New Releases: 'The Future'

The release of Miranda July's The Future (her second feature film after 2005's Me and You and Everyone We Know) has re-instigated the common critique that the writer-director is too “twee,” too “precocious,” or too “quirky,” especially for the emotional sweep and the thematic heft that she's attempting. As in 2005, July's haters have come out of the woodwork, and there's a trace of sexism in many of the criticisms heaved her way. (David Edelstein's review in New York Magazine claims that July has a gift for going back in time and evoking the “helpless little girl she once was,” for example.) After all, July's style doesn't really seem much more precocious than Wes Anderson's, although the two directors get varying degrees of mileage out of their hermetic worldviews.

The quirkiness of The Future (like that in Me and You and Everyone We Know) is a double-edged sword: at times it comes off as too self-conscious, as its own form of empty showboating, but without this brand of daffy eccentricity neither movie would be as singularly effective. I still detest the scene in Me and You in which the adorable little boy and the frigid art curator meet on a park bench as the music swells, realizing that they've been exchanging bizarre scatological come-ons with each other in an online chat room. But this same little-boy character and his frizzy-haired precociousness also make for the movie's overwhelming final scene, which stems from a concept that could be deemed “cute” but which strikes us with its wide-eyed curiosity with the world and its subtle interconnectedness with what has come before it.

Similarly, much of The Future threatens to be unbearably quirky. Its two main characters are melancholy, awkward wannabe-artists (July's Sophie and Hamish Linklater's Jason) who speak in deadpan non-sequiturs. They are mortified by the prospect of adopting an aged cat with renal failure, though they've committed to adopting it and have about a month to fret about their mortality and impending responsibility before they can take the cat home with them. Said cat, named Paw Paw, sporadically narrates the film's proceedings in warbly monologues (delivered by July herself), accompanied by adorably DIY shots of enormous cat paws nudging their way across crumpled newspaper. This isn't even to mention the liberal sprinkling of melancholy surrealism spread throughout the film, such as a talking moon with the voice of a gentle old man offering sage life lessons, a cherished T-shirt crawling its way across Los Angeles to be with its former owner, or a little girl who buries herself up to her neck in her backyard simply, it seems, to dabble in some attention-craving performance art.

This last scene is probably the weakest in the movie: the little girl is so nonexistent as a character in the film that her stunt has no discernible emotional or thematic value. True, this little girl is the daughter of a middle-aged man with whom Sophie initiates a desperate affair, so the stunt can be rationalized: just as Sophie callously throws herself at a stranger in an attempt to escape her mundane life, so does the little girl submerge herself as a way to express her vague dissatisfaction with her home life. I guess. Thing is, we have no way of reading the daughter character, so this sequence comes off as nothing more than yet another off-kilter gimmick on July's part.

Most of the other set-pieces in the film are, thankfully, more effective. In particular, Jason's inexplicable ability to stop time—especially after he discovers Sophie's infidelity (in a way)—is a powerful illustration of his fear of aging and his debilitating emotional fragility (and makes for the most beautiful image in The Future, as Jason eventually must push and pull the ocean's tides back into motion in order to kickstart time). And the aforementioned crawling T-shirt, once it finally finds its way back to Sophie, emboldens her to finish the dance she's been trying to perform throughout the entire film—an idea which probably sounds insanely corny but which is actually hauntingly beautiful, as July gyrates and contorts herself painfully from inside the folds of the fleshy yellow shirt. The Future has its weak moments, to be sure, but it has many more strong points—strong because the absurdity is so attuned to the fears and delusions undergone by the two leads.

In many ways, Sophie and Jason are unlikeable, self-obsessed, immature idealists. They simply expect life to lead them in the right direction, and are so naively convinced of the beauty and creativity that they have to offer other people that they are baffled when they are unable to spontaneously create it. That sounds like the kind of creative block that artists in particular suffer from, but July suggests that it's really a problem shared by her (and my) generation: late-twentysomethings to forty-year-olds, who may be so overwhelmed with what's expected of them (find a job, start a family, make money) that, at some point, they give up and simply allow time to run its course. This isn't to excuse them: it's an irrational form of irresponsibility, and if Sophie and Jason stayed this way throughout the whole film, The Future would be unbearable. In some ways, though, July's film actually seems like a condemnation of people who are perpetually precocious, desperately whimsical, obliviously flighty—the very traits for which July is typically criticized. But both Sophie and Jason do genuinely seem to go through transformations, and while genuine character arcs seem increasingly hard to come by in modern (American) movies, it's something almost effortlessly (and indelibly) achieved by July in The Future. Sophie, desperate to give her life a violent jolt, does so recklessly, maybe self-destructively—afraid of complacency, she embraces the first impulse that comes to mind. Jason, meanwhile, is initially horrified at encountering the truth, at making discoveries about himself or the world around him—until he ultimately relents, submits to it, and gives in to hopeless defeatism. When both characters' overwhelming flaws re-intersect with the life of Paw Paw, that talking cat finally turns into something meaningful, genuine, and surprisingly heartbreaking—in other words, cutesiness shattering apart into a harsh, unavoidable truth. Finally, the end of the movie finds both characters at a turning point: aware of their own weaknesses, trying to decide whether they should remain imprisoned in their own insular worlds or actually try to change them through their own actions. Assuming July actually is as precocious or twee as everyone accuses her, we might read The Future as a self-reckoning (or, just as admirably, a direct and emphatic rebuttal to her critics): for those who think life is a wonderland full of affectation, time will prove you devastatingly wrong.