(IMAGE: Get Out Inc.)
Get Out Inc. 2022. Drama. 80 minutes.
RATING: 2 out of 4
After watching Three Eras, perhaps the most misguided Buster Keaton tribute attempt that will ever be made, I did not expect to see hide nor hair of its creators, the Meyers brothers, again. Nor could I have expected I’d find them likable. But after watching their documentary Just an Illusion, which IMDB says came out a year before Three Eras, I think I understand them a bit better. I’m not yet ready to say they’re good filmmakers – that’s a ways away, yet. But the mere fact that it seems eventually possible is a step forward. Because they do seem to understand the principles of storytelling better than they’ve managed to convey in a movie so far.
Just an Illusion chronicles an 11-year journey by boat of the Meyers family, which appears to be mostly two sons and a father, but turns out to be much more when the closing credits finally reveal a mom and more siblings who mostly stayed off-camera. They clearly filmed a whole lot, and have a treasure trove of footage. At times, the water and surrounding scenery looks beautiful. More often, the movie de-romanticizes the idea of life on a boat by showing all the nitty-gritty repairs their craft constantly needs, along with backed-up toilets, bloody fish jumping aboard and hurting themselves and passengers, and dark nights with just the GPS for guidance.
There’s plenty here for a good story. If only the Meyers brothers – and mostly Jay, who directs – had a clue how to structure it. The footage constantly leaps backward and forward in time, with the given year always helpfully plastered across the screen in what looks like default editing program font. The movie relies a lot on generic text pointing things out on screen, to the point where one wants to yell “Show, don’t tell!” at them. As my high school art teacher once pointed out to me, if you have to label everything in your picture, it must not be visually clear what it is.
Here’s the maddening thing: when the movie actually stops and just focuses on two of the brothers individually sitting at home, telling straightforward stories about a time they tried to help an incompetent friend on a sailing trip and everything went wrong…it’s super-compelling. [Publicists, do NOT use that quote out of context.] Both of them prove natural raconteurs, despite some silly insert shots for variety of chips and salsa, or the reorganizing of a record collecton. It’s these moments that make even a callous critic understand the impulse the brothers feel to convey a narrative onscreen. But understanding doesn’t necessarily equate to defending.
Because another irritating amateur mistake that Jay makes, as so many other ultra-low budget films do, is to lay music over scenes that don’t need it. And not just any music, but music that sounds like the director’s friend’s band who owes him a favor. Now, before Christian Carpenter Fields gets too upset with that assessment, I must qualify that this is one of those Bill Maher “I don’t know this for a fact…” moments (He also did music for Three Eras, though). And his music probably sounds a lot better when his lyrics aren’t actively competing with the onscreen talking heads. In scenes where the music is the only sound, it’s possible production sound was unusable, in which case a creative decision to use ambient audio from other parts of the footage might have benefitted the feature.
A decision that does work is to occasionally super-impose cartoonish drawings over the live-action footage for comedic effect. If all the onscreen text were similarly hand-drawn, it would feel much more lovingly idiosyncratic.
The movie’s title comes from the boat being called The Illusion, which seems an interestingly appropriate name, as though all involved knew the fantasy of a life on the water would give way to harsh practicality almost immediately. And with their cameras seemingly running almost constantly, there’s a refreshing lack of preening and vanity by everyone involved. If only a really good editor and sound designer could get their hands on all this footage, there might be something truly worth watching if handled correctly.
That hasn’t happened yet. And while I’d like to grade the movie as an “incomplete” until it does, this is the version that’s being released. It needs work.
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