Things I Don’t Understand
Forget everything you KNOW...
- Directed By: David Spaltro
- Written By: David Spaltro
- Country: USA
- Released: 2011
- Running Time: 109 minutes
- Links: Film blog, Facebook
- Drama, Reviews
Things I Don’t Understand follows Violet Kubelick (Molly Ryman), a brilliant young graduate student who has an obsession with the afterlife. So much so that this has become the centrepiece of her studies, and the basis of her thesis which is on the subject of near-death experiences. This obsession takes a dark turn, before the opening credits, with Violet’s attempted suicide.
What follows is the story of an emotionally fragile individual trying to put her life back together and trying to make some sort of sense of the world. She isn’t trying particularly hard, though, and has slipped into a rut in which she divides her time between a therapist’s couch, a minimum wage job and a lifestyle that revolves around casual sex, drugs and drink.
Her one island of stability is home, a Brooklyn apartment she shares with two slacker artists (played by Hugo Dillon and Meissa Hampton). Between them, these three have built a protective bubble in which they can feel safe and fail to amount to anything.
All three of these characters are very well drawn, convincingly portrayed and thoroughly believable. It is very apparent that writer/director, David Spaltro has enough confidence in these characters to not feel obliged to insert any artificial likeability of false quirkiness into their personalities. These are people – they have their good points and they have their bad points, their main bad point being that all three of them are content to remain right where they are both physically and emotionally.
Our three protagonists are not left to drift, however. Events and people conspire to bring things to a head and force the characters to finally confront their fears and face reality.
The event is a financial one. The three room-mates find themselves facing the very real prospect of losing their home. The need to find a solution to their housing difficulties keeps the plot moving forward at a satisfying pace. This is not the real focus of the film, though. That – and the element that clearly interests the film-makers most – is the personal.
Violet’s therapist convinces her to pick up her thesis again and to visit a nearby hospice for the terminally ill in order to conduct some further interviews. It is here that she meets Sara (Grace Folsom) a young former dancer who is facing the final stages of her cancer alone and who desperately needs a friend.
Sara really does light up the film. This is a character who is facing death, on her own, and dealing with it. She is witty, funny, painfully self-aware and instantly likeable. Grace Folsom does a fantastic job, not just in bringing the character to life but also by doing so in such way that really is inspirational. If only we could all face death in the way that Sara does.
The other major character that deserves a mention is Parker (Aaron Mathias) who tends the bar below Violet’s apartment. The friendship that develops between Parker and Violet, as with the friendship that develops between Sara and Violet, provides Violet with the absolution that she has spent far too much of her life trying to achieve by turning inwards.
This brings us to the real message of the film, which is that we are the sum of the people we affect. Any one of us can sit and discuss the meaning of life, or worry about the afterlife, for as long as we like. It is not until we go out and make a difference that we can really claim to have found a meaning.
Like David Spaltro’s previous film, …Around, Things I Don’t Understand is a genuinely warm film and one that reflects a real understanding of people and the relationships we form. The film is peopled with a collection of characters that are ordinary, believable and – as the plot progresses – increasingly engaging.
This is very much an ensemble film and all of the cast put in very strong performances that play off each other in a manner that is occasionally surprising yet always consistent. The result is a view of a small community, living in a much larger city, into which a surprisingly broad narrative can be seamlessly inserted.
This is a film that really does deserve a much wider audience.
