ND/NF Dispatch. 2.

Now that New Directors / New Films, organized by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, has come to an end, we can see that a few first features were stand-outs. One which showed the hand of a promising new talent was Momma's Man, by Azazel Jacobs, son of the veteran independent filmmaker Ken Jacobs.

Momma's Man premiered at Sundance, and was among four US independents shown at ND/NF 2008 - the others were Ballast, Frozen River and Sleep Dealer. Each, including Momma's Man, makes great use of its location. You can't really call the concrete and interiors of Momma's Man a landscape. (For what we've come to see as the generic Sundance look, consider Jellyfish, which I'll look at soon in an interview with its Israeli director Etgar Keret.) Should we praise Sundance's programmers for this outcome, and should the ND/NF programmers be looking more widely for new work?

The title of Jacobs's film hints that our protagonist has been overly coddled by his mother, which may well be true. Momma's Man opens as 30-something Mikey (a child's nickname if there ever was one) is beginning a trip home from his parents' cluttered loft in lower Manhattan. He will spend the whole film never completing that trip. Mikey has a job, a wife and a child back in California, yet somehow he can't go back.

It's no secret that the generation born after World War II has learned how to make adolescence last a lifetime. Yet this isn't the suburbs and Mikey's parents are not overbearing types who smother their son with either affection or abuse. Squirrled into a bunk in a loft that seems like a vertical workshop, Mikey fights behavioral demons that seem to have existential roots. We are watching a confused creature, from one furtive move to the next.

Jacobs is getting at something uncomfortably human here - the dull pain of a child, well past childhood, who is stuck in his parents' home - not to speak of the pain on the faces of his parents (Ken and Flo Jacobs) as they witness what became of the unfinished job of raising Mikey. Is he hiding something, or is there a secret bond or stigma that ties him to his parents? We're never told.

There are also literary conceits at work in this modest minimalist family story. Sometimes you feel as if you're observing a situation conceived by Kafka in Lower Manhattan (how many times have you heard that one?): a thirty-ish man awakens one morning to find that he cannot escape the forces that attach him to the home of his parents. Yet we see the behavior, not the causality. Jacobs may also be borrowing a turn somewhat obliquely from the writer Robert Coover, that master of the ritual of human perversity. In Spanking the Maid, Coover created a theme and variations on a maid who entered the master's domain to receive - well, it's in the title. In Momma's Man, scenes (if you can call them that in this flow of inaction) begin with Mikey's mother warmly asking him if he will come sit with her or talk to her. The son's detachment just grows. Sisyphus starts up once again.

Matt Boren fits the part (and the baggy clothes) as that man, pudgy and fearfully deceitful as he runs through excuses on the telephone to his wife and co-workers. He's like a baby roused from a nap when he paces through the loft in his underwear, yet Mikey bears a stunning resemblance to David Berkowitz, that child of murderous fantasies, constructed around a neighbor's dog, who became the Son of Sam and murdered girls in cars all over the city of New York in the summer of 1977. Hey, maybe Mikey's problems aren't so serious after all. Still, you feel them all in this film.

The aesthetic of the film is as spare as the story. Mikey walks up and down stairs. He rides the subway, and turns back. He picks up the telephone and tells a lie or two. Then he goes back to sleep in his parents' house, crammed into a bed like everything else that is jammed into their space.

In a lesser world, this kind of character would be calling out for a talk with Montel Williams, or just downing martinis at a country club. Azazel Jacobs has taken nothing, or next to nothing, i.e., the unlived life, and made real drama.

Posted by dwhudson at April 8, 2008 9:15 AM