Mutual Appreciation

[December 6th, 2006] Every so often, some sensitive young man is anointed The Voice of His Generation. The mantle has been blithely assigned to Dave Eggers, Conor Oberst or any number of other angst-ridden memoirists and poet-musicians. But such casual coronations ignore the fact that this generation, for all its media savvy and access to such varied forms of self-expression as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, is uniquely clichÉd, fumbling and unintelligible in much of its communications. If an emblematic voice actually walked the streets of New York's indie capital Williamsburg (or its left-coast counterparts like Portland's North Mississippi 'hood), he probably wouldn't talk much. He'd probably be mute.

This is nearly the case of Alan (Justin Rice), the hero of Andrew Bujalski's hipster comedy of manners Mutual Appreciation. Arriving in New York City after the breakup of his Boston band, Alan specializes in conversational pauses that allow him to flash his toothy, toothsome grin. Cadging sleeping quarters from friends and attracting sexual advances in other bedrooms, he bears more than a passing resemblance to another hipster who was once fresh to the Village. "I guess girls don't normally compare you to Bob Dylan on the first date," radio host Sara (Seung-Min Lee) chuckles. "Nah," says Alan. "It's usually like the third date."

Much of Alan's existence, apart from seeking a drummer and dodging his father's increasingly concerned phone calls, consists of explaining to women—especially Sara—that it ain't him, babe. But then he starts spending increasing amounts of the weekends with Ellie (Rachel Clift), who is dating his childhood best friend (Bujalski himself). It's here that Mutual Appreciation, which at first appears as a satire of the self-admiration societies formed by the young, takes a turn. In its minor (very minor) way, the movie becomes an update of Flaubert's Sentimental Education, charting the moral history of the men of Bujalski's generation. And, like many such histories, it's all about the girl that got away.

The desultory progress of Alan and Ellie's courtship is subtly and precisely observed, leading to two scenes—both on the edge of beds—in which erotic release seems both imminent and impossible. Here Buljalski's use of low-budget celluloid and his eschewal of a soundtrack, often an annoyance, heightens the standoff between ethics and desire to a painful tension. I found myself holding my breath.

The characters also hold their breaths, or at least their words. What's most striking—and disconcerting—about Bujalski's portrait of his contemporaries is how thoroughly inarticulate they prove. They are good, and kind, but even as they discover their best impulses, they can't find the verbs to go with the feelings. "You can say whatever you want," Alan tells Ellie. She tries, but the conversation staggers to a halt. Maybe it's the beer, or the weed, or the callowness. Whatever the cause, speechlessness is not the most promising grounds for entertainment. As finely wrought as Mutual Appreciation is, it suggests that while Williamsburg may be a nice place to live, I wouldn't want to visit there often.