Movies, Fast and Slow

Recently, I watched Drive My Car, and it's gotten me thinking about some of the differences between fast and slow movies. 

It's one of those artsy plotless modern films: A 40-minute prelude, followed by 2 hours and 20 minutes of theatre performance rehearsals, all framed in cosy cinematography. Three central characters. All of them suffering from dissociative disorders—a theatre director, a rising actor, and one who finds solace at the incinerator.

I remember my friend gawking at me when we met at the cinema and I told them it was three hours long: "wait seriously?" 

My thoughts exactly. Who even makes films this long? 

These slow movies give you time to reflect and room to contemplate the characters internal lives. They can afford longer shot lengths, with more time for the viewer to absorb emotive details or listen to lengthy monologues. And so, they fill up a gap that is often (but not always) left by fast movies: deep characterisation. 

I'll start by discussing how fast movies can succeed or fail at characterisation. 

Fast Movies

One movie which I found beyond insipid was Free Guy.

Take the point of peak tension, for example. Guy enters a state of existential dread. He questions whether anything is worth doing after learning that he lives in a simulated universe. He talks with his best friend, overcomes his personal roadblock, and then proceeds to smash shit up. 

With one problem: it was rather unbelievable.  The film doesn't show how Guy starts questioning reality. It wasn't dramatised by his failures in spite of his efforts, or despair over the people around him suffering. It just happened . And this tokenic depression was resolved promptly with a hand-wavey, universally-applicable platitude of "this moment is real! this matters!" from his supposed best friend.  

An unconvincing problem with an unconvincing solution to match. 

That being said, I don't generally dislike these big box office films! Free Guy is an exception in whittling down both the characterisation and plot too much. I think there is absolutely an art to reduce a story to its essence (2 hours is not a lot of time!), all while maintaining cinematic excitement. Kind of like a really perfect short story. 

A film which is fundamentally the same, structure-wise, is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. (If you haven't watched it yet, I recommend you stop and go watch it. It is phenomenal.) Like Free Guy, it shows the transformation of the hero from zero to Everything. But instead of showing nothing of the transformation, Spider-Verse shows everything. 

Moments where he had tried to put on his mask, but failed—over and over—until his moment arrives. We feel every emotion that Miles experiences building up to his transformation: frustration, anxiety, self-doubt. And when he finally sheds his limits, the payoff is one of the greatest I've ever experienced in cinema. 

If you aggressively strip every story element to the bare bones into only serving its plot function tokenically, that's really quite profoundly offensive to me. Constantly ushered along, every "oh this idea seems interesting!" wiped away by the next explosion. Nauseating. But Spider-Verse wasn't like this.

Why? Because the filmmakers had integrity and decided to show us the process! Fast movies don't have to be emotionally and narratively bankrupt. 

Back to Drive My Car 

Most of the movie, in my opinion, is in the micro-expressions of the characters. The three central characters are emotionally neutral stone-faces. But that makes it all the more interesting when their subtle facial expressions, inflections in their voice, little flinches, reveal underlying psychological afflictions. They're not easily readable characters, with no outwardly direct personality traits nor grandiose goals or ambitions. 

These aspects of personality can only be teased out through prolonged exposure—time spent intimately studying their reactions to questions like "why are you doing this?", or a compliment like "I'm glad you're here". Only from that can we get an idea of who they are. 

Not to say that I understood the characters in the film though. I'm not close enough to them (psychologically speaking) for them to 'click'. But I do have a strong outline. A puzzle half-pieced-together.  

Fast movies precludes these kinds of understandings. The best they can do is present you two to three puzzle pieces, at best (and no puzzle if it's bad). And don't get me wrong, this can be outstanding if you show the particulars in a compelling way. 

Spider-Verse shows deep flavour in expressions of expectations, disappointment, respect from really subtle gestures, which I only managed to fully appreciate on my third and fourth re-watches. Characterisation is a background note, but is essential to a rich plot. In slow movies, characterisation replaces plot-action as a top note. 

If you have limited screen-time to show the day-in and day-outs of character's lives, you'll have to rely on the audience's existing hooks on Personhood to build a story. You're restricted to a few archetypes. If you have endless screen-time (in slow movies), you can show a person with highly specific experiences. The tradeoff is, of course, with each new weird puzzle piece, the more specific the audience member needs to be. To have had certain experiences to understand what there is to notice in a scene. 

I haven't seriously fallen in love with any slow movie before. They're... well, too slow! I get sleepy, I get bored. I wonder "what the hell this is about". But that's what's great about slow movies. Even if I don't fall in love, I love seeing peoples lives. It's intimate. 

Part of me still feels that Drive My Car was one of those masturbatory Art Films that incoherently gestured at greater meanings that do not exist. A harmonic progression endlessly far from resolution. 

But hey, I like it! 

The Verdict, Fast or Slow? 

It's a tie. As I say with food, "I like all food, as long as it's good!"

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very important caveat: many movies probably fall in-between fast and slow, fall somewhere in-between on the characterisation–plot tradeoff. and i haven't really watched all that many movies (the ones i've watched i've forgotten, unless they were exceptionally bad or good) so...

also this isn't really about drive my car. i kinda just wanted to dunk on free guy and praise spiderman

also if anyone reading this has watched drive my car, can someone tell me what was up with the ending? it seemed like a non-sequitur panic scene to plug their hyundai sponsorship. production affected by the 'rona?. 

feb 2022