BRIGSBY BEAR: Does a Brigsby Shit in the Woods?

Director: Dave McCary
Writers: Kevin Costello, Kyle Mooney
Cast: Kyle Mooney, Mark Hamill, Jane Adams, Greg Kinnear, Matt Walsh, Michaela Watkins, Ryan Simpkins, Alexa Demie, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Claire Danes
Runtime: 97 mins.
2017

For a while, my favorite youtube videos were Kyle Mooney's series of incomprehensible interviews. Kyle would show up at public events with a cameraman and a microphone, and he would speak nonsense at people until they responded in some way. He was the master of the empty signifier, rolling out fragmented sentiments in such a way that they gave the impression of meaning while being entirely inscrutable. It was a deft manipulation of the cultural logic surrounding interviews, and the real fun of it was seeing how the passersby would choose to engage.

Kyle has since graduated to SNL--sort of. As I understand it he mostly does the digital content. In the meanwhile, he's used his newfound semifame to bankroll a passion project called Brigsby Bear, a uniquely white male film about living in a nostalgic fantasy land. You see, James (Kyle Mooney) was abducted as a child by Ted (Mark Hamill) and April Mitchum (Jane Adams). James grew up in a bunker, convinced that the outside world was an apocalyptic desert. His only access to culture was Brigsby Bear, a very 90's television show about a magical bear out to save the universe. When the police raid the bunker and he discovers that everything he believed was a lie--including Brigsby Bear, which was secretly crafted by his captor Ted--he must figure out how to adjust to living with his birth parents. Ultimately, he works through his latent trauma by writing and filming the finale to Brigsby Bear with the help of his sister (Ryan Simpkins) and some new friends.

I was an easy mark for this film. I wanted to love it, expected to love it, but I couldn't. The first sign of trouble was the inciting incident. Up until the raid, Brigsby Bear casts a casually menacing vibe over the innocence of Mooney's experience. Brandon Tonner-Connolly's production design, both within the Brigsby Bear show and inside the bunker, is stellar. All of this evaporates the moment James is thrust into our world. The visuals, the tone, and the dialogue all become pedestrian.


This tactic is meant to highlight James's jarring shift in reality. It just ends up being deflating, as we too are removed from a fantasy-tinged postapocalypse into a fairly lackadaisical fish out of water coming-of-age story. From hereon out the film becomes an exercise in putting Mooney's character in uncomfortable situations, or putting him in normal situations that he makes uncomfortable by spouting some awkward nonsense that reflects his warped understanding of the world.

Unlike the better fish out of water stories, there's no clear internal consistency to what James does and doesn't understand. His position feels more like an excuse to trot out bizarre nonsequiturs, some alluding to James's status as a trauma victim. Brigsby Bear is eager to acknowledge James as a survivor of trauma, and it makes a few vague gestures as to how that informs his behavior, but it is terrified of fully exploring the conceit. This becomes clear when the whole world apparently decides that the best way to help James deal with his trauma is to humor his Brigsby Bear delusion, even going so far as to become caught up in the mythology themselves. At no point is it clear why anyone develops genuine affection for the show. After all, it seems to undercut the central conceit--that nostalgia is a delusional, isolationist state of mind.

At least that's what I wanted the central conceit to be, and I would even go so far as to say the film wanted that as well. But its creative team apparently didn't, as James is only rewarded again and again for his bizarre egotistical obsessions. Everybody caters to his whims, even his birth parents who he has consistently mistreated, even the police officer (Greg Kinnear) who has to deal with James when he commits crimes. In fact, this officer is so smitten with James and his vision that he steals crime evidence for him (the Brigsby suit) just so he can have an acting role in James's movie. And he gets caught by his partner. And he faces zero repercussions for this.

This even extends to Mark Hamill's abductor character, who gets plopped back into the movie at the end to help James write the Brigsby Bear finale from prison. It could have been a bold move to cast Hamill as the kindly father figure who turns out to be a manipulative abuser, but in this sequence the film backpedals hard. Instead of condemning Hamill, or at least complicating him, he merely throws his wife under the bus. He blames her for abducting James in the first place--she was baby hungry--and he was simply making the best of a bad situation. Of course we never see her again to get her side of the story. That makes this not only sexist, but a terrible missed opportunity for something more interesting.

I would qualify the entire film as a series of missed opportunities. Brigsby Bear culminates in a sold out screening for James's movie. Unsurprisingly, everybody loves it. The whole audience gives James a standing ovation despite having just watched an hour and a half of derivative fantasy nonsense from a man child with zero filmmaking experience.

If I sound salty it's because I was expecting Brigsby Bear to be a neat meta-examination of the regressive pop culture obsessiveness that is especially pronounced in awkward white men. I expected bold stylistic choices, a blending of fantasy worlds and reality. This does happen a few times, but it feels tacked on. It's such a shame because everything about the design of Brigsby's universe is captivating. The show is so aggressively campy that, like all very bad visual media, it becomes otherworldly in its own way.

But instead of the meta-commentary I was expecting, we get a movie in which the entire world is apparently willing to cater to the protagonist's whims. Every character ultimately comes around to affirm James's actions, even though he is breaking the law, even though he is callously hurting his loved ones, even though he is trying to have sex with a high schooler. There's even a sequence when the Brigsby Bear tapes go viral, and rather than making a commentary on what it means for such an artifact to go viral (and the nasty ironic gawking that that usually entails), the film just shows a bunch of people kind of appreciating the show. This is a surprising misrepresentation of youtube culture coming from an artist who got his start there.

So James goes from a microcosmic world that is catered entirely to his delusions to a macrocosmic world that is still catered entirely to his delusions. There is no arc involved, and very little growth. So it seems that Brigsby Bear is indeed a metacommentary, but one about what it's like to indulge in a passion project surrounded by yes men. This is a movie about how everyone ought to come around to appreciate things the way Kyle Mooney does, and the climactic scene in the movie theater practically begs us to stand up and applaud as well. Brigsby Bear is a movie that profoundly misunderstands itself.

2 / 5  BLOBS