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August 08, 2006
Can We 'Trust the Man' Freundlich's New York?
Bart Freundlich's new romantic "comedy" Trust the Man premiered Monday night in Chelsea, where the filmmaker and his wife/star Julianne Moore (right) were on hand to have a look with a few hundred friends. Anchored deep in bourgeoisie crisis, scatology and the existential black hole of the West Village, Trust the Man follows the exploits of two New York couples who just cannot seem to get their relationships in working order: Unemployed Tom and actress Rebecca (David Duchovny and Moore), frazzled parents who chum around/commisserate with Rebecca's underachieving brother Tobey and his long-time girlfriend Elaine (Billy Crudup and Maggie Gyllenhaal).
The story is not complex: Rebecca will not give Tom sex, so he cheats. Tobey will not give Elaine a baby, so she makes him leave. Everybody meets somebody else, and in fairness, I should acknowledge that Freundlich does offer a mildly refreshing, matter-of-fact view of infidelity. Followed, of course, by the singer-songwriter-accompanied moving-out montage. And then by the equally cloying coming-around montage. Estrogen-drunk monologues and men who actually say "boo-yah." A climactic, slow-motion moment of romantic truth onstage at Lincoln Center. It is all just.... so... easy.
As such, with all of this nagging conventionality in mind, I had to ask him and Moore during a chat last weekend: Who the hell are these people? And 25 years after Woody Allen's prime, with artistic heirs ranging from Ed Burns to Noah Baumbach contorting his legacy with various degrees of success, is the "crazy-ass-middle-class-white-New-Yorker-in-trouble" genre possess even half the intrigue for anybody outside New York as it (theoretically) yields for us?
"That's something I thought a lot about, and I think it does," said Freundlich, who ackowledged the autobiographical elements--friends, family, geography--that influenced his film. "Becuase I think people in New York are fascinated to see the place they live painted in a real way, but I think that New York is kind of this beacon, and that everyone is fascinated by it. And I like the idea of showing it as a small town, and hopefully although people may have kind of high class problems in the movie, showing that they have the same type of issues people have anywhere else. I didn't think too much where it was going to fit in; I just tried to be as true as I could to what I knew New York to be. ... I tried to stay true to it because there's something very unconscious that goes on when you know that it's real."
Which indeed is kind of fascinating in one way: Semi-conscious New Yorkers couldn't care less about seeing close-ups of the façades at Barney's or Magnolia Bakery or Da Silvano, and people unfamiliar with New York know little to nothing about the relation of retail landmarks to a filmmaker's "real" New York. They are status symbols without status.
Moore employed a more historic view of Trust the Man's milieu. "When you remember all of those Doris Day movies that were set in New York?" she said. "Sabrina was set in New York. ... All those so-called 'sophisticated' romantic comedies or comedies--The Apartment, all that stuff--were set in New York City. The thing that's appealing to me about New York, actually, and that people don't always understand until they've spent some time here is how community-oriented the city is. You can feel very, very lost if set up in Midtown somewhere and you're like, 'I don't have any friends and I don't know where to go.' But once you figure out New York and you realize it's just a group of little villages and you get to know everybody--you know the magazine guy, you know the deli guy, you know the other restaurants and you have your friends on the street and the laundromat you go to and all that--you feel very supported."
Then she went further macro: "You have two kinds of American movies: You have the small-town American movie and you have the big-city American movie," Moore said. "And in both of them, you realize they kind of celebrate whatever community these people belong to. So I think it does play."
If she says so. In any event, it is everyone's city, so you tell us. Judge for yourself when Fox Searchlight opens Trust the Man Aug. 18.
(Photo: Dennis Van Tine / Open All Night)
Posted by stvanairsdale at August 8, 2006 12:45 PM
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