Underneath It All

A year in the country: Schreiber and Beatty ponder.

Tom Gilroy’s first feature is subtly powerful.

by Sam Adams

Spring Forward

Written and Directed by Tom Gilroy
An IFC Films release

recommended

The first feature written and directed by Tom Gilroy, who’s acted in such films as Land and Freedom and Girls Town, Spring Forward is good at the things movies directed by actors are supposed to be good at. It’s generous to its leads, Liev Schreiber and Ned Beatty, and gives them plenty of room to establish and develop their characters. The scenes play out in real time, so there’s nothing to distract you from the performances, which are wonderfully subtle and nuanced. You’d be forgiven for thinking at first that Spring Forward is just another acting exercise of modest ambitions, of the kind that litter film festivals but don’t often claw their way into theaters. (And indeed, Spring Forward arrives under the seldom-unfurled banner of the distribution wing of the Independent Film Channel, which also financed the film.)

But Spring Forward does more than allow two oft-employed actors to give some of the best performances of their careers. In its own quiet, insinuating way, it reminds you that there are few experiences more transfixing, more spiritual than gazing into another human face, and how it’s that form of eavesdropping which may be the most seductive form of voyeurism the cinema has to offer. It’s one thing to be offered the opportunity to peep into a locker room or watch two movie stars pretend to copulate, but it’s another to be given the illusion of peering into someone else’s soul. It takes great actors to instill that feeling in the audience, and it takes a great movie to convince the audience that there’s something in those faces worth seeing. Spring Forward doesn’t clonk you over the head with weightiness (except in a final scene which almost shatters the eggshell-thin mood with the clumsiest sort of drama) but it’s a great movie in the small ways that matter most.

Looking Forward: Beatty and Schreiber.

Set over the course of a year, Spring Forward was shot that way, too, in one-week segments in a small town outside of New York. But despite the film’s literal-minded shooting schedule, director/ writer Gilroy isn’t after anything so conventional as realism. Split into eight scenes which vary only slightly in length, Spring Forward has the unannounced formalism of ritual theater. Nearly every scene begins with Schreiber and Beatty alone, conversing, then shifts as a third character enters, mainly as an opportunity for the two to watch each other interact. Every scene ends on a quiet grace note, and the wordless tableaux which intersperse them act like theatrical blackouts, resetting the clock before the next scene starts. It’s an odd device, since it rejects one of a filmmaker’s most powerful tools. But Gilroy wants us to take a deep breath, to contemplate the distance between scenes and to imagine how much has happened offscreen every time we pick up the story.

Schreiber’s Paul is a jailbird struggling to get his life back on track, full of anger and self-loathing but ultimately more hapless than dangerous. Beatty’s Murph is a municipal groundskeeper with a pragmatic view of the world: After Paul, who’s immersed himself in self-help books, spends several minutes explaining the concept of karma, Murph replies, "You mean, ‘What goes around comes around.’" But as much as he gently mocks Paul’s eclectic spiritualism, Murph’s down-to-earth attitude can’t encompass every pitfall life has put in his path. In the first scene, their encounter with the unctuous son of a town selectman (Campbell Scott) builds to a confrontation which climaxes in Paul’s calling him a "faggot," an insult which leads abruptly to the awkward revelation that Murph’s son is gay, a subject which he’s none too fond of discussing. It’s a simple scene, conventionally constructed to release its secrets at the point of maximum volume. But though Spring Forward occasionally uses such overdetermined techniques — one scene is set at a funeral, another finds Murph and Paul getting high together — they work because they’re not contrived to advance the plot (since, basically, there isn’t any). Beatty and Schreiber play their roles with such understatement that you never feel that the drama is being shoved down your throat, and the film is more interested in aftermaths than explosions.

Spring Forward isn’t a visually complicated film, but it’s elegant in its simplicity. Gilroy’s style is laid-back but lyrical, taking abundant joy in the natural backgrounds against which Murph and Paul play out their story. (It’s probably the greatest advantage of the film’s shooting schedule that you can watch the New England landscape shift in the background.) The film tricks you into thinking nothing’s going on, and then you realize, suddenly or gradually, that everything has shifted. It’s like taking your eyes off the road for a minute and suddenly ending up in a strange part of town, one that might be two blocks over or miles away. Spring Forward is demonstrably set in what we usually call "the real world," but it’s like the Frederick Wiseman version of the real world, where anything that might shatter the mood has been excised. Even when a homeless man (Ian Hart) emerges, screaming, from under a gazebo in the middle of a public park, the effect is more Waiting for Godot than crazed panhandler.

The effect is to refocus our attention, to transport us into a shadow world that exists just beneath the one in which we spend our waking hours. The message, conveyed with light-fingered sleight of hand, is that the wisdoms large and small to which Murph and Paul eventually awaken are always present but usually obscured. It’s not a new message, but it’s one that bears repeating.