People like to not like this movie. Reviewers complain of it. It’s obscure. It’s difficult. “Fey” and “twee” and “pretentious” are words that pop up often. The tireless bloggers on its IMDb message board don’t like the two principals. The bloggers complain even more about the fate of the cat. (More about the cat later.) Well, I feel things, too. But I think I’m looking at an impressive work of art in this, Miranda July’s second feature. This movie—any movie, really—whose director has deliberately made it “difficult” is probably asking for your care and effort. It seems to me that you should make the effort to interpret The Future that you would make if you were watching one of the impenetrables from Ingmar Bergman’s middle period, The Silence, say.
As with any fine movie, you can read the opening and closing shots to find the its wholeness. Here, the first voice you hear (over a black screen) is the talking cat that has prompted much of the annoyance at this movie. (The voice is Miranda July’s, and it is a pitiful mewing, not at all the stern meows with which our Emma summons me to my duties, kibble and headrubbing.) The cat whines that it has been outside, “never been petted, not even once.” That is “the darkness.” (Later the cat will go off into a realm of light.) “They said, we’ll come back for you, Paw-Paw.” “They” are Sophie and Jason who found the cat with an injured paw, brought her to a shelter, the “cagetorium,” where she is locked up. Now Sophie and Jason want to adopt her, something this unloved cat longs for. That’s one of the themes of this film, the need to belong to something or someone. But we get to that later.
The shelter veterinarian tells them that the cat may die shortly of kidney failure but not if they do a good job taking care of her. In any case, they have to pick her up thirty days hence. Don’t be late, because we’re overcrowded and we euthanize. In other words, come back in thirty days on the dot, or we kill the cat.
Now the camera cuts to Sophie and Jason, two thirty-somethings, sitting face to face with similar mops of uncombed hair, working their laptops. Sophie is Miranda July herself; Jason is played by Hamish Linklater.
”Can you get me some water?,” says Sophie. But Jason can’t or won’t do that. That is another motif, the inability to act, particularly to act so as to help another. Partly, this movie is about the way how this loosey-goosey style of thinking and acting leads people to betray one another our of sheer carelessness. Sophie betrays Jason. They both betray Paw-Paw out of what we might call will-lessness.
And then we learn of Jason’s remarkable ability. He can stop time. By way of demonstration, he and Sophie are still for a few seconds. Then, while time is stopped, the credits roll, telling us, me anyway, that, if we have not already caught on, this is a movie about time.
Stopping time stops activity. We are going to see shiftlessness, failure to act, fecklessness, lack of will carried to an unholy degree (if you can believe in stopping time). I think Miranda July is out for bigger game than just skewering a slacker lifestyle that seems to afflict our current century (at least in movies—think Judd Apatow.)
The whole prospect of coming for Paw-Paw on the appointed day seems seems quite overwhelming to these two. Jason and Sophie go home and talk of adopting a cat as though it were a huge event. It will change their lives. They talk about it as if it were getting married or having a baby. Both are out of reach for these slackers. From time to time Sophie clutches a yellow t-shirt that she calls “Shirty” like a security cloth.
Well, slackers is perhaps not fair. They do work. Jason acts as tech support for people who telephone in for help. Sophie works at a dance gymnasium, teaching a class of five-year-olds. And the thirty-day deadline (literally a deadline) galvanizes them.
The deadline brings the pressure of time to bear on their shapeless lives. “In five years,” says Sophie, “we’ll be forty.” And Jason adds, “Forty is basically fifty and after fifty the rest is just basically loose change.” Sophie: “So, for all practical purposes, in a month, that’s it for us.” Jason says, “God, I always thought I’d be smarter.” “I also thought eventually we’d be rich.” “I actually thought I’d be a world leader.” (Unbelievable!) Sophie concludes, “It’s too late for us.” But they decide that they should “definitely reprioritize.” These two ineffectuals decide they are going to do something special, wonderful, magical—but “I’m gonna let it choose me,” says Jason. “I just need to be alert.” Uh-huh.
On a whim, Jason decides to go door-to-door selling trees as a way to halt global warming. He plans, to Sophie’s surprise, “to go outside.” (The opening words of the movie are the cat’s, “Have you ever been outside?”) When someone answers the door, Jason’s opener is, “Do you have a moment to help reduce global warming?” And, of course, nobody does. Nobody has the time. This job is as futile as being a help desk. But it’s about time.
Sophie plans to achieve what she has been trying for fifteen years (!) to achieve, putting a successful series of dances on YouTube, maybe leading to fame and fortune in dance. “Thirty dances in thirty days” is her slogan. But her dances are worthless, and she gets nowhere.
Let me, for one paragraph, jump to the finale. Just as the opening shot sets the themes, so does the closing. In the last scene, Sophie has come back to the apartment with Jason, although their relationship has become impossible. Jason says, “Just one night, and then in the morning you go.” We hear the song “Where or When” (in the dreamy, breathy Peggy Lee, Benny Goodman version of 1941). Where or when means space and time. Where Jason is involved with time, “a moment to help reduce global warming,” Sophie is involved with dance, moving her body through space. “You go.” Picking up Paw-Paw involves both going somewhere and doing it at a certain time. Something for both of them.
When Sophie despairs of achieving anything with dance, on a whim, she calls Marshall (David Warshofsky), a middle-aged divorced man who drew a picture of his daughter that Jason impulsively acquired. After locating him in space (can he hear her shout?), she goes to see him, and on the second visit, they have sex. She moves in with him and his daughter Gabi ((Isabella Acres). After she shacks up with Marshall, she goes here and there, back to the apartment, back to her old job. Space.
Gabi is digging a hole in Marshall’s backyard. Is she trying to get to China, Sophie asks (space). No, she wants to experiment with sleeping in the hole, in effect, immobilizing herself.
While Sophie has been getting involved with Marshall, Jason has has struck up a friendship with Joe Putterlik (a non-actor, played by himself). Joe has a different take on time. Joe is old, a creature of a previous generation. Joe actually does things, electrical work. (He doesn’t just fool around aimlessly on a laptop.) He has repaired a a hair dryer that he sells to Jason, who buys it for god knows what reason (more aimlessness). Joe had a long marriage, sixty-two years, and he marked nine holidays of each year by making a bawdy greeting card for each. He makes a toy for the soon-to-be-adopted cat, something neither Jason nor Sophie think to do.
Ironically, coming back from Joe’s after listening to him, Jason is inspired to do things in time. He finds Sophie in the apartment and tells her, we have some time. This is just the beginning. “I mean, like, we have fifty more years together. And it’s just gonna get better.” Sophie at this point has fucked Marshall, and she says, drily, “And you know all this just by being alert.” “And noticing everything, yeah,” says Jason. More uh-huh.
Sophie goes back to Marshall and then comes back to Jason again, this time to tell him what she has done. Jason can’t face this knowledge and he stops time. The woman next door is frozen in position; cars are stopped; pedestrians don’t move. Jason asks for advice from the moon (voiced by the sage Joe Putterlik). But the moon doesn’t know how things will come out, and the moon is too far away, to change anything, “just a rock in the sky.”
Jason stopped time at 3:14 in the morning, and now things get really peculiar. Jason says, “I know what will happen at 3:15. at 3:15, we aren’t going to get back in bed together. . . We aren’t gonna have kids. We aren’t gonna grow old together.” In other words, when Jason lets time start up again, several days will have elapsed, but things will have happened. And we see onscreen the things that would have happened during those days.
Even more, we see an inevitable future that goes far beyond a few days. Sophie goes back to Marshall (David Washofsky) and sees him off to work in the morning like your basic housewife. “Shirty,” her yellow t-shirt, crawls like an inchworm, following her back into the house. She goes back to the dance studio and gets a job as receptionist. Two friends of hers come in, very pregnant, and in rapid succession, we see them with their babies, their children, their grown-up children, and grandchildren, whom Sophie dutifully registers for dance classes.
Marshall’s daughter Gabi has finished her hole in the yard and gets in it to sleep. Like Sophie and Jason, she set herself a fantastic task, but, wiser than they, after a few hours she tires of being immobile and comes in the house where Sophie gives her a bath. (Again, she is taking care of five-year-olds. In earlier work, Miranda July seems fascinated by the way adults’ taking care of children transforms the adults.)
Sophie now performs a strange Pilobolus-like dance with “Shirty,” Much has been made of this strange shirt and dance. Several critics suggest it is a security cloth, and in a way I agree. I think it is her inability really to dance, an inability that allows her to live securely in limbo. She has pranced around her living room, trying to create dances with no success for fifteen years, from time to time clutching “Shirty,” (Earlier, she put a big cloth in the same yellow over her dance class of little girls; they can’t dance either.) Now, at Marshall’s house, looking at a new life, a life perhaps different from her life with Jason, she still can’t dance. The inability she needs followed her. She can’t escape the lack she needs to keep her inertia.
Finally, Jason releases time. To do it, he has to go to the sea and call it into motion like the moon. When time resumes, Sophie goes to the shelter, where she learns that Paw-Paw has been euthanized and that Jason has been told, too. Desolated, Jason goes back to selling trees, but, facing one more indifferent citizen, he pronounces a verdict on global warming. “It’s probably too late for all this anyway.” “You know how, like, in the cartoons, when the building gets hit with the wrecking ball, right before the building falls down, there’s always, like, this moment where it’s perfectly still, right before it collapses. We’re in that moment.” Time out of time, motionless, with catastrophe in the offing: that’s the world of Sophie and Jason.
Sophie goes back to the apartment. “We were too late.” Jason says, referring at least to Paw-Paw. As for Sophie, “Just one night, and then in the morning you go.” We hear Paw-Paw’s final words. He has reached some kind of timelessness: “As it turns out, living is just a beginning.” It’s a kind of nirvana: “I’m not even I.” “It’s warm, it’s light, it goes on and on and on and on . . . “ As Sophie packs some clothes, Jason glumly reads a book, trying to ignore her. And we hear “Where or When,” our couple lost in time and space.
To me, this is a film, a brilliant film, about the way time and space put pressure on us, pressure we ignore at our peril (and the peril of others, indeed of the world, if we think of global warming). It is a pressure that is deeply hurtful yet unavoidable, part of the nature of reality. This is a film that haunts you. It asks you—it asks me—to face some deep questions about our human situation and how we act in the world.
