly dipping into the shot. If the studio isn’t totally soundproofed, you can get noises from a loud passing car or an airplane flying overhead. (Even IF the studio is soundproofed, you can get noises from somebody’s watch alarm or somebody coughing.)
And the neat thing about this movie is that you DON’T have to have any knowledge of how movies are made to see what the problems are. They’re all made very easy to understand.
For example, framing a shot. It’s one of the things I care a lot about as a viewer. (And too many movies are pretty lazy about it.) But the difference between a shot that looks good, that’s really well-framed, and one that looks “off” can be just the slightest difference is where the camera is placed and where the actors are, where they move to.
In one sequence here, a vapid Hollywood bigshot actor (James LeGros from Drugstore Cowboy) is playing a scene with a lovely, but lesser-known and more insecure lady (Catherine Keener from Being John Malkovich and Adaptation). It’s a love scene, she’s confessing how she loved him all along, he’s swooping in for a kiss. And LeGros keeps suggesting little changes to the way the scene’s played, changes that give his character more attention than hers.
And his suggestions are terrible! You can watch as what’s a halfway decent-looking shot becomes a RIDICULOUS one, and you won’t need any special training from films school or art school to see it. (People who say they don’t care about what a movie looks like DO care, they just don’t know it — check out these different pictures for an example.)
So you’re watching how a shot can get ruined, and how tiny, subtle changes can really muck it up. And how a director has to balance their “vision,” what they want a movie to look like, with the input they get from actors, from cinematographers, from the sound crew. It really gives you an appreciation of how tricky this all is. And it’s also increasingly funny.
So, when Peter Dinklage shows up and punches his hat…
Oh yeah! Peter Dinklage is in this! He wasn’t on the posters in 1995, but he sure was on the 20th anniversary discs’ cover. It was his first-ever movie role, although you’d never guess it. He shows up in this very goofy-looking blue suit and snappily, annoyedly, punches his hat, and it’s like Bogart snapping his fingers — it’s the move of a brilliant, totally confident actor. He’d done some community theater before, and another member of the cast had met him at a company that sent faxes. That’s how friggin’ Peter Dinklage got his start. He’s playing a dream-sequence dwarf (a la Twin Peaks) and he is, as you’d imagine, NOT particularly pleased with the typecasting…
LeGros is very good as the Bratt Pitt-ish vain movie star, and it was originally Brad Pitt in the role! But promotional demands for another (far less interesting) movie got in the way. Catherine Keener has a really difficult part as the insecure actor; she’s got to act acting badly. The first scene has her doing take after take of a scene that has little technical glitches, and Keener is sometimes effective, sometimes very wooden — she’s PLAYING an actor being wooden. And not making fun of the character, either; no actor’s gonna get it exactly right with robotic precision every time. That’s part of what draws people to theater; it’s how every performance, even saying the same lines in the same scene every night, can feel a little bit different, a little better or worse, than the one before.
The whole cast is very fun — some of them were cast just because they could contribute money to the budget. And some were cast, THEN contributed money to the budget. This took awhile to make. It was originally a 30-minute film, shot in a few days, and everyone enjoyed making it so much that Tom DiCillo went back and wrote an extra hour. And scraped together additional funding (the whole budget was $500,000.) Two of the actors had a family member pass away and leave them some money — it went into the movie.
There’s a neat audience Q & A with DiCillo and Buscemi on the disc, from a screening in the early 2000s. (One audience member tells DiCillo he’s “full of s**t,” and DiCillo laughs and agrees; which actually makes him LESS full of s**t than most directors.) Buscemi talks about making indie films vs. making big studio ones; he says the big-budget ones just help get the indie movies financed and that’s it. An idiot producer might not know the name Steve Buscemi, but would perk up at hearing “guy who was in Armaggeddon and Con Air.” Buscemi was actually a firefighter in New York in the early 80s, while taking acting classes and doin some stand-up comedy! And he’s been arrested while protesting the closure of firehouses. Sounds like a dang cool guy. (Oh, and he agreed to do this before even reading the script! He IS a dang cool guy.)1
There’s a few things you might not be crazy about — there’s two dream sequences that don’t feel like actual dreams at all. (Although I think that’s part of the joke — the part with Dinklage shooting a dream sequence is a parody of how silly dream sequences often are.) The very last scene, where we’re given insights into what’s going on in everybody’s heads, isn’t as clever as the earlier material; it feels like the movie ran out of steam and just stopped. But it’s not a BAD scene, and what comes earlier is so inspired and funny, that I didn’t mind the ending being a little flat.
Overall, though, this is great stuff. It’s the rare movie that can make fun of filmmkers’ pretentions without coming off as full of itself (the way Ben Stiller’s movies sometimes do). DiCillo is poking fun at people like himself, and celebrating the hard work that people like himself put into a movie. (He kinda looks like a harder-living John Sayles, and Sayles is kinduva neglected hero of indie moviemaking.) If you want to see Peter Dinklage throwing a fit at Steve Buscemi — and who wouldn’t! — you are going to really enjoy this one. I had a terrific time, which is something I could use right about now.
DiCillo sounds like a cool guy, too. I’ve been looking at his website a little. He wrote this post, about petty-tyrant directors. Here’s a great quote: “The worst thing you can do is lock yourself behind a wall of rigidity. This is a false security. It actually does weaken you, no matter how loud the tantrum you throw. It shows everyone that you’re dishonest and you can’t see yourself. It immediately makes people wonder what else you are not seeing, making them feel like a blind man or a drunken baby is steering the ship.”
I’ve known this sort of a-hole. I imagine you have, too.