Weighing Realism Against Entertainment

Everybody knows that realism is overrated when it comes to art. Even focusing on the genres of realistic dramas and comedies alone, even without elements of fantasy or science fiction, we typically don’t want to watch something realistic. Aaron Sorkin’s movies and TV shows are popular partly because all the characters are intelligent and witty and think quick on their feet, and you get to have fun watching them all shoot comebacks back and forth at each other.

Of course, some people don’t like ultra-stylized dialogue. My roommate Julie told me she thought John Green’s acclaimed book “The Fault in Our Stars” (one of my favorite books) was extremely overrated, and one of her reasons was that teenagers don’t actually talk like that. They’re too clever, she argued, too quick at thinking on their feet. It seems like John Green, at least when it comes to witty banter, is like a YA form of Aaron Sorkin.

I think it all boils down to what the given story is trying to achieve. “Steve Jobs” and “The Social Network” don’t strive for realism when it comes to speech, but they each have beating emotional hearts—Steve’s denial about being a parent and Mark Zuckerberg’s contentious relationship with his friend Eduardo Saverin, respectively. The same goes for “The Fault in Our Stars,” which deals with death, grief, and the innate human desire to leave a mark on the world. You can bring out those sophisticated themes without having dialogue that necessarily bears a great resemblance to real speech.

And then there’s the mumblecore movement, films that luxuriate in all the mundanity and awkwardness of real life. Dialogue is filled with “um”s and “uh”s and “kind of”s and “sort of”s. There are often no scripts, leaving actors to struggle to find the words that make the most sense to them. It’s like a modern form of the neorealist films that populated Italy after World War II. These are movies that purposely portray the day-to-day lives of people who feel real, with little sensationalist conflict.

Mumblecore movies are still fairly overlooked when it comes to mainstream filmgoers, though, possibly because they’re anti-climactic by design (just like the Italian neorealist films). It’s only natural that movies like “Drinking Buddies” fly under the radar, even when they have stars like Jake Johnson, Anna Kendrick, and Olivia Wilde. Crowds have the rightful desire to want to be entertained, or at least engaged. Sometimes unconventional endings—like the romantic leads never actually acting on their desire in “Drinking Buddies—leave you unsatisfied. Sometimes I feel like happy endings are underrated, not overrated. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the guy and the girl ending up together in the end if that’s the ending that feels right for the story.

Still, I think part of film’s gradual evolution should be a greater willingness to challenge audience expectations and force people to ask themselves why some movies feel so unoriginal. Maybe sometimes a movie doesn’t have to have a satisfying, conclusive ending to be worth watching. Sometimes giving a disarmingly accurate portrayal of life is enough.

I wrote about this before, writing about “Boyhood” and “The Strange Little Cat.” “Boyhood” has no conventional plot, conflict, or arc; it’s just an authentic portrayal of a boy growing up, and it’s enormously affecting despite lacking a climax or conventional path of rising and falling action. “The Strange Little Cat” is far more challenging, instilling mundane reality with a sense of mysteriousness. There’s almost a sense of spirituality in the movie the way characters tell minor stories about things that have happened to them over the course of their day. The movie makes every seemingly insignificant anecdote seem indicative of some higher power, some nebulous force we can only barely sense and never comprehend. As I wrote in my article, “Sometimes it seems like we always think of life in such broad terms. When we watch our movies or TV and read our books, we look for commentary on big, important concepts like love, hate, God, war, success and failure. It makes sense that we’d want a movie to give us a new perspective on something important, but too often, that makes us forget everything else. Things like a stranger’s foot or the white side of an orange peel may seem inconsequential, but they become important through the sheer amount of space and time they take up in our lives.”

Another unconventional portrayal of reality is Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,” the first half of which is dedicated to a psychological exploration of Justine (Kirsten Dunst) on her wedding day. Justine has depression, and despite her loving, patient husband and the perfection of her wedding, she just can’t be happy. She collapses, sobs, wanders away from the wedding into the cold night, and has sex with a random guest.

I’ve only watched “Melancholia” once, and I came away from it thinking it was okay, but not great. Maybe the depiction of depression was accurate, I thought, but I had to admit that it got boring simply watching her be depressed for an hour or more. Movies are defined by change, by things happening, and no character should only play one note for the majority of the movie. In the second half, “Melancholia” becomes about how depressed people sometimes feel a sense of peace and calmness when faced with exterior catastrophe, so the lack of change isn’t much of a problem anymore, but still, it was hard for me to get through that first half, so humorless and dour and…well, depressing.

But “Melancholia” has stuck in my mind. I don’t have any plans to watch it again—it’s really hard to watch from its darkness alone, and I still stand by my belief that it was a little too one-note in the first half—but I remember it sometimes, its rawness, its realism. I don’t have depression, but I somehow know that there’s something unspeakably real about it. There’s something about the image of Justine’s face, completely apathetic and dead while she looks at her husband, or the image of Justine’s sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) helping carry a naked, despondent Justine to the bathtub and bathing her. Again, this isn’t how every depressed person acts. This is how Justine acts. But Dunst’s utter vulnerability and the honest imagery of her experience shows that these experiences don’t belong to Justine alone. “Melancholia” is perhaps the most unrelentingly grim yet accurate depiction of depression I’ve ever seen, and it’s stuck with me. I never would’ve seen it if I was only concerned with conventional crowd-pleasers.

Maybe “Boyhood” is a better example to use than “Melancholia”; “Boyhood” was received warmly by mainstream moviegoers, and I doubt most people would love “Melancholia” if they had to watch it. But my point is that movies like these don’t necessarily need to be loved, to have beautifully cathartic endings or naturally escalating first acts. Not every movie you watch should be one of your new favorite, most satisfying movies. Sometimes, challenging us emotionally is enough.