Aardvark
Josh (Zachary Quinto) meets with his first therapist, Emily (Jenny Slate). She tries to figure out what’s wrong with him. He is obsessed with his brother Craig (Jon Hamm), a semi-famous television actor who was on a long-running show called “South Street Law.” Josh describes his brother to Hannah as “one of the great talents of his generation,” but it’s more like he seems to worship him.
He starts getting agitated when she admits she doesn’t really watch TV. It’s been years since he’s seen Craig in person, but he believes that Craig appears to him disguised: as a homeless woman begging for change, say. Or a renegade cop making Craig help steal a kid’s bicycle. When Craig actually shows up, it becomes hard to reconcile Josh’s narrative of messianic talent with his personality he just seems like a regular handsome garden-variety TV actor talent.
There were moments during “Aardvark,” Brian Shoaf’s first feature film starring Zachary Quinto and Jenny Slate and Jon Hamm and Sheila Vand, when I wondered if the movie was putting me on. That is not code for it had its own sense of humor or whatever “Aardvark” does not know how to do what it wants to do it is simply that I wondered if I was being put on because there seemed no other explanation for why things were happening in this movie the way they were happening. It is not that the tone is uneven or uncertain; the film does not have one at all.
That may sound like an exaggeration, but there are some movies you just know aren’t going anywhere about 20 minutes into them and so spend the next hour-plus figuring out why you know that and whether you still have any right or maybe even responsibility just to sit back and watch anyway but then also maybe come up with some new ways of analyzing movies. A bad movie with a strong-willed vision will at least give you something to write about; those without any idea what they’re going for are just exhausting.
Because “Aardvark” does not really have characters, per se, it is difficult to say anything interesting about them. There is no reason to think or talk much about this movie at all, beyond the fact that it exists and until recently employed some of our greatest contemporary actors. It would certainly be unfair to critique the performances when the script did not provide anyone involved with anything substantive to do.
So instead there were logistical questions: Like, how thorough was Jon Hamm’s physical? Because his character appears in such different states of physical health throughout that it became unclear if he hadn’t gotten enough sun or if maybe he had gotten too much sun or too little or if possibly he’d gotten a new haircut between takes and nobody noticed. Similarly, how many days did they shoot during because I counted at least seven full-blown natural disasters (including but not limited to: snowstorm; thunderstorm; torrential downpour) happening outside Emily’s apartment window while she and Josh had therapy sessions inside.
But these are complaints about form. The content leaves something to be desired as well especially “Aardvark’s” haphazard and uncurious treatment of mental illness. Shoaf (who also wrote the script) doesn’t get into Josh’s diagnosis, although the narrative requires him to be in a psychotic state. People throw around terms like “paranoid schizophrenic” and “bipolar” like they’re interchangeable they’re not interchangeable but then we don’t know exactly what Josh’s diagnosis is either. He has been living with this diagnosis for years; he would know it like the back of his hand. So would Craig.
Mental illness is difficult terrain for any artist, but especially one working within the confines of a dramatic narrative. I appreciate that this is not a mental-health documentary, but when you decide to build your whole script around hallucinations, and then half the movie is devoted to a single one of these hallucinations in particular “what if he was just crazy enough to think his brother wasn’t acting?” it seems necessary to at least gesture toward getting some things right about mental illness. Maybe Shoaf didn’t want to burden Josh with a specific diagnosis. Fine. But then maybe don’t write him as someone who has lived with this diagnosis for years. Or: Do! But if so, take it seriously.
The movie begins with a flashback to childhood, underscored by some yearning composition by Heather McIntosh (who also scored last year’s lovely “Princess Cyd,” directed by Stephen Cone) as an aardvark wanders out of a cave and sniffs at the air with its long snout. Two little boys are watching through glass. The flashback comes up throughout “Aardvark,” and every time it does it changes. Sometimes it’s a good memory. Sometimes it’s bad. Maybe this is meant to show how people have different memories of the same event, but it’s done so casually I can’t tell if we’re supposed to think about this or not.
There are many cultures in which the aardvark is seen as a powerful symbol: solitude, survival, striving for success. Shoaf doesn’t do anything with that knowledge (and maybe that’s all right; then again maybe he could have underlined the symbolism just once so that the poor neglected creature might gain some emotional resonance). Josh meets Hannah (Vand), who may or may not be yet another one of his hallucinations now that we’ve seen him hang out with various “Craig”s but she certainly has no life outside waiting for him.
She is too serious to be just another manic pixie dream girl. At one point she compliments his bright plaid shirt. He goes off on a monologue about the shirt’s imperfections, then says, “Sometimes irregular things can be just fine.” She nods at him with soft eyes. Again I felt like I was being put on. Are we supposed to take that line seriously? Find it deep?
Things get introduced and abandoned in this film. Potentials get raised and then vanish. Emily has troubles of her own, as we see in her tense meeting early on with her former mentor (and clearly her ex) such a rich scene, strange and evocative. You want to know what happened between them. We never see him again. If the scene is there only to give complexity to her character, it’s a half-finished job.
And then Jon Hamm comes swaggering into the movie and nearly walks off with it, through the force of his no-nonsense realistic acting. He brings subtext and feeling and logic into a movie that badly needs all these things, since it wants so much to float around in its own unwillingness to pin itself down.
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