GOLDILOCKS AND THE TWO BEARS (Jeff Lipsky 2024)

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CLAIRE MILLIGAN IN GOLDILOCKS AND THE TWO BEARS

JEFF LIPSKY: GOLDILOCKS AND THE TWO BEARS (2024)

Failure to launch

Having long frequented Quad Cinema in New York I'm no stranger to notices posted of Jeff Lipsky-directed films. I even knew someone - a fond memory - who spoke of wanting to distribute the director's Flannel Pajamas. But Goldilocks and the Two Bears is my first direct experience of a Lipsky film. I regret to say that it has not been a happy one.

Who is Jeff Lipsky? A hybrid, it seems. He has had a long career both as an indie film distributor and maker of his own indie films. He distributed Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself and Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André; and later Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise and Lasse Hallstrom's multiple Oscar-nominated My Life as a Dog. Those last three, especially the third, and the 1992 US release of Tous les Matins du Monde, were big hits. Later Lipsky, who headed a string of different companies, came back to distribute tougher material in Tim Roth's The War Zone and Michael Cuesta's L.I.E. He seems to have taken on challenges, and somehow succeeded. As a director he has always been marginal, but passionate to be in the game. He may be less successful than usual here, with an unknown cast and material that seems a little too much of the time like off-the-wall riffs. I would hope this is not him at his best. Because if it is, we'd have to say he is a distributor whose own films are vanity projects.

In earlier outings he has directed Chazz Palminteri, Drea De Matteo and Linda Fiorentino in the 2009 Once More with Feeling ; Jonathan Groff in Twelve Thirty, Justin Kirk and Julianne Nicholson in Flannel Pajamas, Reed Birney several times, and early on, Edie Falco and Rebecca Schull. There would be nothing wrong with his current cast being less familiar if only it impressed more. It features Claire Milligan, who plays Ivy, a blonde young women (the "Goldillocks,") who enters her new Las Vegas condo which she is to inhabit with her grandmother, and finds there two homeless squatters played by Serra Naiman as Ingrid and Bryan Mittelstadt as Ian (so the two "Bears" are a man and a woman, which doesn't quite gibe - the first wrong note, perhaps). For some unknown reason Ivy befriends the two interlopers. They get to talking. And talking. And talking. The stories the odd couple, mainly Ingrid, tell, you wouldn't believe. And you don't. But we're supposed to, I guess.

Lipsky joins his three characters by choosing names for them beginning with the letter "I." Does this whimsical gesture imply he didn't think they fit together otherwise? If so, he may be right. Their bland looks and manner are odd considering the back stories that emerge, especially of the obviously seedy and lawless (but not at all seedy and lawless looking) Ingrid and Ian.

Lipsky's material is dialogue-heavy, like the films of Éric Rohmer, which I love. But while Rohmer's films may be artificial, they're full of emotion. Their characters are attracted to each other. They have ideas that they're passionate about. And they don't indulge in monologues that last ten minutes and go off on random tangents as Ivy, Ingrid, and Ian's do. This trio's speeches feel made up and recited because the material doesn't engage or convince.

To take another example, an inimitable one, but all good art is inimitable, Tarantino's dialogue notoriously, especially in his masterpiece Pulp Fiction, spreads out and goes off on tangents. But (I'm thinking of the Chris Walken gold watch monologue in Pulp Fiction) with Tarentino, those tangents are brilliant and riveting, with an undertone of the hilarious. And though the gold watch monologue spans wars and generations, it's really only four and a half minutes long and frequently interrupted by establishing, motivating, enlivening shots of the boy intently listening.

Ingrid has tales to tell about herself and Ian, about how they met, their shared (but somehow implausible, because without visible trace) drug addiction. Later Ivy will have her tales to tell of family bereavement, and so on. Whether these tales are plausible or not doesn't matter. The gold watch tale is the shaggiest of shaggy dog stories, though with a startling literal "punch" line flash-forward it ends with. I'm reading Huckleberry Finn again, and from one angle that book can be seen as consisting of one long string of digressions, each one more implausible than the last - but also each one of them more brilliant, amusing, and profoundly significant, when you ponder them. Lipsky's monologues here certainly meander, but they don't engage in those ways.

Besides being less clever or amusing than those examples, the speeches in Goldilocks fail to engage emotionally. Lipsky is said to be inspired and mentored in his filmmaking career by John Casssavetes and his improvisational films, so it may be far fetched to go to another comparison that's so written, but I also thought while watching this film of Whit Stillman's Metropolitan and the way its well-turned speeches create a whole self-contained social world that makes the highly structured talk of his characters feel right, even though, like Éric Rohmer's they're artificial.

Ivy, Ingrid, Ian, et al. are just riffing, and as the RogerEbert.com reviewer Sheila O'Malley puts it, if the long speeches in Lipsky's movies don't hold us and we stop and say "wait, what is this person babbling about?" the game is up. And that's what happens here. A lot of complications, ridiculous, possibly for some potentially intriguing, come later in the movie, but it's too late: he's lost us.

That's not just because of weakness of direction, action, and writing. It's also because the premise, the sterile, nearly empty condo and three people whose presence there together is random, contains too little to engage us.

Oh yes: the cinematography is clear and bright and pretty. And so are the young actors, whether dressed or naked, nice to look at. But even if they were famous, that wouldn't be enough.

Under the circumstances, anything would be too long. But making the film run for two hours and fifteen minutes rubs it in. Easily the last half hour is a collection of scenes, some straight out of a soap opera, that wildly flail about and contribute northing.

Goldlocks and the Two Bears, 136 mins., opened July 5, 2024 in New York (Quad Cinema) and Los Angelse (Laemmle Royal).