Editor’s note: Ibad Shah is one of four recipients of the
Sundance Institute’s Roger Ebert Fellowship
for Film Criticism for 2014. The scholarship meant he participated in the
Indiewire | Sundance Institute Fellowship for Film Criticism, a workshop at the
Sundance Film Festival for aspiring film critics started by Eric Kohn, the
chief film critic and senior editor of Indiewire.
Immediate response
to a festival like Sundance is often for its most high profile, audience-friendly,
breakthrough hits. Oft-spoken about films include the award-winning competition
titles “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” and “James White.” The risk of showing
this many high-quality films over the course of a week is that certain types of
stories rise to the maximum buzz available, while many other gems remain to be
discovered for remaining interested buyers.
Matt
Sobel’s debut “Take Me to the River” is one such find, a film with a passionate
understatement that might have made it naturally stand out less than some of
the higher-profile festival favorites but remains a personal highlight in my
own festival-going experience, only growing in estimation more impressively the
more I reflect on it. The central emotional elements of the film feel organic
and realistic, but they soon drive the story into
darker, unsettling territory. It’s as if you’re witnessing a quiet nightmare
that never quite makes you scream.
The film takes place
on a Nebraskan farm on the occasion of an annual family reunion. 17-year-old
Ryder (Logan Miller) is brought there from the West coast by his liberal
parents—his Jewish father (Richard Schiff) and his native Nebraskan mother
(Robin Weigert). They refuse to allow him to disclose his homosexuality to his
more conservative extended family, from whom he’s largely distanced aside from
the young girls who appreciate his artistry. Ultimately, the family comes to
suspect something much more perverse of Ryder. The film from there descends
into a disturbing unraveling of the dark histories at the center of his large
family. Ryder’s increasing
discomfort with his surrounding circumstances makes for a weighing viewing
experience, tapping into the disturbing and poisonous roots of some close
families.
I
had the fortunate opportunity to speak with Sobel during the festival, and he
talked a little about how that arc was achieved. “The
flow of the story was something that I had scripted to gently lean into almost
a type of surreality. But to do so subtly and gently so that there would be no
point at which the audience would feel, ‘Oh my God, like, I just, did this just
become another movie?’”
Logan Miller is
particularly strong as the center of the film, whose alienated point of view we
penetrate as he floats
aimlessly to a place that was once so familiar to him yet is now distant as he
comes of age. Sobel was interested in Miller projecting this awkwardness as much
as possible. “The first time we met each other at a general
meeting, we got quite personal real fast. Like, I wanted to see sort of how he
would deal and how to portray feeling as uncomfortable as this kid is for the
entire length of the film. Usually like some characters get a break, but he
never really does. I think we did an improv where he was telling his mother
about the thing he was most ashamed about, and I told him the thing I was most
ashamed about in my life. And I told him, like, ‘you can choose not to tell me
what the thing is — you know, just imagine like your equivalent of what I
just told you. And now let’s drop into the improv.’ And yeah, we’ve spoken
about it since and he told me that it made him quite uncomfortable from the
get-go, which for me was like an A+ sign. He passed with flying colors.”
The improvisation on
set was Sobel’s way of getting the actors into the characters, especially for
the younger actors who play into some of the more insidious strands of the
story. “I mean, we definitely gave a toned down description of some of the
darker elements of the story to the child actress. We did not feel like it was
necessary for them to know everything about the story. But everything should be
a game when directing a child, I think. So whether that’s like, um, literally
like a game of like tag or something within a scene or something more subtle
like whispering into Molly’s ear before a scene a secret, and then telling her
like ‘whatever you do make sure Ryder doesn’t find out your secret during this
scene.’ And then telling Ryder like ‘whatever you do, just make her figure out
her secret,’ and then seeing how that would play out. Because then something
active and real is happening that is not pre-planned. And I think when you try
to lock into a rehearsed plan with a child actor it becomes a problem… we would
start like an improv and I would say, like, ‘as soon as I hand you this prop,
then we’re gonna start the scene.’ You know? So we had the cameras rolling and
we would start this kind of, like, improv between Ryder and Molly. Maybe get an
energy going? And then I would just sort of say ‘action’ and now they would
drop into the dialogue.”
I
was still interested in how much the film’s initial realism provides insight into
Sobel’s own adolescence. And while he’s
written a story that is removed from his own past, he says he remained true to
the spirit of the Nebraskan setting. “The dialects and the patterns of
speech in the film are lifted from conversations I’ve had with my family. So I
had to get the voice particularly of my mom out of my head when casting, and
with directing, because you have to like see what’s actually in front of you
rather than try to make what’s actually in front of you into something else….all
of the dramatic elements of this story are entirely fictional, but the place is
real. That is my family’s farmhouse in the film. That’s the house my mom grew
up in. And that reunion really happens every year there. And even some of the
costumes are actually my family’s clothes.“
“I do think that actually
like I learned a lot about my relationship with my mother while writing this
and working on it with Robin [Weigert]. I’m an only child, and, mothers and
other only sons have a special relationship I think. And there’s a lot of,
like, loving and almost too like a cloying degree that goes on like a little
bit later in adolescence than it might, like, if you were not an only child?
And, yeah it’s just sort of this interesting dynamic between boy and his mom
where it’s kind of true to my mom and me. Where, like, both of us know that
this tickling and nicknaming is gonna have to end at some point but neither one
wants to be the person to say it’s gonna be today. They just sort of want it to
be kind of like understood that we’re never gonna do that again. We’ve now
crossed into the phase of adulthood.”
That mother and son
dynamic and sense of mutual commitment is at the soul of the film, and Sobel’s
own parents were at the festival serving as associate producers on the film. “They
played a huge role in this movie in making it, yeah. They were the locations
department; they were script advisors; they were emotional support throughout
the entire thing.”
His extended family
also offered support, emotionally and otherwise, and he is eager for them to
see it. “I am very interested to see their reaction…honestly they’ve been
more interested to see, like, places that they know and people that they know
in film. And so I’m not really sure what the conversation will be like after
it, but they were completely supportive of the project when we were doing it.
They gave wildly of their time and resources to help us and I am very thankful.”
The arrival of his
film at Sundance is an emotional homecoming for Sobel, who has been attending
the festival for years. “This is literally like a dream come true for me.
I started coming when I was 13, and the first movie I ever saw was in the
Library Theater. And so to be able to come back, now 14 years later and
premiere there was the best time of my life.”
Now that he has gotten his debut out there to decent acclaim, he can shift his
focus in a drastically different direction. “Yeah. I’ve been working on a
science-fiction film for the last couple years set in China about these
orphaned sisters who are recruited by a Chinese sports camp to be trained as
Olympic synchronized high-divers…I wanna do something, after you finish a
project you want to do something completely different? I spent something like
almost 7 years thinking about this, and the next one’s gonna be completely
different. People are gonna say exactly what they mean, like this whole tactic
of emotions are gonna be big and bold and it’s gonna be a love story, and yeah
it’s gonna be totally different. Completely different!”
