Jesse Eisenberg’s ‘The Hummingbird Project’ Feels Like A Noble Failure

THE HUMMINGBIRD PROJECT

★★★

The Hummingbird Project is a film that exists in a post-Big Short world: a wry, wordy, faux-art movie featuring name actors in odd haircuts talking really fast, its meta-heist-movie a tragicomic burrowing-down into the miniscule arcana of the financial world, where obsessions about fractions can translate into huge real-world repercussions.

It stars Jesse Eisenberg and Alexander Skarsgård as a pair of original-odd-couple cousins with a cockeyed, billion-dollar dream: lay a dead-straight four-inch fibre-optic cable from middle-America to the New York stock exchange, thereby increasing the processing times on high-frequency trading computations, thereby making millions. Eisenberg, in his fast-talkin’ element, plays the salesman/huckster of the pair; essentially delivering a variation on his familiar screen persona. Skarsgård is evidently desperate to shake off his bland-hunk baggage, though: donning a balding wig, glasses, and an emotionally-maladroit air, as he plays the crack-coding, way-antisocial brains behind the operation, with nary a shot of his buff chest in the movie.

The flick turns into something resembling a road-movie, as the pair — aided by Better Call Saul’s Michael Mando — head off on their quixotic adventure, with Salma Hayek’s almost-Cruella-haired antagonist, a former boss fond of ruthless corporate skulduggery, hot on their trail, out to foil their best laid plans. The comic tenor is set by the rat-a-tat rhythms of the dialogue and the jaunty pizzicato pluckings of Yves Gourmeur’s score. But the tone doesn’t quite work: all its hustle and bustle a rather-romantic depiction of folly motivated by greed, the attempted emotional turn in the third-act at odds with what’s come before. In such, The Hummingbird Project ultimately feels like a noble failure; although failure feels far too strong a word.

It’s the latest odd work for Québécois filmmaker Kim Nguyen, who first found acclaim with the Congolese-set child-soldier tale War Witch, a weird mix of Dickensian picaresque and socio-political tragedy. Since then, he’s made wild dramas about lovers lost in the snowy wilds of Nunavut (Two Lovers And A Bear) and lovers divided by a continent but united by military surveillance technology (Eye On Juliet). None of Nguyen’s movies is, in their own way, great; sometimes, they’re not even good. But each feels distinctive, pernickety, a little ridiculous.

So, here, all the effort going on at all times — the ultra-clever dialogue, the oddball details, the quirks of character, the capital-A acting, the balance of tones, the big swings taken — can feel exhausting, almost futile. But, taken in the right way, it can be seen as a form of nobility; endless energy expended in the hopes of making a movie that at once lives up to and confounds prestige-picture expectations. Your mileage may vary on whether this tragicomedy seems more comic or tragic, and your entertainment may depend heavily on whether seeing a bald Skarsgård playing tennis in slippers and dressing-gown is delightful. But in an era of cookie-cutter entertainments and endless riffs on familiar genre, The Hummingbird Project is, at the very least, a picture that never feels pro forma.

BURNING

★★★★1/2

Burning, the international breakthrough for veteran Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong, is, in many ways, a strange film to have achieved a breakthrough. His sixth flick — and first since 2010’s Poetry — ended up all over Best-Of lists at the end of 2018, including Barack Obama’s. Even though it’s the kind of movie — long, slow, drifting, totally open to interpretation — that rarely finds such approval. Looked at in one light, it’s a thriller: a love-triangle in which a woman goes missing, her two paramours, and romantic rivals, the rich cad who may’ve done her in and the earnest lover out to know the truth.

But Burning defies simple readings, let alone categorisations. Anyone who takes this as a tale of an honest guy with a crush on a cute girl who falls in with a bad man can’t see the forest for the trees. Adapting a brief short-story by Haruki Murakami — which is, itself, a story about telling stories — Lee takes the scant handfuls of source-text plot and pads them out with aching, telling silences. It’s, slyly, a film about both an unreliable narrator and the unreliability of cinema. Lee employs a super-handsome cast (Yoo Ah-in, Steven Yeun, Jeon Jong-seo) and a disarmingly-beautiful photographic approach (he and DP Hong Kyung-pyo routinely shooting amidst the golden glow of magic hour), as a kind of sleight-of-hand; Burning a work of quiet disorientation camouflaged by its attractive façade.

As whole, it’s a movie that truly embodies the notion of being a ‘mystery’. That’s because what’s mysterious is, essentially, everything. Its central puzzle — what happened to Jeon’s character — is never solved; she simply vanishes, leaving behind a cavernous hole, and endless questions.

Those questions are left to linger, in the minds of viewers more than anything. Burning is a film where even its resolution brings no resolve; Lee employing a familiar trope of cinematic catharsis/justice and rendering it meaningless. The director has called his film a study of inarticulate rage, of young people — either privileged or economically-disenfranchised — who don’t know where to channel their anger, how to combat the ennui of modern existence. The hole its missing-woman leaves behind is a symbol of a greater hole, inside all its characters, that can never be filled. In their yearning, these three characters feel relatable; but, othertimes, they feel more like phantoms. In its study of youthful rage, Lee has made, ultimately, a film about how we can never know really anyone. Burning’s characters embody the idea: each as distant, difficult-to-read, inscrutable, and impossible-to-really-know as the people we puzzle over in real life.

1985

★★★

An American indie drama about a closeted, HIV-positive man coming home to Texas for Christmas to visit his conservative Christian family sounds, at this point, like something to avoid. But Yen Tan’s 1985 pushes back against the familiarity — and the bred contempt — of the ‘black sheep comes home for a family gathering’ micro-genre.

It does so by keeping things small, careful, finely-observed. Its smallness starts with its running-time; which, at 85 minutes, is a length you have to wonder might even be meta-symbolic. Whilst 1985’s premise suggests moments of high drama — spilled-out secrets & lies, skeletons shaken from the family closet — instead, Tan steers away from these staples of the scenario. Here, he’s undertaking a study in the denial and repression of the family dynamic, where grand things are rarely spoken aloud, acknowledged, or admitted to. And, in turn, his screenplay echoes this: the film filled with people never delivering the big speech you’re waiting for, 1985 absent great moments of revelation, coming-out, catharsis.

In turn, 1985’s mise-en-scène embodies this grand act of ‘underplaying’. Whilst the black-and-white 16mm celluloid carries an unmistakable air of ‘cinema’ — mirroring the DIY indie movies of the era, whilst summoning the romantic rebellion the French nouvelle vague — these images only chronicle a flat banality. Here, the period setting isn’t an excuse for poodle-perms or keytars. Instead, the set dressing is devoted to capturing a middle-class family home in all its forgotten-about knick-knacks and never-considered interior design. And, in turn, there’s no moments of visual flourish or eye-catching composition; the bland direction matching the directorial decision to take a hot-button issue and depict it as quotidian.

THUNDER ROAD

★★★1/2

Even in an era in which the insatiable feed demands infinite streaming-video content, it still seems rare for short films to take on a life of their own. But Jim Cummings’ 2016 short, Thunder Road, evidently did. A 12-minute single-take depicting a cop having a meltdown delivering the eulogy at his mother’s funeral, it didn’t just get stuck on the festival circuit; instead finding a growing online audience, inspiring a Kickstarter to turn it into a feature film, and possibly even setting a precedent for the best-ever episode of Bojack Horseman.

Now, Cummings — still in his role as writer, director, star, producer, composer — has turned that buzz and goodwill and “free money from the internet” into a feature-length exemplar of cinematic can-do spirit; a DIY movie that takes its cop-meltdown-to-Bruce-Springsteen-at-a-funeral predecessor as an inciting incident, spinning it out into a study of the calamitous state of modern masculinity.

Cops have long been a cinematic staple, but they’ve usually come in two sizes only: good or bad. Cummings’ character — named Jim, too — is neither. Instead, he’s a host of oft-contradictory impulses, most of which he fails to control. Moustachioed and uptight, he’s a simmering pot prone to boiling over; and, as police-officer, he feels entitled in his employment of violence, out to ‘subdue’ anyone and anything he finds disagreeable. He’s a buffoon, but one only funny up to a point.

Jim is a successor to the archetype of Adam Sandler’s early movies: the emotionally-arrested manboy prone to outbursts of anger. Thunder Road plays this for both comedy and tragedy, Cummings making palpable — as filmmaker, but, especially, as actor — the horrors of a man forever acting out and/or losing his shit, trying to do good but seemingly only bringing harm.