The set-up to Black Bear is familiar. A couple in crisis welcomes an outsider, but can’t conceal the faultlines in their relationship. Indeed, they barely even want to conceal them. What ensues is sniping, sharp retorts, and long-simmering philosophical arguments finally giving way to the underlying issues. If you see shades of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or even this year’s prickly biopic Shirley, you wouldn’t be alone. But writer/director Lawrence Michael Levine has more on his mind than simply rehashing a classic.
Instead, Black Bear is about artistic friction. The friction between the life you imagine and the one you have, between inspiration and outcome. And, of course, between an artist mining the people in her life for material and the people being watched.
“We had jobs.”
Allison (Aubrey Plaza) is an indie filmmaker looking for inspiration. Through a friend of a friend, she learns about Gabe (Christopher Abbot) and Blair (Sarah Gadon), a musician and his pregnant dancer partner, who own a lakehouse where they host artsy friends who need a getaway — for a fee. Allison shows up in the midst of a bout of writer’s block, and immediately finds herself in a tense situation. Gabe is flirtatious towards Allison and overprotective with Blair. Blair, meanwhile, seeks to puncture Gabe’s pretensions and looks towards Allison as a potential ally. And Allison, a consummate shit-stirrer, seems to have precious little patience for either of her hosts’ emotional needs.
Dinner turns into drinks turns into dancing turns into debate, and the three prove to be a toxic trio. Part of what’s fascinating about Black Bear, though, is the turn it takes after the reckless night. Though the twist is in the trailer, I’m loathe to go into it without warning. Consider, the remainder of this section, then, to be spoilers.
The back half of the movie is a reflection of the first. It recreates the tension of Allison, Gabe, and Blair, both as a behind-the-scenes look at a film-within-a-film and as the actors portraying those characters. But the roles are different, swapped through multiple lenses to examine each character from different aspects in the same basic story. Is Allison a director? An actress? A jealous housewife? And Gabe — a manipulative husband flirting with a guest, or a manipulative director pitting two women against one another for the sake of his Art? As the movie gets lost within its varying storytelling devices, the simplicity of the dynamics at play gave me something to hold on to — and something for the movie to explore.
“You’re alienating our guest.”
Say what you will about Legion, FX’s periodically brilliant, often insufferable superhero show, but it demonstrated to the world that Aubrey Plaza was more than her deadpan comedic persona. Black Bear takes that a step further. Here, Plaza doesn’t just refute her past persona, but engages in an artistic transformation that is genuinely startling to watch. Legion played with Plaza’s persona, but never really asked her to leave the snark behind. In Black Bear, however, she reaches a stage of classically influenced boozy diva-dom I legitimately couldn’t have seen her pulling off prior to the film. It’s a raw performance, less honest than it is outré and provocative. Plaza has modern comedy’s most savage deadpan; Black Bear forces her to leave that behind for most of the film’s emotional second half.
The movie isn’t quite a three-person show, but it may as well be. And while Plaza is clearly the star here, Gadon and Abbot have phenomenal chemistry with her. Their transformations aren’t quite as robust as Plaza’s, but they still get ample opportunity to stretch. Abbot in particular gets to stretch in some interesting directions, and I think there are some interesting ideas at play about masculinity with his character. What makes someone ‘manly’? Is it purely aesthetic? Is there something manipulative about it? It’s an interesting question, though one the movie handles only glancingly. As I said above, this is clearly the Aubrey Plaza show.
“What you said before, by the way, is bullshit.”
We have a tendency when it comes to art to think of inspiration as a one-to-one thing. You get cheated on, so you write a song about being cheated on. Change the names, sure, but the basic scenario is a simple A to B.
Black Bear posits a different and more honest vision of artistic influence. Allison sees in her hosts something simple. Something elemental. There is something practiced about the way Gabe manipulates Blair to protect his masculinity. There’s something stark about the way Blair constantly tests her boundaries. Allison gets that. But Allison doesn’t just want to be an observer. Instead, she wants to bend them both around her.
Which, it turns out, is magnetic. More so than many movies, Black Bear ended up being more than the sum of its parts for me. I don’t know that it sticks the ending, and the witty repartee sometimes feels more stilted than acidic. And yet, I still think the movie is something special.
Call it the Plaza Effect. Not just her performance, though that is delightful. I can’t lie: There’s something wonderful about watching an actress you’ve followed for years finally get a chance to stretch her artistic muscles in a new direction. That said, what stood out to me was the way the story bends and warps around her character so profoundly that at times it almost seems to invert. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Martha sought to remake her personal reality through sheer force of will only to fail tragically. In Black Bear, Allison might just succeed.
