“Black Bear” has been marketed as a cross between a thriller and a comedy. I’d say it’s a cross between a mushroom trip and a fever dream. Director Lawrence Michael Levine has created a work that is so novel it leaves its audience a little confounded. This unsettling, however, is its very triumph. It starts off with linear storytelling which quickly swirls into circularity that challenges our expectations as consumers of North American cinema. “Black Bear” blends reality with abstractions that don’t register until hours after you’re done watching it. In his director’s statement, Levine says, the film “stands as a long hard look at my own complicity in the state of the world, at the ways I have hurt those around me in pursuit of my own selfish desires.”
Levine tackles two major themes: infidelity and the personal costs of making art. He weaves the exploration of these themes through reality and fiction, urging the audience to let go of comfort and grapple with the concepts themselves rather than the logical frameworks audiences have come to expect of conventional cinematic storytelling.
I’ve constantly had to go back and change things in this review because my understanding of the film’s plot keeps shifting. Perhaps this is a marker of a good film: one that grips you long after you’ve walked out of the theatre, or in my case, after you’ve shut down your video stream. If you’re on the fence about watching this film, I’ll say right now, yes, stop reading this review and watch “Black Bear”! There are spoilers ahead and the film is far too strangely wonderful to not dive into them for this review.
“Black Bear” opens with Allison, played by Aubrey Plaza, in a red bathing suit, sitting on a towel on the boating dock of a lakehouse. She is staring at the lake in front of her. This image is used as a reset button throughout the film. We come to it a handful of times when Levine wants to switch the plot up or pull us in and out of fact and fiction. We learn that Allison has escaped the city to work on a screenplay at the lakehouse. We meet Gabe, played by Christopher Abbott, the owner of the lakehouse, and his wife, Blair, played by Sarah Gadon. Allison goes overboard with complementing Blair out of guilt for flirting with Gabe a few moments before meeting her. Afterwards over dinner, a heated argument about feminism exposes the fractures in the married couple’s relationship. It leads to Blair confronting Gabe about being attracted to Allison. The dinner ends but Gabe and Allison’s tryst continues to the night waters of the lake and then to the couch in Gabe’s garage. Blair’s suspicions are proven true and push the trio into the face of a tragedy catalysed by, you guessed it, a black bear.
We’re then jerked rudely into sunlight where Alison is back on the dock in her red bathing suit, only this time the camera pans to reveal an entire camera crew in action on the lake and on the surrounding shore. This is Part Two. Get ready to have everything you learned so far to be majestically upended. We see now that Allison is the lead in a movie being filmed at the lakehouse. The movie is being directed by Gabe, who is her husband. He’s also manipulating Allison into giving a more authentic performance by staging a conspired flirtation with Blair, who is acting in the movie with Allison. I hope you’re still with me!
We then learn that in Gabe’s movie, Allison plays the jilted Wife and Blair plays the Other Woman. Allison and Blair have swapped characters from Part One. Gabe steps out of the narrative and watches the hurt he has caused his wife through the movie he is making. Gabe’s intentions are, of course, selfish. He hurts his wife, Allison, until she abuses her body with alcohol. She reaches an uncomfortable level of drunkenness. You can sense the toxicity of the alcohol twisting her insides and readying her for a debilitating hangover, and possibly, cirrhosis. Gabe seems to be okay with this, but only if it gets him the perfect last scene. Levine makes a point through Gabe’s character about the selfishness of creating art and the artist’s tunnel vision that destroys relationships and loved ones.
The filming crew bands together to capture the last scene of Gabe’s movie well into the night. This scene involves a confrontation between Alison as the Wife and Blair as the Other Woman, and mirrors the dinner in Part One. At this point I started to think, okay, Part One was the “reality.” Gabe got involved with another woman and hurt his wife. Now to process his guilt, he’s making a movie about what happened, half fictionalising it, while his mind plays tricks on him by interchanging the two women. In doing so, he is also creating one of the most dynamic contemporary uses of the Shakespearean play within a play mechanism. An alternative theory I had was that Gabe left his wife for Allison in Part One, married her, and then cast her in a movie as his ex-wife to half torture her and half to process his own guilt.
That’s it. That’s the best interpretation I can come up with for the plot! I may be entirely wrong.
Levine swaps the actors around to represent the chaos and confusion that results from Gabe’s infidelity – the Wife becomes the Other Woman, the Other Woman becomes the Wife. Allison was a filmmaker in Part One and Gabe becomes the filmmaker in Part Two. The shuffling of these markers of identity isolates the central themes and makes them hyper visible. The hurt caused by infidelity and the selfishness of creating art become palpable this way. The shuffling also gives Part Two the feel of a dream.
Levine’s jagged storytelling persuades us to leave the comfort of “knowing” and focus on the film’s central themes. This letting go jostles us but also paves the way for a very refreshing moviegoing experience. We feel like we’ve done a very intelligent thing by watching this movie – we kinda get it but we kinda don’t.
The creativity of the screenplay is the star of “Black Bear” but the film’s performances are what hit it out of the park. Plaza pushes herself as the tortured actress watching her husband falling in love with someone else. Abbott as the conflicted and connivingly greedy Gabe rises above the tepid character he played in “Girls” of Alison Williams’ thirsty boyfriend. Plaza too thwarts our expectations of her as the anti-social funny girl, breaking free of her deadpan “Park and Recreation” persona. Plaza and Abbott reinvent themselves in “Black Bear” and show us that they are more than the awkward and comedic caricatures that they’re usually associated with.
“Black Bear” also pays tribute to filmmaking. It points the camera on to the people who work tirelessly behind the scenes. Levine recreates the urgency and momentum that drives a filming crew. We get to see the hurdles that come their way: button down shirts ruined by coffee, unexpected diarrhea, the actress getting too drunk, the assistants getting too high. We also witness the joys of making a thing of beauty and intelligence: the friendships, the wrap parties, and post-production hook ups. Levine justifies the pain of making art. He believes that in the end, art transcends reality and gets to the core of our existence as humans. It helps us get behind all the lies and to the truth. Of special note is the flawless camera work. It switches from serene Pacific Northwest chic forest and cabin visuals to making the audience feel like they’re swimming drunkenly in the lakehouse’s warm pools of light, just like Allison in her inebriated misery.
“Black Bear” is a workout for the brain. It subverts mainstream storytelling and dips its toes into experimental waters. It starts of as a hipster indie film but takes you by complete surprise. Put this on your list for movies to watch while you stay safe and indoors this fall!
Find out more about the Vancouver International Film Festival over here.
– Prachi Kamble