"Cold Weather"

It's interesting and sometimes a little odd how people can admire a film equally, but for almost entirely different reasons, or maybe I ought to say qualities. Manohla Dargis, in her beautifully turned and practically rapturous review of Aaron Katz's new film Cold Weather, writes that the film "concerns young people moving from a preoccupying sense of self to an embracing understanding of another human being." And that's true, and it's all well and good, but that's not the quality of the film that makes me love it, that made me find it so transporting. (And a good thing, too, as everybody knows that I completely hate "young people," and don't care if they ever embrace understanding of anything, and in fact would be perfectly happy if they all walked off of a cliff.)

No, what I love...or, okay, one thing I love about Cold Weather is the way Katz suspends his characters between a gorgeous, lyrical, leisurely, often goofily funny simulation of reality—the setting is a very sensitively shot Portland, Oregon, and thereabout—and a full-on house of fiction, if you will. The ostensible mystery that the film's Sherlock-Holmes-loving protagonist Doug (Cris Lankenau) finds himself drawn into is replete with potentially sensationalist genre elements: a suitcase full of money, the production of pornography, a possibly dangerous man who wears a cowboy hat, all that sort of thing. But every time the story turns a corner and the whole enterprise could be seen as having the potential to fall face-first into the Hitchcockian or even the Lynchian, Katz does a wry pullback that returns the viewer to some artistic iteration of the quotidian...that's also...not...quite...quotidian. Just as the very title and premise of his last feature, Quiet City, seemed to revel in a kind of paradox, so too does this picture take elements of thrillers and more conventional character studies and mix them in a way that makes the perspectives and atmospheres here seem utterly new. Richard Brody, at his blog, points out two Godard, or at least Godardian, nods in the film (although he does not note the pracitically Karina-esque cheekbones and eyes of the film's lead actress, Trieste Kelly Dunn, seen below). There's also, since we're on the subject, there's a pretty amusing lift from Bernard Herrmann's North by Northwest score in Keegan DeWitt's music for the film.

But one ought not infer from these references that this is some kind of academic exercise in clever post modernism. Look at the way the Sherlock Holmes motif is worked into the story and you see that an interaction with culture is a big part of Katz's theme, but it's not a fruitless meditation, or something done for its own sake; it's meant to add up to something larger, and it does, without getting grandiose about it.This is not a film that needs any special pleading, explanations, or associations with non-existent movements to explain or justify it. It's a full-blown, full-blooded piece of American art cinema that's completely worth your time and money. 

And here I need to revert to my old-school and perhaps antiquated sense of journalistic ethics and disclose that Mr. Katz is what one would call a friendly acquaintance of mine. It's not like we, you know, "hang out," but he is a cousin of someone I consider a good friend and an athletic inspiration, and in fact I first met him in that context, so take that for what you will. 

UPDATE: My friends at MSN Movies are also big on Katz's film, so they asked me to reshape and expand on some of the above thoughts for the purposes of something like a "proper" review. The notice is here. 

Comments

[Nort]

This was just a beautiful film. Katz, Reed and Dewitt are one of the most exciting teams working in American cinema today. Hopefully it's not another three years before we get something from them again. And Trieste Kelly Dunn...

[Graig]

The above still looks like it could have been taken from SILENT LIGHT. I saw COLD WEATHER last year at LA Film Fest, and liked it, but walked out thinking that it could have been darker with, as they like to say in screenwriting circles, a higher sense of "stakes." That said, the film's stayed with me, and I've grown to think Mr. Katz and co. are up to something trickier and more interesting. Your thoughts, and Manohla's thoughts, make me want to see it again.