It’s easy enough for a filmmaker to wander through college. Just pick up a red Solo cup, grab a stoned roommate, and head off to a party; something is bound to happen. It’s much harder to make anything new out of that formula, to say anything insightful about how it feels to leave home for the first time and go chasing adolescent id. Which is why Cooper Raiff’s unfortunately titled new film Shithouse (in theaters and on demand October 16) is such a winning refreshment. The film, a talky little movie about college kids bonding over youthful feelings of confusion and displacement, is a more soft-hearted rendition of Mumblecore, a movement that was popular when Raiff was in grade school. (Gulp.)
Raiff stars as Alex, a Texas transplant at a Los Angeles university—Raiff, like Alex, is from the Dallas area and went to Occidental—who is seized by loneliness. His roommate, Sam (Logan Miller), is an amiable oaf with whom Alex has little in common. He misses his mom (Amy Landecker) and sister (Olivia Welch) terribly, and spends most of his time either on the phone with them or having imaginary conversations with his cherished stuffed dog. That last bit is not nearly as quirky as it sounds; Raiff instead makes it a sweet and sorrowful reminder that 19-year-olds are still pretty much kids.
Well, certain 19-year-olds are, anyway. Raiff’s world is one steeped in privilege: a private school background, a fancy college where it’s perfectly allowed, encouraged even, to bumble around and find yourself the slow way. So Shithouse is not some universal exploration of America’s youth, to be sure. But in its own narrow scale, it’s pretty effective. This is a discursive movie keenly sourced from individual experience.
The film takes on an improvisatory vibe as Alex gets to know his RA, a sophomore named Maggie (Dylan Gelula), over the course of one melancholy night together. They chat about family, and mortality, and the strange realization, common to their age, that the world is not something to simply step into, but to figure out, to negotiate and compromise with. They’re talking about big stuff, but Raiff keeps things on a believably personal scale. Maggie and Alex sound like real kids, thanks to Raiff’s light-handed direction and his and Gelula’s subtle performances.
As Shithouse—that ungainly title is taken from the name of a particularly raucous party pad that the kids frequent—rambles on, it seems to be taking a cue from Before Sunrise, a college-age romance all contained within one loquacious evening. Raiff has more resolution in mind, though, and moves his film past that near-perfect first night and into the fraught days and weeks after, when the contexts and confines of the world outside Maggie and Alex’s newly formed bubble conspire to tear them apart. It’s high drama, but really only for people that age, a crucial perspective that Raiff ably maintains. He doesn’t seem terribly interested in saying anything big about how teens live now; this is very much just a movie about two young people getting to know one another.
Perhaps the most admirable aspect of Shithouse (ugh! That stupid title!) is how Raiff—playing a version of himself, I’d have to assume—gives free rein to Alex’s sensitivity. There aren’t many movies about straight adolescent boys that show them vulnerable, insecure, weepy, affectionate toward their family. Alex is all of those things, without any wry editorializing from behind the camera. In that way, Shithouse (seriously, someone re-title this movie before Friday) feels almost revolutionary, like it’s helping to usher in some gracious new era of male detoxification. Alex is still a dumb kid who says and does obnoxious things, but he seems mostly guided by a decency and a caring that should not feel as rare or special as it does.
Anyway, that’s probably a bit grandiose considering how small a movie we’re talking about. But Shithouse (I’m dying) does do some novel, exciting things, and is well worth seeking out. It’s a warming, energizing film, measured in its technical approach (though, richly textured—the boys’ dorm room is just the right amount of squalid) and deeply compassionate toward its likable characters. Don’t let the name scare you off; this is one of the most charming movies of the season, even though it has the worst title of the year.
A similarly, though very deliberately, deceptive title haunts the new release The Kid Detective (in theaters only, October 16). In Evan Morgan’s new film (both his and Raiff’s are debut features), a scruffy but no worse for it Adam Brody plays Abe Applebaum, a former Encyclopedia Brown-esque youth sleuth who has found himself bottomed out in his 30s. He’s plagued by memories of a case he couldn’t solve, one much more serious than your standard missing cat. A girl from his class went missing, and Abe never found her. Of course, the grownups in his quaint town didn’t expect him to—but Abe has not forgiven himself for his imagined failure, for not living up to the full promise and potential of his preternatural skill for investigation.
The setup for The Kid Detective suggests a movie that’s overweeningly ironic, a smug, warped subversion of sunny, kid-friendly tropes. There are shades of that in the opening minutes of Morgan’s film. But as he goes, Morgan finds and sustains a soulful chord of autumnal ache rather than arch humor. The film is funny, though. Brody does a weary update on his Seth Cohen character from The O.C., mixing in a heap of post-child-star sadness. He’s arrestingly good in the film, and turns The Kid Detective into a mournful character study as much as it is a grim mystery.
On the latter front, The Kid Detective concerns the murder of a local teen whose girlfriend has enlisted Abe’s services. Drunk and zonked as Abe often is, he’s by no means ready to handle such a heavy case. But he has something to prove to himself and his town—so he sets out into the sleepy, dreary streets on the hunt for clues. Abe is out of his depth, but Morgan is careful not to make him a total bumbling idiot, the way a less sharp, less humane film would. The Kid Detective is interestingly balanced, between comedy and a menace that creeps around Abe, threatening to swallow him up.
Brody plays that teeter well. He strikes just the right bleary tone as Abe shambles along, hitting notes of zany comedy (one extended sequence I won’t spoil here is particularly funny) and bitter ennui with equal lucidity. He and Morgan work in fine concert, keeping The Kid Detective moving on a fine and fascinating line. As the story takes a plunge into true darkness, we don’t feel snatched away into a different movie altogether. It’s just the sorry, organic end of things as they have been arranged by this detailed, particular film. There’s nothing cheaply twisty about The Kid Detective. It’s a lesson in control, and augurs exciting things for Morgan’s future career.
I’m being vague here because I don’t want to give away too much of what happens in The Kid Detective. Not because it’s so full of wild developments, but because it’s best to go in mostly uncertain of where the film is headed. Just know that what begins with a maybe too clever premise gradually settles into a film that’s alert and gripping. Sure, the movie has its clear inspirations—Rian Johnson’s Brick springs immediately to mind, as does the similarly themed Mystery Team—but Morgan and Brody contour their work into something original. It’s a thrill to watch a film that so cogently, shrewdly renders its ideas. It’s a case of high concept, adeptly cracked.
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