The next time somebody suggests that “Juno” or “Lost in Translation” is an independent movie, you might refer them to “Frownland,” shot on 16 mm film, with first-time actors and no discernible budget.
More than that sort of cred, “Frownland” is also stubbornly resistant to any crowd-pleasing impulse. A movie sure to inspire some walkouts, this is a decidedly tough one to warm up to.
I’m not sure I did warm up to it, but this picture has something — its own integrity, at the very least. From the opening sequence, in which we are introduced to the sniveling life of Keith (Dore Mann), a lonely guy living on the fringes of New York City, this world is difficult to look at.
Keith, who stutters and cringes his way through a weird half-life (surely he has never seen sunlight), goes about his rounds: selling coupon books door-to-door, trying to get a rent payment out of his slugabout roommate Charles (Paul Grimstad), and haplessly edging toward a woman (Mary Wall) who may or may not be an ex-girlfriend.
Dore Mann, a distant relative of writer-director Ronald Bronstein, physically resembles a Paul Giamatti for whom nothing good ever happened. He gives an amazing performance, in an unvarnished kind of way.
For a while, the movie veers off from Keith to follow Charles, a character who had loftily dismissed Keith earlier but who turns out to be just as luckless. His experiences trying to get a job provide glimpses of comic relief.
“Frownland” needs to catch its viewer in the right frame of mind, because this is not an easy film. It strikes me as highly authentic, however. Certainly, it makes Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” look like a Hollywood musical by comparison; at least that book’s hero had the ecstasy of art. Keith is just miserable.
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