Tape (2001)

Premise: When Vince (Ethan Hawke) travels to Lansing to attend a film festival where his high school best friend Jon’s (Robert Sean Leonard) latest film is shown, he decides to look up Amy (Uma Thurman), his high school sweetheart whom John slept with after they broke up.

I can definitely say that this is one of the best independent films I have seen in a while.

Unfortunately, some independent films have such a phoney air about them. It’s like they are made by those film students that annoy me so much. “We’re the genius children of the counter culture,” they all seem to say. The trouble with that statement is that they don’t realize that the counter-culture is the culture now.

But enough about them.

If there is one thing I like about Richard Linklater’s direction, it’s his focus on all the minutiae of conversation: every gesticulation, every change in tone, every gesture. Words are powerful, and they honestly mean so much. Linklater just gets that.

Stephen Balber’s screenplay is something else. It revolves are three very different perspectives of a seemingly (or, rather, ideally) in-interpretable event. I wouldn’t call it subtle, but it deals with a serious issue in a way that I have never seen it dealt with before. It’s quite alarming, actually.

And how awesome is it that Leonard still does movies? I love those movies, those leading roles that made him famous (e.g. Dead Poet’s Society). I tell you truly, he’s still got it. All that anger, angst, talent, passion that made him so impossible to ignore is still there.

There is one teeny little problem: I feel unresolved. I am still wondering what happened that night. I seems like they all had one score or agenda that they wanted to play out when they met up again in that motel room, and I think they all did, to a certain extent. I just don’t feel like they came to a consensus about any of it.

I suppose they don’t have to, and I really wish they would.