PERSON TO PERSON ★★★½
Dustin Guy Defa’s breezy second feature follows a group of characters all navigating an inflection point in their lives during the course of one autumn day in New York City.
Claire (Abbi Jacobson), on her first day as a journalist for a pulpy tabloid, shadows the morally ambiguous and unlucky-in-love Phil (Michael Cera) as he investigates a death. Across town, vinyl record collector Bene (Bene Coopersmith) is given a lead on a rare and valuable copy of Charlie Parker’s Bird Blows the Blues, but soon discovers that the seller may not have been entirely truthful in his description of the item. Ray (George Sample III) is trying to piece back together the relationship he ruined by posting naked pictures of his girlfriend online in a depressive haze. Wendy (Tavi Gevinson), skeptical of her best friend’s new boyfriend, questions not only her own sexuality but her place in the world.
Though events are incited by a death, nothing quite that dramatic occurs during the course of the film — unless you count a low-speed bicycle chase as dramatic. Each of these characters — and other faces drifting in and out of each storyline — must decide how they define themselves and what’s important in their lives: does Claire have the moral constitution to risk failure and confront a grieving widow in the pursuit of a story? Is Wendy ready to shake her tendency for critical self-evaluation and just experience life? Can Ray sufficiently humiliate himself to convince his girlfriend of his contrition? Does Bene’s shirt make him seem too fancy?
These New York stories are nothing new, nor do they have much grand to say, but they exude an effortless charm as each quirky personality meanders in and out of the film. The vignettes are uneven — non-actor Coopersmith shines in the film’s best storyline; Gevinson’s too-cool attitude gives Wendy’s verbose dialogue an air of inauthenticity — but taken as a collection, Person to Person proves there’s life in the talky American indie yet.
MY FRIEND DAHMER ★★
Based on the graphic novel by John Backderf, who was friends with Jeffrey Dahmer in the late 1970s, My Friend Dahmer dramatises the notorious killer’s senior year in high school — when he was just a shy, if disturbed, kid.
Following events from the moment Backderf and his clique, hoping to have a few laughs at his expense, befriend Dahmer and encourage his offbeat behaviour, in some ways the film seems unsure of its own tone. There’s more than enough animal cruelty and psychosexual fantasy to satisfy the horror and serial killer buffs, but the flared costumes and colourful production design make That 70s Show seem subtle, and Anne Heche, playing Jeffrey’s mentally unstable mother, seems like something straight out of a Kristen Wiig sketch on SNL.
The decision to concentrate on Dahmer’s adolescence — when he is first exploring his cruel and unusual fascinations with death and anatomy, but before he commits his first murder — is a strange one. Portraying Dahmer as an awkward, somewhat socially frustrated teenager (expressed through Ross Lynch’s stooped, wooden performance), the film edges toward humanising a serial killer and offers up a number of factors that could have contributed to the monster Dahmer would eventually become: humiliating schoolyard hazing, family breakdown, a manic-depressive mother, alcoholism. But it seems less interested in any kind of in-depth character study and more taken by a prurient fascination with the disturbed childhood of a man who would admit to raping and killing 17 men and boys.
If Backderf — and, by extension, Meyers — weren’t trying to humanise Dahmer with an empathetic portrayal, the obvious question is: what’s the point of telling a story about Jeffrey Dahmer and concentrating on what is surely the least interesting part of his life?