Lawrence Michael Levine (2020)
I was interested in seeing Black Bear because of Aubrey Plaza, in light of her impressive lead performance in Matt Spicer’s Ingrid Goes West (2017). Not interested enough, it transpired, to watch writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine’s film through to the end.
At the start of Black Bear, Plaza’s character Allison sits thoughtful on a dock beside a lake. The screen announces ‘Part One: The Bear in the Road’. We learn that Allison is a scenarist-director and former actress. She has come to a creatives’ retreat in the Adirondack Mountains, run by Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and his pregnant wife Blair (Sarah Gadon), where Allison is looking to kick-start her next screenplay. On her first evening at the retreat, needling conversation between her hosts develops into verbally violent arguments that also involve their only guest – the wife accuses the husband of being sexually attracted to Allison. Not long after Blair has gone to bed, her suspicions are realised: Gabe and Allison go for a swim in the lake then start making love. They’re interrupted by Blair, who attacks Gabe and tells Allison to leave. Gabe retaliates by shoving Blair to the ground, causing her to bleed. Gabe orders Allison to drive them to a hospital. On the way, Allison is startled by a black bear that looms up on the road. The car swerves to avoid the animal and crashes into a tree.
Throughout this gruesome evening, Allison keeps professing views and giving biographical details that she then withdraws – leaving Gabe and Blair uncertain of what she really thinks or who she really is. Blair reasonably finds this vexing but doesn’t seem to suspect, as vexed viewers may do, that the instability of Allison’s identity is connected to her purpose in attending the retreat. On-screen creative writers of the present day, unlike their predecessors, don’t usually work on a manual typewriter or chain smoke. They may not even be hard drinkers. So they’re no longer able to pound the keys, rip a page of manuscript from the typewriter, scrunch it into a ball, chuck the ball at a waste paper bin already full of the things, furiously stub out their cigarette, light up again and reach for the bottle. A would-be writer in a film will still, almost certainly, be suffering from writer’s block but the loss of those visual clichés leaves a gap. It’s increasingly conventional for this to be filled by expanding another venerable trope: the writer overcomes their block by making shameless use of the lives of people around them. In a film with meta tendencies, this can also entail making the audience unsure whether events occurring on screen are objectively real or only taking place within the writer character’s mind.
It’s pretty soon clear that Black Bear is that way inclined and Lawrence Michael Levine removes any doubt about it after the road crash. He gives notice of ‘Part Two: The Bear by the Boat House’; in my case, this turned out to be notice to quit after a few more minutes. The same trio features but now Allison and Gabe are married, and she’s suspicious that he’s having an affair with Blair. In this scenario, Gabe is a movie director; the two women are both actresses in his movie. Gabe may not actually be having an affair with Blair but wants his wife to think he is in order to make Allison’s acting more ‘authentic’. In other words, the art-imitating-life-or-is-it-all-in-the-writer’s-head stuff isn’t enough for Levine to stretch to feature length; he needs another over-familiar conceit to get there. The fractious exchanges in Part One, for as long as they remain socially plausible, are intriguing, and well played by all three actors, especially Plaza and Gadon. In the early stages of Part Two, Abbott, perhaps encouraged by Levine, overdoes the manipulative director’s nastiness, which hastened my exit (from BFI Player). There’s a detailed plot synopsis on Wikipedia. Suffice to say, it’s no surprise to learn that the film eventually ‘cuts back to the opening scene, with Allison alone looking at the foggy lake. She returns to the cabin to write, but this time she is seen writing “Black Bear” on the notepad before looking at the viewer’.
25 August 2021
