Josephine Decker (2018)
Troubled sixteen-year-old Madeline (Helena Howard) is by some way the youngest member of an experimental theatre group in Manhattan. Madeline, who lives with her single mother Regina (Miranda July) and younger brother Damon (Jaron Elijah Hopkins), has mental health issues, for which she’s on medication, and a fragile, fractious relationship with her understandably but tiresomely anxious mother. The theatre workshop is a lifeline. According to its director, Evangeline (Molly Parker), Madeline alone truly understands what she wants from her performers. This is both hard and easy to believe. On the one hand, it’s integral to the scheme of Madeline’s Madeline that Evangeline herself doesn’t know what she wants and keeps changing her mind. On the other hand, the young heroine is one of only two members of the group – the other a woman known as KK (Okwui Okpokwasili) – who shows signs of acting ability, even though her speciality is ‘being’ a cat – stretching and miaowing and so on. Perhaps it’s because I like cats so much that I can’t stand humans pretending to look or sound like them (think that gruesome Rossini operatic duet).
The visual style of Josephine Decker’s film – lots of handheld camerawork designed for kinetic and disorienting effect – gives it a quasi-experimental flavour too, even if that style is hardly original. In comparison, the story Decker tells (she co-wrote the screenplay with Donna Di Novelli) is essentially familiar. Madeline’s Madeline is both a coming-of-age drama and the latest variation on a reliably entertaining theme: what happens when a creative starts to use the real lives and problems of people within their orbit for art’s sake. In the climax to the film Evangeline invites Regina to join the workshop, devises an exercise in which all group members pretend to be Regina, and gets from Madeline a passionately incisive impersonation of her mother. Exit Regina weeping: the other workshoppers, horrified by Evangeline’s exploitative approach, instantly create another ‘immersive’ exercise, with their director on the receiving end.
This isn’t the first time that one or more of the group plays a trick on Evangeline. Early on, Madeline and others moon her; then a rehearsal ends prematurely, without her say so. Between incidents, however, Evangeline’s actors, except for Madeline, are unquestioningly compliant. I didn’t understand if Decker was making a comment about theatre collective dynamics or if it was just convenient to her to keep putting rebellion back on ice until the big finish. I came out suspecting the latter because there are other instances in Madeline’s Madeline where Decker holds something falsely in suspense until she needs it, or introduces an element which she then drops because following it through would complicate matters.
It’s soon obvious that Evangeline is herself ragingly insecure; when Madeline attends a party at her home, Evangeline’s warm, supportive husband George (Curtiss Cook) and his family therefore come as a surprise. But as she drives Madeline home afterwards, Evangeline goes into rather baffling paroxysms of anxiety about herself and her marriage – as if to prove she’s more vulnerable than Madeline. So the only point of introducing the husband seems to be to enable a scene in which Madeline joins George in the kitchen after the party and hits on him, without result. The drive home ends with Evangeline suggesting that Madeline take a break from acting and Madeline agreeing. It’s unclear why she decides to rejoin the workshop when Evangeline recruits Regina – except that she must, in order for Decker’s climax to happen at all.
All three main actresses are good – as is Curtiss Cook, in spite of his dim role. Helena Howard, making her screen debut and clearly very talented, is remarkable in Madeline’s devastating impression of Regina. (This truly is a major advance on Madeline’s feline mimicry.) Josephine Decker might have done better to ration the frenetic camera movement, maybe using this specifically to express Madeline’s emotionally turbulent point of view. The workshop goings-on would have greater salience placed in a more visually neutral context: as it is, they and the surface of the film seem to be part of the same dubious aesthetic. It can’t have been the intention but Madeline’s Madeline plays to sceptical attitudes towards experimental theatre and independent film-making.
14 May 2019
