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October 11, 2004
Primer
I frequently say that the fundamental necessity for any film is first and foremost, ABOVE ALL ELSE (can I stress this anymore?!) a good story. And in this sense, Primer, which opened this past weekend, is a very interesting case. Most films are lacking in their story. With Primer, a very rich story is in place - it is how it is told that raises questions.
Primer is the story of two white-collar engineers who live in a random suburb and spend most of their time tinkering in their garage. Then, one day, they build a box (which, I have since learned, is intended to remove an object placed inside from Earth's gravitational pull - but you don't need to know this). Soon, they learn that the box is capable of much, much more than that. It is, in effect, a time machine. Soon, they build a bigger box. Then they build two boxes. Then they put boxes inside boxes.
I very much enjoyed Primer on the whole, but I don't think I could defend this at the end of the day. Not that I need to. Even 30 years after 2001 came out, people still complain that they don't get it, that it's too technical, or that it asks too much of the viewer. For the person with these types of complaints, Primer would probably make their head explode. The film opens with a lot of meetings between the two main characters as they talk about their invention. The dialogue is supposedly real, and intriguing if you can follow along, boring if you can't. Those that can't (including my roommate) walked out of the movie, and that is justifiable. I'm quite sure the director realized this would happen.
But once the film takes off, it opens up an infinite web of possibilities. It allows your imagination to go wild with ideas, and this is in part why it's such a great film. My theory on the strange love people have for Donnie Darko is that it's 1) a mystery and 2) a mystery without a conclusion - meaning that whatever you want to be right is right, except that it's always possible that you're wrong. My problem with Donnie Darko is that the logic is very facile and pointless at the end of the day. In Primer, it's the opposite. The mystery is open-ended and yet closed, and the logic is extremely intense and fascinating. As a story, it's somewhat like taken Momento and rather than presenting it backwards, putting all the scenes in a bag, shaking it up, and letting the contents fall out. Sort of.
Everything in the film serves the story - the characters, the acting, the cinematography, etc. This could be successfully argued as a downside to the film, but again, it feld like it melded with the story well. And because the story was so rich, anything that would normally stand out as lacking in another film can be ignored here. The mystery is one for the modern age, and I've been thinking about it ever since.
Go see the film. Really, go see it, but make sure you see it at a theater where another movie you'd like to see is playing. That way, if you go in and realize the film isn't for you, you can walk out. If you like it, you can thank me later. This is the most serious and realistic time travel movie you've ever seen. Me, I would've done it differently. With Primer on the hyper-realism side and Back to the Future on the escapist-fantasy side, I would have been somewhere in the middle. But that's me, and I have a lot of respect for the director, who shot the film for $7,000 on Super 16.
I can't promise you'll like it, but I enjoyed it very much.
Posted by nick at October 11, 2004 03:19 AM