TGI Humpday!

In the opener of Lynne Shelton’s new movie Humpday, satisfied career man, Ben, and his pretty-but-not-hot wife, Anna, giggle in bed about being too tired to screw. The banging at the door later that night is bearded, fedora-sporting Andrew, the wild-card best friend from Ben’s past. Andrew is intense, demanding, charming. Is the carved duck he slaps on their mantle a gift or some obscure challenge?

For those who remember Kelly Reichart’s poetic, humorless Old Joy things seem very familiar. In that film, the beard was played by Will Oldham as a rambunctious and bitterly disappointed “thinker” who is beginning to fear his thoughts are worthless. Humpday’s beard, Andrew, played with glee and a sort of spontaneous, free-floating humility by Joshua Leonard, finds himself at a similar crossroads. Both beards, down on their luck, unconsciously decide that tearing down their old-best-friend’s marriage is what they need to get out of their funk. As Old Joy winds-up, Will Oldham as the burn-out dreamer gets his feet held to the fire while the ignorantly complacent husband gets the narrative treatment of one of Russell Crowe’s battered hookers in LA Confidential.

Not so in Humpday which hinges, some scenes hinge entirely, on the ability of Mark Duplass to make married Ben a breathing thing and to, in the process, make the stunt-plot seem uncommonly efficient: to prove himself as free-spirited as the wandering artist Andrew, Ben steps up to a challenge to have sex with Andrew in a pornographic film in the name of art. Andrew, unsure what he’s got into himself, refuses to back down.

The story works itself into this funny corner wherein Andrew and Ben are forced by pride to examine what exactly sex is. Where it comes from. Why two certain people, given a certain amount of contact, will end up screwing, and two different people, given all the time in the world would never screw.

Humpday adheres to a clarity of character and scene-making that fans of today’s art films will find distasteful and embarrassing. Shelton has more in common with 1970s psycho-chatterists Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky than she does with Bresson or Ozu, touchstones of serious films like Old Joy and, more recently, Goodbye, Solo. It’s not that there isn’t good work to be done in those fields, there is, but there’s something charming and exciting about characters who speak their minds and films that don’t hide their opinions behind layers of distancing, murky style.

And for anyone who saw Puffy Chair, saw Mark Duplass hold a stereo playing Postal Service over his head in bald allusion to Say Anything, saw it, processed it but still couldn’t shake that film’s nervy, sentimental sense of itself there’s more of the same to be found in Humpday. All three performers in the film’s shy love triangle work their scenes out in front of us. When the film veers toward the precious or unlikely, it’s the confidence and adaptability of the actors that brings it back. It brings to mind the funny, daring acting in Shadows, Shampoo, Five Easy Pieces. -Micah Bloomberg

Director: Lynn Shelton
Writer: Lynn Shelton