LIVING IN OBLIVION
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1995 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: This is an occasionally amusing look
at the problems a director faces to get a few
scenes shot. The film is somewhat educational
about the process of making films, how it is done
and what can go wrong, but ultimately the film
falls a little flat and feels like an exercise in
petulance. The problems themselves, if not the
density of their occurrence, are believable but
they are not enough to carry the film. Rating: 0
(-4 to +4).
Are you in an easy job? Probably not. I know my job isn't simple. I have to be diplomatic at times, I have frustrations, people I deal with make mistakes. In fact, my job seems a lot like that of director Nick Reve (played by Steve Buscemi) in LIVING IN OBLIVION. This is less a story than a catalog with dramatization of the problems a director faces getting three scenes shot for a film called LIVING IN OBLIVION. The name "Reve" means dream but Nick's life is anything but a dream. The problems Nick faces with assistants who have their mind on other things, equipment that fails or that nobody on set knows how to use are driving him into hysteria. The film is nearly plotless, as for most of the film the viewer sits on the shooting stage like a fly on the wall and watches what happens.
What the viewer does see is an incredible number of foul-ups, personality clashes, and accidents. Nick has to act as confessor, mediator, diplomat, counselor, and general seer. We are presented an unending chain of weirdos, people with chips on their shoulder, and people who think they can do Nick's job better. It is easy to believe each of the problems that Nick faces; it just stretches the credibility to say he faces all these problems just filming three scenes. Admittedly one expects more problems working on a low-budget film with cheap equipment and with fewer assistants than on a big Hollywood production. Still, it is hard to believe that this day is typical. There is internal evidence in the film that this really is not all happening in a single day. But that is not clear due to logic holes in the script by writer/director Don DiCillo that I will discuss in a spoiler section after the review.
There is a good deal of discussion of the different production methods that have to be used in low budget independent films and in polished but empty Hollywood productions people on set refer to as "Hostess Twinkie films." But again the sort of problems faced in making the independent film cannot be all that different from problems in any small semi-technical operation.
Steve Buscemi is a good actor and one of those actors who appeal to low-budget, independent, cult directors much as John Turturro does. One will nearly always see him somewhere in a film by Quentin Tarantino or the Coen Brothers. Not as familiar are Catherine Keener as an insecure actress who is all too easily crushed by any criticism at all and James LeGros as a supremely egocentric but untalented actor. The two actors, have slept together the night previous to the shooting and have a comic battle of wills on the set.
The photography makes good use of both monochrome and color photography, though it is not consistent as to where it uses each. As films about the making of films go, this one is certainly one of the most informative. It suffers from its limited scope and an insufficient number of different things to go wrong to keep the audience amused. In the end the viewer has been edified more than satisfied. Give this movie a rating of 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Spoiler...Spoiler...Spoiler...Spoiler...
Dreams are very important in this film. There are three sequences, two of which turn out to be dreams and a third is the filming of a dream sequence. As I pointed out above, Nick's last name is French for "dream." Tito criticizes Nick for not understanding how dreams work, but DiCillo does not seem to understand any better. I believe (but am willing to be corrected) that dreams are always from a subjective point of view. In sequences that turn out to be dreams, characters see themselves as another person. A dream would always be from the inside of the person dreaming looking out. I think it is also very unlikely for a person to dream a scene where he or she is not present. Perhaps someone who know a little more about the psychology of dreaming can tell me if these two assumptions are correct. They are certainly true of all my own dreams that I remember. Things that happen in dreams seem to carry over to the filming of the third sequence, which is apparently not supposed to be a dream. For example, Wolf's eye is injured in one dream, but that seems to be carried on to other sequences. My suspicion is that at some point the first two sequences were not originally written as dreams and the script was patched to say they were dreams at a later point.
Mark R. Leeper
mark.leeper@att.com
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