Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Beaks screened this film for me right after he got a look at it, and the excitement he felt was pretty impressive. He’s normally pretty stoic, even when he likes a film, so to see him giddy about something... well, it made me wonder what could do it. And PRIMER is indeed a heady brew. I’ll let him explain:
PRIMER (d. & w. Shane Carruth)
It’s the inelegant, mechanical opening of a garage door that serves as an appropriate raising of the curtain on the no-budget miracle, PRIMER, a $7,000 garage-band go at hard science-fiction that packs more mindblowing ideas into its fleet seventy-eight minutes than was likely discussed, to flog the genre’s most recent imagination-starved whipping boy, throughout the entire development and physical production of Fox’s recent $120 million dumb-down of Isaac Asimov’s I, ROBOT. And if you have any desire to keep pace with the film’s characters and the pivotal early goings-on in their ersatz lab, you’d better be paying close attention, because writer-director Shane Carruth steadfastly refuses to spoon-feed the dizzying theoretical concepts being tossed about by his brainy characters as they struggle first to invent, then to figure out what in the hell they’ve actually invented. It’s a daring conceit – one that will surely alienate more passive audience members – and the script’s barrage of information will likely necessitate at least one repeat viewing even for those with the particularly acute antennae.
Fortunately, Carruth’s debut feature is so deftly plotted, shot and edited, submitting to a second (or, in my case, third) screening is hardly a chore, for not since MEMENTO has a film so brilliantly toyed with an audience’s temporal perception without courting its ire. As with Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece, the confusion generated by PRIMER is invigorating; you *want* to figure it all out, and can’t wait to buy a ticket to further plumb its secrets. But even as the mind reels the first time through, the film is blessed with a killer hook that keeps the viewer grounded: what happens when two inventors hatch a device that seemingly refuses to obey certain common laws of science?
The two inventors are Aaron (Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan), and they comprise one-half of an entrepreneurial-minded think tank attempting to brainstorm their way toward financial windfall. At an impasse over where to concentrate their efforts as they lobby for venture capitalist funding, Aaron and Abe move forward on what ostensibly seems to be some kind of anti-gravity device. Though the science will probably go above the heads of many viewers, the cleverness of their problem solving as they cobble this machine together (which includes hack sawing off a catalytic converter from Abe’s car) proves infectious. And, frankly, it’s an absolute blast to, for once, be placed on a higher intellectual plane with a film’s characters rather than have the filmmaker bow to convention and break down their jargon-laced dialogue into layman’s terms. As the duo stray further into uncharted territory with the completion of their machine, they are continually confronted with questions for which they have no answers. Why does the machine stay powered up after the batteries are removed? How did a Weeble (yes, a Weeble) placed in the machine become coated with a specific fungus that could only have accumulated in such a quantity after several years?
And, most pressingly, why is there another Abe hanging out around a local storage facility?
It’s with the shocking revelation that the boys have inadvertently slapped together a ramshackle time machine that Carruth’s narrative goes absolutely bonkers. With a bigger model of their contraption now existing in this warehouse, and a matching one on the way, Abe and Aaron discover that every minute spent inside the machine is a minute spent traveling backwards (there’s actually much more to it than that; in fact, a large portion of the film’s enjoyment is derived from our attempting to make sense of the device’s capabilities along with the characters). Thus (and without much moral hand wringing), Abe and Aaron – and their doubles – swiftly set out to make a killing at the stock market, betting on sports… essentially, making a fortune off of any endeavor prone to manipulation via their unnatural foresight. Their scheme is simple enough – they start up the machines in the morning, cocoon in a local hotel for most of the day, then head back to the storeroom to do the day over again armed with prescient knowledge of the day’s events. But the physical toll is considerable, and, in keeping with the machine’s very existence, inexplicable. The lethargy resulting from consecutive thirty-plus hour days is at least understandable, but what to make of their increasingly illegible handwriting? And why does prolonged exposure to the machine cause their ears to bleed?
These strange physical maladies dovetail with the inevitable abuse of the machine, and the questions asked by the film quickly switch in nature from practical to ethical. Though Aaron and Abe are virtually indistinguishable in temperament for most of their adventure, the former begins to evince a slightly darker personality as they cope with the consequences of their actions and, in a way, the eventual boredom of having the whole world on a six hour delay when your only concern is racking up a fortune. In keeping with the minimalist style of the film (muted blues and greens dominate the moody color scheme), Carruth and Sullivan give suitably low-key performances, and their carefully governed enthusiasm, particularly as they ponder their invention’s potential, is actually quite endearing. Of course, it helps that Carruth is an ace with sneakily droll dialogue (another reason repeat viewings are such fun), but there’s a definite skill required to make that kind of writing sing, and both leads prove expert in its delivery.
Though no time travel tale is ever free from basic implausibility, Carruth’s variation, couched confidently in the vernacular of hard science, is probably the most convincing ever brought to the screen. That such verisimilitude is partially the product of its bewildering narrative is hardly a detriment, because Carruth – with his bracingly economical plotting trimmed down to the essential, and abetted by a fine sense for scene transitions – wins our trust by demonstrating early on that he’s an uncommonly smart director; i.e., we’re willing to give him the benefit of the doubt even when the logic gets utterly indecipherable.
That’s a trick only a master storyteller could pull off, and that it’s but one of Shane Carruth’s triumphs with PRIMER suggests that we’ve only seen a faint glimmer of his greatness. ESQUIRE’s critic extraordinaire Mike D’Angelo is, as far as I know, the first to invoke Slammin’ Stan Kubrick in discussing Carruth’s achievement, and I’m now making sure he isn’t the last. Perhaps I should temper my praise and state that Carruth is merely the most excitingly cerebral auteur to hit the medium since David Cronenberg, although Carruth’s interests are wildly different. (Obviously, it’s early, but he doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who sees a gaping vagina every time he cuts himself.)
Or maybe I should just back off and let you all experience PRIMER sans any further hyperbole, no matter how earned. Trust me, your head will be spinning enough.
PRIMER opens in limited release on October 8th in New York and Dallas. For more news on its release pattern, you can visit the official site.
Faithfully submitted,
Mr. Beaks
I’m sure Harry will have his take on the film after it screens in Austin in a few weeks, and I’m going to be writing about this and a few other micro-budget gems this weekend. Good stuff, Beaks. Thanks.
"Moriarty" out.
