Creating art is hard. With that in mind, filmmaking is perhaps one of the most complicated artistic enterprises. Crafting a motion picture is an absolute ball-busting endeavour, often fuelled by chaos, with little fanfare upon completion. At the end of every Filmcast podcast episode, host David Chen remarks that, whether you enjoyed the main review or not, at the end of the day, it’s pretty impressive that a film was made. He’s not wrong. Media creation has become more accessible, but coming up with a feature film from scratch with a full cast and crew that appeals to an audience? There are still a lot of dreamers who pretend it’s easier than it is.
The film Living in Oblivion expertly depicts the frenzied
bedlam of low-budget filmmaking. Steve Buscemi plays Nick, a long-haired,
wide-eyed director who seems a hair's breadth away from a full-on manic
episode. Such is independent filmmaking. As the low-budget project begins to
crumble around him, Nick struggles with maintaining on-set equilibrium. The
production is riddled with dilemmas that could hamstring a production. Nick
valiantly fights to preserve his sanity against a creative world focused on losing
the plot, both literally and figuratively.
Tom DiCillo, a filmmaker who studied alongside Jim Jarmusch
and Spike Lee, is the brainchild behind Living in Oblivion. While Jarmusch and
Lee are household names among the dwellings of typical cinephiles, DiCillo had
a quieter career. It’s not hard to see why, when DiCillo described making a
film as “one of the most tedious, boring, painful experiences, and that just
when something goes right.” This became the origin of Living in Oblivion,
capturing the madness and anxiety of making a film. This is perhaps what makes
the film so enjoyable. While many other fictional “filmmaking” movies have an
air of notable smugness (are we surprised when they do so well at awards
season?), Living in Oblivion captures the worst fears of making a movie, and
does so with a charming, offbeat wit, smart direction and stellar performances.
One must wonder if DiCillo dislikes the process because he knows how to nail
it.
Living in Oblivion accurately pinpoints the calamitous pain
of creating with no money. Its opening segment has two crew members debating
the freshness of some milk that has been sitting outside for a week. The
innocuous conversation kickstarts a series of predicaments that gradually
increase in importance, while Nick tries to capture the emotional resonance of
a pivotal scene. The scene in question involves an emotional conversation
between mother and daughter, played by Nicole (Catherine Keener) and Cora (Rica
Martens). Nick envisions one elegant long take drifting between the actors. The
reality is very different. The sequence gets spoiled by various mishaps
occurring around him. Lights get blown. Boom mics drop into shot. The shot
itself falls out of focus. These events lead to both actresses fumbling lines
that came to them so well at the beginning. Nick slowly loses his placidness
with each slip-up, then suddenly, due to a small gesture of reassurance from
Cora, Nicole finds the emotional crux in the scene. The crew are spellbound as
the two actresses hit the scene straight out of the park…Only for everyone to realise
that nothing was recorded because the cinematographer, Wolf (Dermot Mulroney),
was puking his guts out in the bathroom. His illness? Caused by the week-old
milk he put in his coffee. DiCillo’s film captures how easily tiny drops of
misfortune swell into disastrous calamities on a no-money production.
If Nick isn't dealing with vomiting cinematographers, then
he's contending with self-centred leading men. Living in Oblivion's second
segment has brash lead actor Chad stumble into proceedings. The intention of
Chad? To hog every bit of the limelight at the expense of everyone else. Chad
is wildly obnoxious, creatively reckless, and a stunningly accurate
representation of the types of creatives who litter the lower end of the humanities.
The female crew adore him, but unknown to them, Chad sleeps with co-lead
actress Nicole, who bluntly cools things down before they go to work. In
retaliation, Chad begins to suggest a series of useless improvisation ideas to
Nick. These are not only designed to diminish Nicole's on-screen presence but
also inflate Chad's ego. Quite simply,
the guy is an ignorant prig, played wonderfully by James LeGros. Chad's
character was assumed to be based on Brad Pitt, who DiCillo had worked with on
his troubled debut Johnny Suede (1991). However, DiCillo squashed those
rumours, stating an emergency junket for the film Legends of the Fall (1994)
stopped Pitt from taking up the role of Chad. While it’s easy to see why people
see Chad as a send-up of the future A-lister, LeGros’ performance is more of a
composite of spiteful clowns who invade creative projects and make it all about
themselves.
Hell is other people. And filmmaking is something that
usually pulls in quite a few people for a product to exist. Living in Oblivion
enjoys pointing out that while the film should be the end goal for everything,
the quirks and agendas which lie in the recesses of each crew member will
gladly hamper that objective. Steve Buscemi has stated that Nick is one of his
favourite roles, and that’s understandable. In a career full of memorable
performances, this hapless indie director is a role Buscemi shares an affinity
with as a performer and director. Seen here as often bemused, bewildered or
sarcastic, this is the actor at his best. He revels in a role that has him
constantly frustrated by those around him. Be it Wolf’s ego and fraternising,
which stops the cinematographer from framing the damn film, or Nicole’s bleakly
insecure acting. The performer's anxiety is only being accelerated by the
needless gossipy chirps which she hears off set. If you’ve ever tried to put on
a production of any sort, none of this should surprise you. What makes the film
so entertaining is how keenly observed DiCillo captures everything. It’s
funny because you’ve been there.
As a film about a production going awry, Living in Oblivion
strikes a perfect tonal balance. It manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and
painfully honest about the multitude of predicaments that fall upon Nick's
production. To top things off, DiCillo even wraps much of the film in dream
sequences. Filtering the indie film world through the subconscious mind of
those who live it is an amusing nod to the liberal use of dream logic as a
crutch in movies. DiCillo uses a unique conceit on dream logic, with the film
narrative fragmenting into the dreams of those who inhabit the world. Dreams are a well-used cinematic trope, and here it becomes a subversive fuel which drives each person on set in one way or another. DiCillo plays this all out Run Lola Run style. Amusingly, the final act is one of a dream sequence being shot. This segment is
the movie Nick is trying to make. What came before it? Anxiety nightmares of
what could have happened? Future apprehensions of what may happen? DiCillo
never lets us in fully. The film that Nick is making? The audience is never
given a full description. Nevertheless, Living in Oblivion understands the
filmmaking process so well that it does not matter. You only need to know that
the crew is so tied to what's being made that you are invested.
We don’t know how good we have it now. Filmmaking is so
ubiquitous that influencers are shilling guides to how easy it is to make a
film on your own, without a crew. You can bring something together in about a
month and probably find an audience soon after. Living in Oblivion is a smart,
witty reminder that filmmaking, at one point, is more like herding cats.
Creating art is hard, and for many, filmmaking is still an endeavour for the
ultra-loopy. But to paraphrase David Chen, as I did earlier, it’s pretty
impressive to make a cinematic project that all comes together. It seems it’s
even more satisfying when said project is about the absolute madness of
filmmaking.
Living In Oblivion can currently be found on YouTube
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