(Untitled)

Another deadpan comedy in an unhurried lackadaisical register from director Jonathan Parker and his writing partner Catherine DiNapoli – they of the slightly droll Crispin Glover-starring adaptation of Herman Melville’s hysterically funny but admittedly one-joke short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” – (Uncut) is a loving sort of a satire that refuses to-talk-down-to-or-about, concerning conceptual art and avant-garde music and their perilous work of shattering bourgeois complacency in a world (Manhattan) that is only fitfully interested in having its core aesthetic beliefs wrenched about, and only then as long as the prices are sufficiently high to bespeak serious marketplace significance. Our protagonist, Adrian Jacobs, is a composer of willfully difficult music that plays to audiences only slightly larger than his three-piece band. He not only pounds the piano with his elbows, arms akimbo, like Cecil Taylor and his eighty-eight tuned drums (plus the inside of the piano, duh), he also hands out pages of composition to his musicians that look not unlike Mr. Taylor’s hyper-complex diagrams of burbled chaos that might well be the diagnostics of UFO engines, and is perfectly rendered by Adam Goldberg with dead serious slacker intensity and simultaneous lassitude in both gait and demeanor. After a particularly poorly attended and remarked-upon concert of new material culminating in his waving the American flag aggressively at the near-empty theater, Adrian is introduced by commercial artist brother Josh to Madeleine Gray (played by sexy human bunny rabbit Marley Shelton), the attractive owner of a high-end Soho gallery who supports her outré showings of seriously far-out but-is-it-art? by pedaling Josh’s banal amorphous-pastel-fields-featuring-dots to hospitals, hotels and the like. Madeleine’s gallery features artists like English eccentric Ray Barko (Vinnie Jones in anachronistically quotidian dress), who does the Damien Hirst thing w/ dead animals crashlanded on household objects, and the borderline retarded single-named Monroe, who just puts his name on the household objects, in one case a blank white gallery wall itself, like an autistic Marcel Duchamp. After his disastrous performance, Madeleine takes to Adrian, whom she sees as a fellow traveler and prospective fuck-buddy (much to the chagrin of Josh, to whom she will not offer an opening in her gallery or bedroom), and he, for his part, is interested in sampling the sound-collage that is her wardrobe and in particular her squeaky leather skirt, which she happily offers up before jumping his bones. When Adrian starts to see his music made to analogically parallel worthless (to him) art that is worth a lot, he becomes seriously divested of his illusions and stages a John Cage 4’33-style pièce de literal résistance instead of the commissioned work involving kicking of bucket, rattling of chains, and a particularly nonplussed Russian opera singer. It takes this immersion within a world where art is both commodity and piss-take for Adrian to become unsettled about the value of his own work. At least until a beautiful epilogue (in fucking Nantucket, no less), which may or may not find him w/ cause to rethink things in the very real human terms that he perhaps started thinking about them in the first place. The real trumpcard in (Untitled)’s hand is that it has brought in real artists to provide the music and art so that what we are seeing and hearing is pretty damn close to the stuff that is actually out there. There is no too-easy mockery being dispensed here, but rather genuinely bemused relish in all the absurd majesty of this millennial art world rumpus room where dead-earnest craftspersons pound away at immortality while everybody else kind of wonders if the whole thing is a joke. We cannot tell if Madeleine is crazy, a flake, or a genuinely thoughtful and worldly woman precisely because she is all of these things. One minute she seems like a daffy duck and the next she is expertly explaining the difference between art and entertainment: “entertainment never posed a problem it couldn’t solve.” The best part of the whole film is the almost afterthought ministrations of cast member Lucy Punch, who as Adrian’s bandmate and friend (and lover?), is known only as “Clarinet,” and who walks through the film w/ that eager small town energy to engage people writ all over her face always on the verge of toppling into punked disbelief and quiet exasperation at all the bizarre goings on. You always see this person at parties, mouth open, head nodding, trying to be interested in what someone who is either drunk or crazy or both is saying and not wanting to be impolite and just get the fuck out of there. (Untitled) knows, and is in fact finally about, how she feels. She features in the final shot, eating quiche, eyes wandering impassively around a crowded Nantucket art opening, ever the game observer. You want to hug her. (Untitled) is not a hysterically funny movie, but you may end up wanting to hug it too.