Dear Kent Osborne,

40 IS a bitch. Man, don’t I know it! I think it was Martin Amis who said—and I’m paraphrasing here—that turning 40 is the most fucked up thing ever for a guy, because it means, for all intents and purposes, that the first half of your life is over, and like, what have you got to show for it, right? You are never going to get that first half back, it’s all downhill from here, you’ve stopped growing, physically, and you’re actually starting to putrefy. You’re on your way to death. Things start going away, right away. In this film about you, Uncle Kent, you start having some problems with your sight—you’ve got to look at certain stuff on paper first farther away, then nearer to you, in order to read. Wow, I’m relatively lucky—I didn’t start getting eye issues when I turned 40, and I still don’t have ‘em, but man, beyond that…well, I gotta admit I was a little surprised and shaken at how much the story told about you in the film Uncle Kent had in common with what I was going through when I turned that age.

The affinities started hitting me pretty early on, as I watched you hunching over your work easel, doing that animation stuff—you apparently work as an animator, whereas I work as a writer, they’re both kinda solitary occupations. And then there was how you live by yourself, and how you drink a lot, and how you smoke a lot of pot, and how you hang out a lot with your cat. See, here’s you, with your cat.

And here’s me, a long time ago, back in my 40s, with my cat.

And my stupid fanboy Akira t-shirt. And my double chin. And my nose hair. Sorry about that. Gosh, how embarrassing.

Now I was never that much of a pot person—until this one period where I got so anxiety-ridden and insomniac that I started smoking it very intently…but I’m getting ahead of myself here—but I definitely had this routine back then of working and drinking and just sort of wallowing in loneliness. And you’re clearly not taking very good care of yourself in other respects. “Check” on that, for me, when I was your age, too. You live in L.A. , so you have a car, and you’re letting that go to shit; I haven’t owned a car in a while (an advantage of a certain mode of urban living, I’d say), but I dare say if I had, well, what’s happening to your car would have happened to mine.

And there’s even more, and here’s where it gets kinda weird!

In Uncle Kent, you have a weekend visitor, a young lady, as Jerry Langford would put it, who you met on this thing called “Chatroulette,” which I don’t know a lot about but which seems to be a social media thing involving webcams and featuring guys who want to show everyone their erections, or something. That bit kind of freaked me out a little, because it so happens that when I was turning 40, and pretty much all alone (I’d had a girlfriend, and the relationship wasn’t going so great, and then she hadda return to her family in Yurrup, so that was that), I too developed a relationship with a woman, online, and eventually the virtual turned real. How freaky is that? In my case it’s even freakier than your case, because…omigod I can’t believe I’m telling you this…the individual in question was a college student. One of my pals dubbed this individual “The Child Bride,” which was then shortened to “TCB.” I won’t go too much into the specifics of this relationship, but will say that it was, in the phrase that always reminds me of David Foster Wallace, grievously ill-advised. (I remember my Premiere colleague Susannah Gora sometimes looking at me and asking, out of nowhere, “TCB; why?” Oh, the humanity.) In the movie about you, Uncle Kent, your weekend visitor isn’t quite as age-inappropriate, as they say these days…well, they said it in those days, too, let’s not kid ourselves. This person…Kate, is a “journalist” who writes “about the environment” (and just between us, Kent, and don’t take this the wrong way, because I don’t mean it that way, I just hope that the Big Hollywood people never get a gander at this film, because they’ll then be able to say that climate change is a myth perpetuated by moral degenerates who hang out on weekends with dudes they’ve met on Chatroulette) and has this boyfriend, who’s pretty hippie-ish looking. We know this because no sooner does Kate show up at your house and go to the bathroom than you abscond with her camera and download its contents onto your computer.

This is part of the key to why your life is so specifically problematic: as laid-back and not-very-motivated as certain aspects of your existence seem to be, it’s pretty clear that you need to relax a little bit. The lady’s got a boyfriend, check; maybe you ought to just roll with it. Don’t try to download photos of the guy the minute the chick pops out of sight. I mean, "TCB" had a boyfriend—who apparently admitted to her once that if he were forced to choose between giving up sex and giving up marijuana, he would give up sex, which really gave me something that might be said to resemble a, um,  leg up in a particular department, despite my advanced age and the lousy physical shape I was in—and while I occasionally tormented myself by imagining that he looked like Taylor Hawkins from the Foo Fighters (he didn’t, not even a little, as it turned out)—I figured that maybe the most sensible policy would be to not get too hung up on it. This notion is confirmed by the fact that in the process of downloading the photos to your computer you mistakenly wipe them from the camera itself, necessitating that you lie about breaking the camera. That’s just weird.

I could also observe that maybe it might have been a good idea to have your situation a little more together when Kate arrived. I have found that, regardless of how odd the initial meeting space or circumstances of the connection, women do like a little romance. When the time came for my first face-to-face meeting with my online liason, I took her to a fairly snazzy restaurant for cocktails and appetizers before we brought her stuff to my place. (Any New Yorkers out there remember Lola on 21^st Street? How great was that place, huh?) I wasn’t hanging out around the house cleaning cat shit out of the litter box when she arrived. Just saying. Call my way of doing things old-school or even "patriarchal," if you insist; I just call it taking pains, and really, it can PAY OFF.

Another thing that makes your situation look pretty lousy—and there’s really no kind way of putting this—is that your friends kind of suck. Man, I had been under the impression that that Bewersdorf character (who is here billed as “Kev,” which does very little to diminish the impression that a few too many twelve-year olds were involved in the making of this picture) was still living in Berlin. In fact I’d been hoping that as he continued to meet with little artistic and/or commercial success flogging his various musical endeavors, he’d just keep moving east, deeper into Europe. I expected maybe he’d be in Dnipropetrovsk by now. But no, here he is in L.A., with his stupid dinky quasi-Casio keyboard in his lap, calling you "dude" and embarrassing you at parties by calling on you to do “cock tricks.” It’s kind of sad—and a little gross—when you tell him you’d rather not do said tricks, not just because you don’t wanna screw things up with Kate, but because you’ve got scar tissue on your testicles and your doctor told you it’s cause, well, you’re disfiguring yourself with these “cock tricks.” By the same token, let’s face facts, Kent: the best way to avoid being asked to do “cock tricks” is by not ever having done them in front of groups of people in the first place. You might have wanted to consider that before unleashing that particular genie from its bottle. I mean, I did A LOT of dumb things in the run up to 40, and more dumb things after that, but man, you made me glad that I exercised some discretion in that particular department.

And then there’s your friend Joe, who’s also the credited director of this movie, and who has a meaningful exchange with you when you visit him at the large but mostly empty house he’s staying in, the property of a “producer” who Joe says is “interested” in him. Joe greets you at the gate of the house in swim trunks and black socks, which is I guess indicative of how “not L.A.” Joe is, which is fine because just between you and me I don’t think he’s gonna be spending a whole helluva lot of time out there in the future. In any event, Joe’s an expectant dad at this point, and he seems to dig it, while you lament that you “missed the boat.” “I think if I had met the love of my life when I was 20 and we were married now it’d be awesome, “ you observe. “But there’s something really pathetic about dating when you’re 40.”

Lemme give you some tough love here, Kent: pathetic is as pathetic does. Drinking beer, smoking pot, doing "cock tricks," getting all passive-aggressive about sex/displays of affection with your weekend guest, going on line with her to solicit a threesome, and then not really having any idea of how to proceed while the threesome—the grievously ill-advised threesome, I’d say—is actually happening; pathetic is one word for it. And I don't want to be too harsh here, but It certainly doesn’t help that, personality-wise, you seem to be a little on the monotonous side. And I know you can’t help the face you’ve got, but the fact that it seems to have only one expression is a little…I don’t know. On the other hand, you DO have a damn good head of hair, which really is a real nice thing to have when you’re 40, take it from me. Why you keep said hair in that sub-SuperCuts Beatles do is beyond me, but like that black guy once said to Lester Bangs, it’s your head, man. I also can’t help but wonder if maybe part of what makes your existence so unfulfilling is that you’re not…well, you seem to be not all that bright. When you and Kate are assessing your "third" (for the potential threesome, that is) on Chatroulette (and again, not to get too judgmental or anything, but Chatroulette really looks like a pretty skeevy site—FYI, I met "TCB" in an AOL chatroom, about cooking, yet!...not that that makes me any better, I hasten to add...), you say to Kate that you “don’t get” the girl’s references—which are to Beethoven and Sappho. Wow! You and I are only ten years or so apart in age—did the United State public schools system change that much in the interim? I KNOW I didn’t hear about Beethoven merely via Peanuts. As "Kev" says, "Dude."

Near the end of the film, you’re seen in front of your computer, looking at a video of yourself with a niece or nephew, entertaining the relative. “Uncle Kent is the best” reads the header for the video, and as you watch, with “Kev”’s piano music hitting wanting-to-be-poignant notes behind it, we get a glimpse of…what, exactly? An alternate to the life you have now? Some version of the life you want? These shots play…well, “sentimentally” is the word that comes to mind. But that can’t be right, because according to Richard Brody, your director Joe is the new Maurice Pialat, and Pialat didn’t have a sentimental bone in his body. So maybe I’m misreading things. But I do think the difference between this movie about you and any movies by Pialat, or I should say a difference, is that this movie is rather soft where Pialat’s are hard. Not without tenderness, but hard. Hard enough so that the distance between “I recognize myself in the people here” and “get me the hell away from these assholes” ceases to function as any kind of effective distinction. Which makes the experience of the films something different than the experience of this film. And part of that’s due to the fact Pialat actually had A SENSIBILITY, and has some (of what we critics call) distance, and did not, again, have a sentimental bone in his body. As upsetting as the plight that is your life is, Kent, what’s weird about Uncle Kent is how pleased with itself it seems; there’s something smirky about its overall depiction of sunlit misery. One gets the sense, not for the first time, of its director reveling in the sensation of putting something over on the viewer. Even what's been cited as the film's most gut-wrenching moment, a kiss-off in which one person says to another, "Write on my wall," felt, to me at least, arbitrary, and no more or less contrived than any of the wanting-to-be-"with-it" social media references that dot No Strings Attached. 

But I will, no doubt, be told that I am wrong for observing thus. And also wrong for thinking, well, yeah, it's true, as some of your pal Joe's champions say, that highly-regarded french director Philippe Garrel also makes movies in which he features his friends and family going through, or re-enacting, painful emotional stuff, so yes, there's a resemblance between his films and films such as the one you're in, but, well, I don't know, the people in Garrel's films seem somehow less...trivial. Am I a bad person for thinking that? And am I thinking that only because those people are speaking French? I don't know. I'm kind of torn. I keep coming back to those "cock tricks." Again, I don't want to seem above it all; hell, I attended the world premiere of Le Petit Package and everything. I've been friendly with Glasgow Phillips, the auteur of The Sound of One Hand Clapping (that's NSFW, for those of you who DON'T work at home), who did, eventually, I believe, conclude that maybe "dick jokes," as he himself called them, maybe were, as they say, no way to go through life. What can I tell you. If not wanting to hang (either cinematically or in the flesh) with people who do "cock tricks" at parties makes me a snob, then fuck it: I"m a snob. And I'll get called a snob. And that’s life. It’s okay, I can handle it. I flare up sometimes, true, but I’m not actually as thin-skinned as my various personae sometimes suggest. Hell, if I was, I think I’d have been institutionalized by now!

Which brings me back to you and me, and you: at the end of the film (um, spoiler alert?) your existence is once again just you and your cat, and your cat seems a little ticked off with you. Sad? Yep. Like I said, I’ve been there. And I gotta level with you, Kent: for me, things got a lot worse before they got better. The whole thing with “TCB” expanded, and then imploded, and then I got into ANOTHER grievously ill-advised relationship with a divorcee (which was less frowned upon by my peers because at least it was more age appropriate) and when THAT imploded, I got so anxiety-ridden and insomniac that I started cadging all this pot from my buddy Tom B., and I spent one whole month of 2002 pretty much drunk the whole time, and it was so bad enough that Tom B. and my other friend Christina staged the World's Smallest Intervention for me (I did suspect at the time that Tom was really mostly irritated that my constant beggings were starting to eat in to his personal pot supply). And somewhere around all that time, 9/11 happened, and that was kind of a buzzkill, too. Right? In any event, after all this I finally got into therapy, and that definitely helped, and while I’m certainly still very much a work in progress, I’m now five years happily married to, yes,  the love of my life (who I did NOT meet on line), am in better physical shape than I’ve been in years, and am no longer haunted by the notion that the first half of my life is over. It happened to me and it can happen to you, Kent. But you’ve got to take some steps yourself. You might want to think of cutting down on the alcohol and drugs, maybe even cutting them out entirely. Do a little self-care, too. Some regular exercise. It might not be the worst idea to make some adjustments in the hair and wardrobe departments, too. (I know, I’ve got little right to talk. But I’m just sayin’.) And seriously, man, drop those loser friends of yours. And maybe think about not advertising your plight in unattractively shot, inarticulately crafted, disingenuously inversely-porny "indie" pictures. Seriously.

I think you’re gonna be okay.

Yours in Christ,

Glenn Kenny

Comments

[Joel]

I'm pretty sure that I turned forty on my 34th birthday--at least that's when I had my first severe back injury--and can relate to the subsequent misery. Autobiographical film reviews are a favorite sub-genre of mine, so thanks for posting this. Glad the yes vote won the poll.

[Matthias Galvin]

+1

[Graig]

Hey, this is great. Funny, touching, personal. I expect that ART HISTORY and SILVER BULLETS, the other two legs of the Swanberg 2011 Trifecta, will inspire you to post similarly thoughtful recollections.

[preston]

In a different reality, this would be make very interesting copy for the liner notes if 'Uncle Kent' were ever packaged on DVD in such a way. I doubt JS would go for it...

For me, 40 is literally right around the corner. Beautiful piece, very glad you chose to post.

[Jake]

Well, what is the exact difference between a Phillipe Garrel movie and a Joe Swanberg movie that makes one less trivial than the other? I remember watching Birth of Love and being bored out of my mind, but this may be because there were language/cultural barriers that only subtitles and Wikipedia could alleviate.

[Richard Brody]

Swanberg is not the new Pialat, he says that he's influenced by Pialat and this makes sense. Swanberg is pretty hard on Kent Osborne too, despite his tenderness. (For instance, the poignancy of the "Uncle Kent" video is intensified by Swanberg's dark sense that Kent has painted himself into a corner.) But I guess it's enough to declare that one director has "sensibility" and another doesn't—again using the dead to club the living.

[Tom Carson]

We've all probably made fun of Facebook's "Like" option, but sometimes it's a useful way to signal admiration without getting dragged into the argument (if any). Going personal in a rave review is bathetic and easy. Going personal in a pan is guts ball, and salud.

[Kent Jones]

Richard, I wrote that I regretted the name simply because...well, not hard to figure out. Doesn't have anything to do with the movie itself, which I have yet to see.

Regarding the Criterion notes, let's cut the guy a little slack on THE RED SHOES and assume he's just fishing for some terminology when he writes about "silent film technique." On the other hand, while it too has no bearing on the question of his films, I have to admit that what he writes about Brakhage gives me pause. "What was the point? And what could anyone possibly see in the work? Those questions are still worth asking, but I’m asking them with an open mind now, and it’s thanks to filmmakers like Brakhage, who were brave enough to experiment." Gee, what a "refreshingly honest" tribute.

[Glenn Kenny]

@ Richard: Well, I figured you wouldn't warm much to my observations, but come now; I detect a little goalpost shifting here. No, you do not say that Swanberg's the new Pialat, but I figure almost any reader can at the very least infer that that's a bit of flippant exaggeration on my part. (And I don't expect it's too much to assume that any reader interested in Swanberg's work would be following your writings on it.) But the comparison to Pialat has been made, both by you and, if I recall correctly, Dan Sallitt. (Who I just saw last night! But this topic didn't come up.) So when you make the comparison in a positive way, it's, what, articulating Swanberg's worthy antecedents and making him part of their legacy? Whereas, if I make the comparison negatively, I'm "using the dead to club the living." Uh-huh. Also, Garrel ain't dead, last time I checked.

And while the "no sensibility" charge is, I admit, a little amorphous, and likely difficult to prove in critical court, the citation of sentimentality still holds. And may be harder to refute, as I see you left that alone.

[Petey]

Has anyone introduced Chuck & Buck, (which I thought to be pretty damn good), into this particular conversation?

[OC]

Joe Swanberg is an incompetent sitcom director. Give him some industry backing, a few bucks to play with, and some c-list stars are he's got about as much potential as Ken Kwapis.

Pialat? Garrel? Richard Brody needs to lay off the pot for a while.

[Jette]

I'm Uncle Kent's age, I was raised and educated in *Louisiana* and I have no trouble with references to Beethoven and Sappho. In fact I was surprised that more people don't know who Wallis Simpson was, after hearing folks talk about it around the office and the gym, etc. in relation to THE KING'S SPEECH. (No one even remembered her name.)

One of the difficulties I had with some of Joe Swanberg's previous films was that I felt too old to care about some of the plights of the younger characters, so I'm interested to see UNCLE KENT and find out if that feeling still holds. Assuming I'll be able to catch it at SXSW.

[That Fuzzy Bastard]

The world's biggest fan of MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (a lovely, moving film, but about as overdetermined as a Red Chinese opera) is complaining about a director's sentimentality?

[Glenn Kenny]

I'm hardly the world's BIGGEST fan of "Make Way For Tomorrow." And you're confusing sentiment with sentimentality. It's all up there on the screen—look at the parting scene in "Make Way," thoroughly straight and straightforward and economical, and then look at/listen to the "I was a better person when I wasn't trying to score chicks" near-wrap-up to "Uncle Kent:" Osborne's face going all "poignant," and the reverse shot of the video he's looking at on the computer, the tinkly/treacly piano music courtesy of "Kev." Uh-uh, pal. You're not getting me on this one. (And overdetermination, such as it is, isn't the same thing as sentimentality either.)

[bill]

Having now seen UNCLE KENT, I can say that as a very basic idea, even with the music, I don’t object to the “Uncle Kent” scene. What I do object to is that, contextually, it doesn’t mean anything. Obviously, Swanberg and Osborne believed it was a pretty big deal, since they named their movie after it, but, I mean, I have nieces and nephews, too. Where’s *my* movie?

Stylistically, another thing that sticks in my craw is that UNCLE KENT seems to want to be one of those fake documentaries, except when it couldn’t justify the conceit. Kent is a guy who takes his camera everywhere, and records everything, but any time he needs to be in the shot, which is often, the first person is dropped for the third person, so that as a construction the film plays really half-assed. In this sense, there are rather surprising parallels with DISTRICT 9. Also, Swanberg sure seems to favor the medium long-shot, doesn’t he?

[Tom Russell]

I know it wasn't your intention, but your review really makes me want to see the film. I don't mean this in a snarky way; the emotional subject matter you describe sounds interesting to me[*]. I realize of course that you don't think the film is particularly successful in how it explores that.

In general, though, as I've said before, I enjoy Joe's films-- more-so than Glenn, certainly, if not quite so much as Mr. Brody and others. I still like LOL the best-- I've seen it maybe eight or nine times, and it really holds together as an entire film. HANNAH and ALEXANDER both have moments and sequences that I've found interesting or note-worthy amidst other moments I've found less interesting.

I'm curious: is Swanberg's presence as an actor a supporting role, or just a single-scene cameo? I've found him to be very funny in small cameo-type roles-- in QUIET CITY, for example, or (um) SON OF A SEAHORSE, which the Scrappy Lil' Indie Filmmaker in me feels compelled to mention will be available in a new cut on a commentary-and-extras-laden DVD sometime this spring, and wow, that was a flawless segueway and in no way forced, right? :-D

[*]-- My wife, who gets less mileage from Joe's films than I do, is interested in this one too, solely because there is a cat in it. And apropos my astonishing partner in life and in art, age-appropriate relationships are vastly overrated. :-P

[bill]

@Tom - I'll give the film this: the cat is good.

[Glenn Kenny]

@ Tom Russell: Swanberg's just in the one scene, but boy, he sells it! But seriously...he seems to be playing some iteration of himself, and, no, he's not...funny.

The movie's only 72 minutes, so every performer in the small cast makes an impression. Speaking of impressions: don't get the wrong one. It's not my mission in life to get people to NOT see Joe Swanberg films. You know, you're a free agent, do as you like, all that. Since my piece is likely best appreciated by people who have themselves seen "Uncle Kent," I can't see as the above writing is much use as a kind of consumer guide...