When a Man Falls in the Forest

Screened at the SXSW Film Festival

“…and no one is there to hear him, does he make a sound,” I suppose — with a title that hideously blatant, who needs enemies? Given that name and the plot description — the lonely lives of three related characters start to simultaneously unravel — you can probably write the script, but the movie is blessed with a trio of terrifically gifted lead actors (Dylan Baker, Timothy Hutton, and Pruitt Taylor Vince) and a rally of stellar individual moments such that though the film never coalesces and sometimes actively irritates with cheap screenwriting tricks, it retains a certain appeal. I sort of wished that the screenwriter would leave the characters alone.

Indeed, the main problem is that this is a “screenwriter’s movie”: built around a theme and constructed with mechanical precision, it’s so schematic that if you squint, you can see the blueprints. The characters’ problems and dilemmas line up against one another just so (Dylan Baker plays a janitor working the night shift in Timothy Hutton’s building; Hutton and Pruitt Taylor Vince were classmates of Baker’s and used to make fun of him mercilessly; their lives continually intersect as all three struggle with their past choices, etc.) and unravel in impossible ways. Hutton, in particular, is dispatched with a gimmick so tired and ungainly that it nearly taints the entire film.

The film’s painfully contrived arc is offset by a number of indelible images and surprising moments of truth. Dylan Baker, channeling William H. Macy in a good way, gives one of his finest performances — there is a moment in a dream sequence when his character, dressed in pajamas and brandishing a small porcelain horse, breaks into a manic run to attack an adversary, and this sight is burned into my memory for the rest of my life. In an incredible scene, Hutton’s character makes a voicemail confession and plea to his estranged wife; done in one poignant take, the scene is both heartbreaking and painfully real, a rebuke to the pervasive artificiality of the screenplay at large. And Vince, with his shifty eyes and sad face occasionally invaded by a grin that’s like a ray of sunshine breaking through clouds, brings a convincing everyman quality to a character who could have been a tiresome sad sack.

I blame the success of Crash for the current abundance of screenwriting exercises posing as films. When a Man Falls in the Forest is rescued in a big way by the cast and by some isolated bursts of genius, but it’s pretty terrible storytelling.

-- Eugene Novikov