Breaking Upwards
Directed by Daryl Wein
Journalists who write about movies just can’t get enough of the same old song about a kid with moxie and gumption and ingenuity and guts who spends nothing but sweat equity to make a little movie that turns into a big sensation. Robert Rodriguez said his maiden effort, El Mariachi, cost him $7,000 in 1992; Kevin Smith said he used eight credit cards for the $27,000 he needed to make Clerks in 1993; the team behind The Blair Witch Project said they spent $35,000 in 1999; the makers of the very similar Paranormal Activity put its price tag last year at $15,000. The latest entry in the do-it-yourself sweepstakes also comes sporting a $15,000 budget: a New York comedy called Breaking Upwards starring a couple of twentysomething actor-writer-directors.
Now, what the journalists who write about movies should know but often don’t, or don’t care to, is that they are being taken for a ride. Perhaps these tiny numbers approximate what was spent during the actual filming, but by the time of their release to the general public all these films had gone through a polishing process—color and sound correction, musical scoring, and the like. That doesn’t come cheap. Creating a print that can be shown in theaters triples the amount of money that was spent on these projects, at the very least. And that’s to say nothing of the cost of advertising and promotion.
No matter. It’s a good story line and young filmmakers are sticking to it, with the collusion of a press corps that acts more like a public-relations arm of the movie business than a cool journalistic eye on it. The story is told to give potential viewers in the chattering classes a special kind of stake in the moviegoing experience, a sense that they may not just be seeing a film but will be participating in an act of artistic entrepreneurship simply by purchasing a ticket. Because what they are witnessing is a labor of love, it must therefore be higher and better and more valuable. Because the movies were made with go-getter urgency and passion, they are to be considered somehow more real, more authentic, more honest.
In the end, of course, it doesn’t matter whether a movie costs some multiple of $15,000, like Breaking Upwards, or some multiple of $150 million, like Avatar. For the moviegoer, the only thing that matters is whether the film on the screen holds your attention, whether it has memorable scenes or lines or performances, and whether it leaves you feeling as though you’ve had a good or meaningful or amusing or interesting time watching it.
Breaking Upwards, which I watched in hi-definition on the OnDemand channel on my cable box on the same day it opened at a theater in Manhattan, qualifies, just barely, and maybe in spite of itself. Daryl (director-editor Daryl Wein) and Zoe (cowriter Zoe Lister-Jones) are bored with each other. So they decide they will take days off from their four-year relationship. She’s a mildly successful actress; he’s the gofer for a famous journalist. They have annoying Jewish parents. They’re annoying. They get annoyed with each other. Then each of them goes out with someone else. That’s about it.
The angular Zoe Lister-Jones is a fascinating camera subject. Daryl Wein keeps the movie chugging along through fast cuts. They talked three wonderful actors—Andrea Martin, Julie White, and Peter Friedman—into working for nothing as the parents, and they supply the amusement. Mostly, though, the movie’s self-obsessed depiction of self-obsessed New Yorkers in their self-obsessed twenties had the effect of making me thrilled I’ll be turning 50 next year. So by that standard, Breaking Upwards had a net positive effect on me. As it will on Wein and Lister-Jones, who will get more work as a result of it, which is really the point, after all.
The untold story of the we-put-on-our-own-show trope, though, is how it has led scores of untalented but desperately ambitious would-be filmmakers to waste millions of dollars of their family’s hard-earned savings in the false hope that they, too, could be the next do-it-yourself star. That’s what can happen when you believe what you read in the arts section.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
