Clip: ‘Listen Up Philip’
A scene from the film directed by Alex Ross Perry.
Video by Tribeca Film on Publish Date October 11, 2014. Photo by Sean Price Williams/Tribeca Film.In the biliously, often hilariously funny tragicomedy “Listen Up Philip,” the alternately self-regarding and self-loathing novelist played in 50 shades of black by a peerless Jason Schwartzman stalks New York like a madman or, perhaps, a murderer. Philip Lewis Friedman doesn’t have blood on his hands (at least not yet), though he routinely goes in for the kill. If he looked shabbier, less domesticated, he could be mistaken for one of those thrown-away men who roam city streets muttering into the void of other people’s indifference. When the movie opens, he seems willfully teetering on the edge of that terrible darkness, inching ever closer to its maw with each furiously detonated word.
Words do more than hurt, they also slash and burn in this sharp, dyspeptic, sometimes gaspingly funny exploration of art and life, men and women, being and nonbeing, and the power and limits of language. Philip is making his name with words (his second novel, “Obidant,” is about to be published), but it’s what he does with them off the page that interests the writer-director Alex Ross Perry. The movie opens with Philip going to meet a former girlfriend, Mona (Samantha Jacober), who arrives late. This engenders an angry torrent from Philip that begins with a generalized complaint about Mona’s punctuality, briefly detours into chitchat, only to gather force and escalate as he condemns her past behavior toward him, attacks her character (then and now) and asserts his supremacy.
Philip, as this scene and the title suggest, isn’t one for listening, especially to people he knows. “Listen Up Philip” is partly about his agonies both as a writer and as a human being, the two seeming — at least for him — sometimes mutually exclusive. To an extent it’s a portrait of the artist as an insufferable jerk, but, more interestingly, it’s one that opens and expands beyond that classic framework to show the life usually seen milling about in the background. Much of the story involves Philip, but it makes generous room for the women he knows, specifically his girlfriend, Ashley Kane (a brilliant Elisabeth Moss), a photographer finding increasing success. The story opens with the couple on the verge of a crisis that’s emerged as her attention has shifted from Philip to her own art.
The little woman, subordinate and subservient, is a sad commonplace in tales about male artists. In Philip Roth’s masterly novel “The Ghost Writer” — one of Mr. Perry’s obvious touchstones — the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, looking back at his 23-year-old self, describes the wife of his literary hero, E. I. Lonoff, as having “the obedient air of an aging geisha when she dared to speak or to move.” The young Nathan should know, having made the pilgrimage to the great man’s country home nominally hoping to become his “spiritual son,” if one who hasn’t yet grasped (or admitted) the Oedipal implications of that journey. Philip has his own literary hero and foil, Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce, excellent), an angry, reclusive novelist who invites the younger man to his country home ostensibly to write.
Mr. Perry attacks the screen with the slashing strokes of an abstract painter on a tear, filling the frame with sweating bodies, giant heads, claustrophobic rooms and singularly unromantic glimpses of New York. The images have a gritty, stubborn beauty thanks to the Super 16 millimeter film, but the agitations of the cinematography, which suggests instability, can get under your skin almost as thoroughly as Philip does. Even as it grates, the visual style proves a seamless fit for this story because the embodied camerawork — you intuit the person behind the machine with every tremor — is as much an assertion of authorship as the film’s on-and-off narrator (an unseen Eric Bogosian). Mr. Perry is announcing that he’s telling a story about Philip, who, in turn, is living that story like a character — a “novelist.”
Philip is, in all respects, a real piece of work, but it takes a while to understand what manner of bastard — vainglorious artist, average narcissist, straight-up nut case — he is. The cruelty of his jabs plants early doubt about whether you should even be smiling, all while Mr. Perry slyly pumps the laughs. The casting of Mr. Schwartzman is crucial to keeping you and the humor off balance. With his caterpillar brows, doe eyes, epic nose and compact size (he’s Groucho Marx by way of a fawn), the actor is such a naturally amusing screen presence, at once adorable and absurd, that he can’t help but temper Philip. It’s no wonder that the more Philip gorges on rage, as he hurls insults and violently slaloms through the city’s slow-moving herds, the more foolish, and at times infantile he appears.
At one point, Mr. Perry, partly inspired by a similar strategy in William Gaddis’s novel “The Recognitions,” leaves Philip and his miseries to focus on Ashley and her story. Having decided to take up Zimmerman’s offer to write in the country, Philip has left her alone in Brooklyn for the summer, a reckless decision with catastrophic consequences. This narrative split is a bold formal move and a relief because it gives you a break from all that male ego. It’s also pleasurable because Ms. Moss is rapidly emerging as one of the most exciting actresses in American movies, and there’s great joy in just watching this intensely expressive, empathetic performer. There’s mischief in her eyes and smile, but she has a silent screen actress’s wistfulness and a gift for conveying an inner stillness that can suggest depths of melancholy.
“Listen Up Philip” is itself exhilarating because, for all its brutal comedy, it’s a serious work about the struggle to follow your muse and be fully alive in a world shared with other people. Zimmerman’s tragedy, one that surfaces in his lacerating asides and battles with his daughter, Melanie (Krysten Ritter), is that he’s sacrificed life — and loved ones — nominally for his art, though more truly for his devouring narcissism. As Philip seems headed to embrace Zimmerman’s self-immolating example, the film moves in another direction. Nothing speaks better to this than the astonishing coda to a late, bitter fight in which Mr. Perry and Ms. Moss together create — with a lingering close-up and eddies of triumph, despair, elation and regret — a masterwork about what it is to live for love and not just the self.