Review: On Demand Streaming
Crimes Against Humanity | Jerzy Rose | USA | 2014 | 77 min
Now Streaming on Fandor»
If you missed Crimes Against Humanity at the 2014 Wisconsin Film Festival (and you probably did, it screened during the first Wisconsin vs. Kentucky Final Four matchup), now is a good time to catch up with it and support the next project by Chicago-based filmmaker Jerzy Rose.
If you’ve been following my comments here at Madison Film Forum you’ll know that I’m a big fan of Jerzy Rose’s 2014 feature film, Crimes Against Humanity. I placed it in my Top Ten at the 2014 Wisconsin Film Festival, and it ended up at Number Four for 2014 overall. His follow up short, En Plein Air, was one of two shorts that I put in my Top Ten for the 2015 Film Festival. I’ve been meaning to return to Crimes and post a longer discussion, and now I have the occasion to do so.
Rose and his partners in Crimes (writer Halle Butler, actors Mike Butler and Lyra Hill, and others) are currently running a Kickstarter campaign for their next proposed feature film, Neighborhood Food Drive. I’m confident that if you take the time to check out Crimes Against Humanity on Fandor (its worth signing up for a free trial to do so), you’ll want to support Rose and see what he and his colleagues come up with next.
You should do so soon, however. As of this writing Rose’s Kickstarter stands at about 75% of its funding goal, with a deadline of this Friday, July 3 at 10:10 pm. Let’s see if we can help them out with a strong push in the homestretch this week.
Love and Lies in the Ivory Tower
Crimes Against Humanity features some not-so-great people treating each other very poorly, yet we find humor in their behavior and maintain a degree of sympathy for all of them because they are trapped in absurd situations in the first place. Despite their high degree of intelligence and their involvement in and around academia (or perhaps because of the later) they can’t seem to communicate to each other clearly and frequently fall into a cockeyed logic that is difficult to navigate and circumvent. The resulting humor often difficult to pull off: laughs rooted in pain, awkwardness, or frustration (and sometimes all three).
At the center of the film is a dysfunctional couple. Lewis (Mike Butler) is a self-important college administrative assistant whose main job seems to be snooping on the personal lives of professors in a highly suspect ethnomusicology department; Brownie (Lyra Hill) is a lethargic, unemployed home dweller who can only seem to get out of bed to get food for her pet rabbit. The plot follows the unexpected consequences of Lewis’s investigation at work and the death of Brownie’s rabbit at home. But for the most part these plotlines are a pretext for a series of wryly funny scenes with odd characters in absurd situations.
It is unclear what could have brought Lewis and Brownie together, but it quickly becomes apparent what might break them apart. Lewis appears oblivious to the fact that his passive-aggressive compliments (“Nice to see you out of bed before 9:00”) and words of advice (“I think you’d feel a lot better about yourself if you had something to do during the day”) do far more damage than good. Lewis’s obliviousness, rather than his cruelty, is the source of the humor here. There are many verbal zingers throughout Crimes Against Humanity, but much of the humor comes from what remains unsaid after them.
The visual style in Crimes is deceptively simple in its precision and clarity. Most often we see just a bit too much space between the characters, conveying a kind of rational frigidity between colleagues and a lack of intimacy between Lewis and Brownie. Even when Lewis and Brownie sit at the same table for breakfast, it doesn’t feel like they are at the same table. They perform a delicate dance around the table (counterpointed by a slow camera movement) to maintain a certain distance before Brownie hands Lewis his tote bag and gives him a peck on the cheek. The impact of Lewis’s passive-aggression on Brownie becomes clear only after he leaves the room.
These interpersonal distances are maintained in Lewis’s workplace. During the first report from private investigator John Folder (Adam Paul) to Dean Manlow (Jim Trainor) the three men stay unnaturally distant from each other as Lewis takes notes within the relatively small office; in the master shot, Lewis sits far left, Folder stands in the middle, the Dean Manlow pivots from the window on the far right. The result is more naturalistic than Wes Anderson’s mise-en-scene (no pastels and only incidental planimetric framing in the vet’s office when Brownie’s bunny is cremated), but no less amusing on its own self-conscious terms.
Within this staging practice the performances also showcase a deliberate precision. Take, for example, every movement and gesture of ethnomusicologist Professor Henson Bower (Tommy Heffron) during his outdoor lecture (or, as it appears to others, his conga drum performance), while he is fully aware that he is being observed by the Dean from his office window. He wordlessly conveys a mysterious menace. While much of the humor in Crimes is verbal in nature, Heffron’s performance (and several others, especially Hill’s ) harken back to the more attitudinal style of silent comedy.
Individual performances are stylized, but frequently not the same style within a scene. In terms of performance, some of the most intriguing interactions are between Lewis and the private investigator’s secretary, Frenchie (Adebukola Bodunrin). Frenchie is always just a little too happy to perform her duties, which serves as a foil to Lewis’s deadpan persona. Both articulate their lines almost too clearly, but to completely opposite comic effects. Their words are clear, but each never understands where the other is coming from until after a party later in the film, when they are both drunk. At any moment it seems like either of them could say anything and it would make sense within the logic of the scene.
The deliberate precision of the staging sets up a counterpoint to the surprise and shock of one of the funniest moments early in the film, which I can’t spoil entirely here but I can’t help but at least mention obtusely. Brownie is finally truly happy for the first time in the film, and she is left smiling in the foreground, center of the frame. The fact that she is left there by herself only barely makes sense narratively, but it makes complete sense when you discover what becomes the payoff to the shot. The gasp you inhale you then exhale as a laugh, at first out of discomfort, but eventually due to the absurdity and audacity of the moment. Just as everyone seems to be able to say just about anything and it makes sense in the logic of a scene, just about anything can happen to the characters and it makes sense in the logic of the worldview of Crimes Against Humanity.
It’s also at this point that Crimes Against Humanity truly takes off and maintains a smart, dry comic energy for the remainder of its duration. Many scenes convey a sense of comic discovery, making something funny out of something you didn’t think you’d be seeing or hearing, let alone laughing at. Rose and company could have played the much easier “Coen Brothers card” and treated their characters with contempt for comic effect. Instead, no matter how bad things get for Brownie, the butt of the joke is how the poorly the world is treating her, not Brownie herself. (So here I disagree with Variety’s assessment that the film “delivers more snark than amusement.”)
The most sustained comic energy comes from a cameo appearance from animator Chris Sullivan as a policeman. We’ve all seen the clichéd police pull-over scene where the policeman is in no mood to play games. Rose and Sullivan turn the cliche on its head with a policeman who insists on playing games. It’s a very simple idea that gets funnier as it plays out to its logical conclusion.
The stylistic arc evolves when Lewis and Brownie finally meet again at the end of the film, which is punctuated with a unique hand-held close-up of their first observed moment of passionate intimacy. Here the distance between them is broken with a all-too-close view of a lip-lock complete with saliva strings. For a moment, it looks like things might finally be different for the two of them. But in the subsequent sequence and the epilogue, we find a return to the same cold distances, which might be even more extreme than before; Lewis’s thinly veiled passive-aggression transforms into outright aggression. The one bright light is that now Brownie is humiliated by her own attempts at agency, rather than her passivity. This is not a “happy ending” but it is one that makes unfortunate sense for the world that Rose and his colleagues have created in Crimes Against Humanity.