By: debbie lynn elias
Described by director Mark Pellington as “An existential horror film. An allegory about male failure. Greed. Shame. Addiction.”, I MELT WITH YOU is a total mind ***k (pardon me for saying). Wow!! These guys make Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas look like child’s play and can even give Bacchus and Caligula a run for their money. But then you look below the surface, you realize that from the opening frame, there is more here than meets the eye. As Pellington himself says, “underneath it is that architecture. . . When you’re 21 you think your whole life is out here. Then you get to your 30’s and maybe it’s the death of a parent or something happens. And when you become a parent yourself and then your parents die, suddenly you’re 44. You’re next in line. You’re closer to the end. Who was I and why am I not what I said I was going to be?”
At first blush, the sensorally exciting and dazzling I MELT WITH YOU, appears to be the poster child for boys behaving badly. With debauchery descending into new depths of hell, Glenn Porter’s script details the 25th annual gathering of four best friends from college. Now in their 40’s, Richard, Ron, Jonathan and Tim appear to have it all. Careers, families, an occasional hiccup perhaps, but nothing unusual. But as the film unfolds, lives begin to openly unravel as no amount of drugs, alcohol or bad behavior can continue to hide the secrets, unspoken truths and horrors of each man’s emotional life. Fueled by the escapist primordial consumption of drugs and alcohol set to pulsating, heart pounding music, we delve into the male psyche as each man faces not only his own mortality but the age old question of “Where did my life go?”
I have to say up front that these are very courageous roles for the actors to tackle. Not only soul baring, but the visual levels of alcohol consumption, drug use and sexual games played out on screen with no attempts to shelter the audience, is bold and daring, and potentially suicidal to a career. (But never fear, there was no real alcohol or drugs consumed on camera. Per Thomas Jane, “It’s all milk sugar and tea. We’re drinking watered down tea and snorting milk sugar.”) Surprising is that prior to filming, our four principals did nothing more than have dinner, as the chemistry onscreen is powerful, so powerful, one truly believes they have been friends for life.
The standout performances really come from Rob Lowe and Thomas Jane as Jonathan and Richard, respectively. Within these two, the inner demons fueling the outer bacchanalian behavior take the longest to visibly manifest, but when they do – Wow! Jane’s Richard is clearly the alpha male of the group, something that distresses Jeremy Piven’s conniving Ron, leading to additional friction and meltdown amongst the men. Jane is a commanding presence onscreen, giving Richard a strong presence that is not only calming and supportive, but instigatory. Drawing Jane to the role is the fact that Richard is “a guy who’s woken up in his 40’s and realized that half of his life has passed him by and he hasn’t achieved the things that his youth promised. My character Richard is a failed writer. A guy who showed initial promise with a great first novel but then petered out and couldn’t deliver on the second novel. . .the only real connection that he had in his life are these friends that he gets together with once a year because that was the most real time in his life. I think a lot of us can relate to that.”
Watching Lowe’s Jonathan disintegrate is nothing short of brilliant as he is consumed by shame and loss. A doctor who has compromised his ethics in favor of writing illegal prescriptions for rich clientele, the gravitas that Lowe brings to Jonathan makes this quite possibly the best performance of his career and were this a higher profile film, one that might put him into Oscar contention. Blown away by the script, Lowe’s passion and enthusiasm for the character of Jonathan and the film is evident. “To read something where you truly go, ‘Whoa! I’ve never read anything like this before’ is pretty extraordinary. I was actually surprised that anyone was going to make it. I wanted to be a part of a movie that was going to be as provocative as this movie was. . .This is [provocative] dealing with the themes of what it is really like to be a man. That was really really interesting to me.”
And then there’s Jeremy Piven. As Ron he does what he does best – plays the arrogant, obnoxious, know-it-all best friend with a rampant high energy. Piven gives Ron this edge of being “the loose cannon” and is he perfect disruptor or catalyst that gets the audience thinking about truth. And like Jane and Lowe, gravitates to the challenging character and story. “With my character, he is so sidetracked with being the breadwinner that it drives him into doing all the wrong things and being immoral. Then he has to face himself. And in this particular weekend he has to face all his friends and all these feelings that they have towards each other that have been laying dormant for years and they are just kind of unleashed on each other. That’s what you look for as an actor, is to play those type scenarios and stakes.”
A surprising, but welcome, casting addition is Christian McKay. As Tim, the theatrically trained McKay brings the element of sensitivity and softness to the film as the perfect contrast to the rougher edges of the characters played by Jane, Lowe and Piven, providing that much needed final piece of the puzzle to create the whole. Adding a female perspective to the mix is Carla Gugino. As Laura, a local police officer who suspects that these four men are not what they seem and their “vacation” may not be as innocent as they profess, she is the catalyst that sets the tone for some edge of your seat tension, fear and even, thrill, as the clock starts ticking on the who, what and when as to someone putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Can Laura, or anyone save the boys from themselves? Unfortunately, her character could have a bit more definition and Gugino definitely warrants more screen time. But be on the lookout for her most engaging scenes where she goes toe-to-toe in a cat and mouse game with Thomas Jane’s evasive Richard.
(And ladies, keep your eyes peeled for some fine ass work by each of our men. That alone is worth the price of admission!)
Written by screenwriter Glenn Porter some four years ago before Mark Pellington got the wild hair to turn this into a film, Porter does a superb job of defining each of the characters, as it is the very nature of each character that defines the storyline. Each character develops through both their vocal and physical rantings, the manners in how they rant, the content of the rant, and then those quick isolated moments of solitude, loss and self-reflection. These are all very sad, lonely men trying to hold on to a past, and a life that has seemingly passed them by and that they let pass them by. As opined by Jane, “A lot of guys find it hard to be intimate, especially American men. . .America is a very youth oriented culture so what’s appropriate to bond with other men in your 20’s by doing drugs and getting fucked up and listening to loud music and partying, that’s an acceptable way to bond. But it’s not an acceptable way to bond when you’re older. Yet, we don’t have the tools as 40 year old men to allow us to be able to experience some of the deeper questions and thoughts and insecurities about getting older. A man over 40 is a man alone.”
What is most interesting about the character construction is that although there are moments when one believes that the relationship of these four Musketeers is slipping away into nothing, at its core, it never does. It takes each of these four individuals to really comprise one person. Each is one quarter of the whole. Intriguing is how Porter and Pellington methodically divulge a critical piece of information that fuels the final explosion in the insanity of each of their individual lives. Frightening, horrific and sad, the emotional construction is a multi-layered and textured journey of self-exploration and loss, exposing the raw truth beneath cracking veneers. The character study is fascinating to watch but, at times, is overshadowed by the extreme debauchery of these wannabe reprobates who are really just little boys lost.
For Pellington, “The whole experience on this is different than making a movie in a Hollywood system, financed by Hollywood people. It’s part of my own bread, part of another guy in Canada. A total do it yourself. Two weeks after we finished [the script], CAA helped us out. And Tom Jane and Guy Pearce and [Jeremy] Piven – I met all these actors within a week who all wanted to do it and Jeremy took this role [Ron] and we just said ‘Okay.’ We picked a start date and said, ‘Let’s go!’ Didn’t even have the money. I started bankrolling it. Just said, ‘We’re making it.’ Picked a start date and said ‘Let’s go.’” Shot in a contained environment to keep production costs low, the film was shot in sequence in Big Sur over 18 days.
Editor Don Broida, who worked with Pellington on Henry Poole, returns to the team, but this time as sole editor of this, his first feature film. And I must say Broida’s work is what visually dazzles and fascinates, escalating the frenetic emotional tone. Cuts are rapid and frenzied within the house, not only setting the pace of the film, but fueling the emotional frenzy and confusion at a dizzying pace. A beautiful counter balance are the slow, casual extended and quiet “hangover scenes” during which one can voyeuristically linger, watching each man in quiet and contemplative thought.
Having worked with him previously on the Luke Wilson vehicle, Henry Poole Is Here, Pellington reteams with cinematographer Eric Schmidt, to glorious result. Also a film with a character facing a crossroads of conscience, it’s interesting to see the difference in tonal lighting and lensing between the two films. Whereas Henry Poole was light and bright, here in I MELT WITH YOU, the look is exquisitely sensory lacking crisp crystaline edges. Use of lighting within the contained space of a house is mesmerizing with mutes and blurs, echoed by the golden glow of an ever present roaring fire. Very primal, visceral and raw. Interesting hand held camera angles and lensing is as frenetic and frenzied as the situation at hand, adding to the spiraling decline of the situation while creating an empathetic mind numbing effect. A gorgeous contrast are exterior scenes which are cold and grey, celebrating and metaphorically capturing the rocky and unsettling shades of grey of life. Epitomizing Schmidt’s work is a money shot between Jane’s and Gugino’s characters atop a cliff. Bright, sunlit, warm, crisp, clear and decisive. The light at the end of the tunnel.
A real standout is the Big Sur location and the house where this week unfolds. According to Pellington, “That was a house for sale. It wasn’t an empty house but it was Spartan enough to be the kind of house you would rent out.” And as Thomas Jane regales, “We actually had to get the house ready a few times for people to view it. We had to clean all the shit out.” Because they were shooting in sequence “however the place was left, when [the characters] would wake up the next day, that’s how the house looked. So we had to literally clean it up and re-dirty it very fourth or fifth day.” And at the end of the shoot? Pellington “had to spend $15,000 to fix that house up. It was trashed.”
The icing on the cake? Thanks to tomandandy, one of the most spectacular soundtracks of the year that is “to die for”, pounding and pulsating with the ferocity of a time bomb.
By no means a “pro drug movie” or “pro alcohol” movie, “it’s these characters who remember their past. [When] you get together with your friends part of it is that you go back to that memory and [here] part or your memory and collective memory was doing drugs and listening to music and getting fucked up and telling inappropriate stories and dancing around a fire. That’s just that kind of male camaraderie that’s part of their joy. It’s also part of their disillusioning fragile bonds – the fact that they’re buddies and they can’t really even talk to each other. . . [And] they only get together once a year. These are not guys who see each other every weekend. They are trying to relive their youth. It’s pathetic. It’s sad. They are numbing themselves because of the very thing they can’t confront within themselves.”
As Piven reflects on I MELT WITH YOU, he finds something “kind of exhilarating about seeing a movie that’s true to itself, knowing that you don’t have to live that life, knowing that you didn’t. And that if something is done with passion and clarity and hopefully, of a high level, it’s inspiring.”
At the end of the day, Lowe too, has a clarity in describing I MELT WITH YOU. “To use the cliche, it can be seen as a cautionary tale. I don’t think that would be unfair. These are guys who didn’t do the work. They didn’t do the self-assessment. They didn’t make the hard choices. And this is what they have to show for it. I think that you can only put off paying for so long and this is what happens in this world.”
Thomas Jane, who is also an executive producer on the film, makes no apologies for the level of debauchery and drugs in the film and is equally thoughtful on the film. “The movie’s not for everybody, that’s for sure. The movie is for people who are at a point in their life where they’re ready to ask the hard questions about their own life. This movie will exist for those people for years to come. Just because you’re not ready to see the movie today, just wait till tomorrow. You’ll be ready at some point. Trust me.”
Richard – Thomas Jane
Jonathan – Rob Lowe
Ron – Jeremy Piven
Tim – Christian McKay
Laura – Carla Gugino
Directed by Mark Pellington. Written by Glenn Porter.
I MELT WITH YOU is currently available on VOD, preceding its theatrical release.
