Perry: Listen Up Philip (2014)

At a moment when every second film seems anxious to recreate the 70s, this delightfully ascerbic time capsule reminds us that some things are perhaps not worth recreating. Opening in an Instagrammed Greenwich Village that could be straight out of New Hollywood, it’s about a novelist, Philip (Jason Schwartzman), who’s clearly modelled himself after the solipsistic masculine voices of post-war American fiction – John Updike, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and, above all, Philip Roth. Eschewing both modernism and postmodernism in favour of a robust, largely reactionary realism, their legacy and influence reaches Philip directly in the form of Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), a venerable but frustrated canonical writer who invites him to spend some time at his home in upper New York, a decision that causes some friction between Philip and his girlfriend, Ashley (Elisabeth Moss), an up-and-coming fashion photographer. Although Philip is nominally torn between Zimmerman and Ashley, the film quickly expands to encompass all the people he’s discarded – or is likely to discard – in the name of his genius, most of whom fall under the category of ex-girlfriend, whether actual or imagined. As a result, the film isn’t exactly plot-driven so much as beholden to Philip’s authorial voice, which is amplified by a wonderful narration by Eric Bogosian, but more than capable of withstanding any assault on its own terms. Rehearsing his next novel with pretty much every utterance, Philip only ever really speaks in monologue, even or especially when he appears to be in the midst of the most intimate and critical conversations, and a great deal of the film’s pleasure comes from the way Alex Ross Perry captures the suffocating, solipstistic constrictions of that monologue, both for Philip and his (always) captive audience, as the camera gets closer and closer to their faces, until virtually the entire film is shot in extreme close-up. Given that this is the kind of pedantic insecurity Schwartzman has made his own, what results is something of a perfect marriage between screenwriter and actor, as Philip launches into one “unfulfilling and exhausating” observation or justification after another, so anxious to leave no part of himself unanalysed, unwritten or unexplained that he tends to analyse, write and explain himself out of existence as the film goes on, until he’s really more of an antagonistic absence than anything else. At the very least, he seems to proceed by absenting and abstracting himself more and more aggressively from whatever is at hand, removing and protecting himself with every word in his artillery, as if simply being himself – an upwardly mobile, minor celebrity – is tantamount to taking the whole weight of the world on his shoulders. As might be expected, then, the line between comedy and something darker is very fine here – especially in a wonderful plot development that sees Philip becoming a totally disinterested creative writing adjunct – but Perry treads it with exquisite command, partly thanks to the presence of Moss and Price, who provide object lessons in brilliant supporting performances, offering just the right amount of wit and disgust to cushion and calibrate Philip's supreme egotism without ever distracting or detracting from it, let alone allowing us to pretend that we might have somehow escaped its massive gravitational pull. Satirical in the extreme, but also strangely gentle and compassionate at moments, it all makes for a film that skewers our aspirational 70s culture – and New York’s aspirational 70s subculture – more savagely and strangely than any recent release, even or especially when it appears to be most entranced and seduced by it.