Meanwhile Blu-ray Review
What are we waiting for?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, April 29, 2013
Can
you name a label that has championed such disparate would be
auteurs as John H. Auer and Hal
Hartley? Well, it's Olive Films of course, the "little label that could" and in fact
does, bringing out an often mind
boggling array of product that few if any would have ever dreamed would see the high definition light of day. The past
few months have seen several releases of Auer films, a frankly second string director whom few remember and even
fewer would probably count among their most prized filmmakers. And then there's the case of Hal Hartley. Olive
released
Trust early in 2013 and now
adds to that nascent collection with two new releases,
Meanwhile and
The Unbelievable Truth (the film that first brought
Hartley something approaching mainstream acclaim). In a sign that this is not merely a coincidence based on these
films being licensable, Olive is "branding" the Hartley films with a little "hh" logo on the spines, something that may
indicate more Hartley films are in the offing.
Meanwhile is a meandering Hartley entry from 2011 that I'm
tempted to compare to the anime genre known as "slice of life". Nothing
seems to be happening, and yet quite
a bit is as lead character Joseph (D.J. Mendel) wends his way through a day of attempting to get what would appear to
be a simple task accomplished while interacting with a coterie of eccentric characters. The very title of
Meanwhile is indicative of what might be thought of as a sort of
Waiting for Godot-esque quality, where
Joseph is "biding his time" until some undefined event occurs, but of course one of the film's points is that there's
something happening every second even if we're not particularly paying attention to it.
There's a lyric by the late great Fred Ebb (
Chicago,
Cabaret) from his
musicalization of
Zorba the Greek
, entitled
Zorba, that states:
Life is what you do
While you're waiting to die.
Though that second line was later amended to
till the moment you die for the revival, the first version probably
better sums up a kind of underlying current that runs through
Meanwhile, especially since one of the few
recurring
elements other than lead character Joseph is a suicide jump off of the Brooklyn Bridge, a victim that Joseph may have
spoken briefly to in one of the film's many interchanges.
The film in fact is divided into actual numbered segments that detail the various people with whom Joseph comes into
contact. These include not just the perhaps distressed young woman staring over the edge of the Brooklyn Bridge, but
Hal Hartley's actual wife Miho Nikaido. In fact the "goal" that Joseph has for the bulk of the film is to try to get to
uptown Manhattan to retrieve the keys for Miho's apartment since she is out of town and offers her apartment for a
week to the evidently peripatetic Joseph. In one of the film's deadpan laugh lines, Joseph, on the Brooklyn Bridge and
borrowing the doleful woman's cell phone, calls Miho, waves manically and states he's standing on the bridge in clear
sight of her apartment. Miho calmly replies, "I can't see you, I'm in Shanghai". (This brings to mind a great laugh line
from Stephen Sondheim's
Company where gigolo hero has slept with a stewardess who gets up early the next
morning and starts dressing. "Where you going?" asks Bobby in song, obviously expecting a mundane answer like "to
the bathroom" or "to work". "Barcelona", the stewardess answers.)
Hartley's films are an acquired taste, but
Meanwhile has a number of good things going for it, not the least is its
brevity (the film clocks in at less than an hour). It's anecdotal and obviously episodic as evidenced by the numbers
defining the different segments, but there's also a surprising amount of cohesion courtesy of Joseph himself. This is a
weird and wacky character, certainly one of Hartley's most distinctive if not ultimately one of his best defined. We first
meet Joseph as he's fixing a leaky pipe, and we initially assume he might be a plumber. But it turns out Joseph is truly
a jack of all trades, one whose shiny metal briefcase holds all sorts of items that help get him through his day. Later in
the film Joseph fixes and author's aging typewriter and also helps a cleaning lady figure out a European model vacuum
cleaner that needs to be plugged into a transformer. Joseph is a drummer (one segment has him auditioning for a
band), as well as an author (Hal Hartley's supposed secretary is reading a huge tome called
Meanwhile written
by Joseph), but he also has dreams of importing European "green" windows for a huge new housing project.
Things meander fairly amiably along, with Joseph ultimately getting to the apartment, working out a problem that had
frozen his bank accounts and credit cards, and, ultimately, seemingly having succeeded in his window scheme. Things
suddenly lurch into what seems like melodrama, if only for a moment, very late in the film when Joseph thinks he's spied
the woman who may have jumped off the bridge and rushes out to talk to her. There's a hint of disaster, but as with
everything else in
Meanwhile, life goes on.
