Comedy and Tragedy at Tribeca

I managed to inadvertently line up a supremely bizarre double bill last night, and have not yet fully recovered. First up was the premiere of Jeff Garlin's I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, which, grammatical infractions aside, looked promising. The Curb Your Enthusiasm star wrote, directed, and stars in the movie--his first--and told me that he wrote every part, down to the cameos, with his co-stars, including Bonnie Hunt, Sarah Silverman, and Amy Sedaris, in mind. Though he has directed a couple episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, this was his first time helming a feature, a goal he's had since studying film in college, where he says he became a big fan of Preston Sturges and Frank Capra films.

The movie, which Garlin says is "loosely autobiographical" shows signs of that film school heritage in that...it's loosely autobiographical, like most student films. Garlin plays James, a schlubby out-of-work Chicago actor, 39-years-old, lives with mom, and hasn't, uh, "eaten cheese" in five years. He can also demolish an entire aisle's worth of snack cakes when he's lonely, and he's lonely a lot, so his local enabling variety store clerk can guage his mood by the size of the pile on the counter. James meets a nice teacher (Hunt) with matching loneliness and a pervy, weird girl (Silverman) and everything more or less works out in the end. Silverman hadn't seen the movie yet, but she must have been pleased with the work of what had to have been a body double bending over in pink underpants during the "here's Sarah Silverman bending over in pink underpants" scene. Butt shots aside, she basically plays a version of the angel-eyed potty-mouth she has perfected in her stand-up. Before the film Silverman talked about her new show for Comedy Central, "The Sarah Silverman Show" ("Shows with funny names are never funny") which is in the works, and described her character in the film as a "free-spirit", which didn't seem like much of a stretch, as she seemed to be feeling pretty groovy, manhandling (clearly a new term is needed) every reporter in sight. Her hands are soft.

Garlin is working within the mode of the meandering, observational comedy that defines his dayjob; though he wrote a complete script, he said improvisation was welcomed and there's a fairly loose, jazzy feel to the film. I'm not sure that there's enough there to hold a whole movie together--there are too many droopy pockets in between the occasional big laugh--but Garlin is a surprisingly likable presence; I wanted to see something nice happen to him. It was important to him to premiere the film at Tribeca, and he turned down several other festivals to do it: "It was my first choice, the festival is prestigious, and New York is where I want to be."

So the film let out (slowly (it was packed)) and I decided to wander down to the Battery Park cinema and check out the world premiere of The Bridge, Eric Steel's documentary about suicide and San Francisco's Golden Gate bridge. A lot of morbid chatter in the line almost had me bolting for a taxi, but I thought I should see the film and decide for myself whether recording the suicides of two dozen people on film can be justified in any imaginable way. Inspired by Tad Friend's 2003 New Yorker article on the subject, Steel decided to film the Golden Gate bridge for every day of 2004. When the inevitable suicides were caught on tape, he closed in on the jumper, tracking down their friends and family, to tell their stories in reverse. I say inevitable because there are no protective barriers on the bridge, and over the years it has become a notorious destination for the distraught. Protests and petitions have been put together to try and build a barrier, so far with no success.

San Francisco officials say that Steel misled them about his intentions in setting up cameras on the bridge, and watching people who are being filmed not by a stationary camera but by a person, zooming in and panning along, it's hard not to feel like something highly suspect is happening. Steel also recorded cases of near-suicides, where jumpers were talked back from ledge, or in one case physically pulled in. One of the more startling cases is that of a young woman--known to bridge police--who is filmed gracefully slipping over the railing onto the ledge. A young man who had been taking photos near her at the railing watches the whole thing with dispassionate curiosity; making no effort to interact with the woman, he begins snapping pictures of her instead. He later admitted that he was "just waiting for her to jump", thinking of her purely as a camera subject. At length his aesthetic instincts slipped and he realized she was seconds away from her death. He put down the camera and reached over the railing, pulling her back onto the bridge as she struggled and sitting on her until police came.

It's difficult to give more than my initial impressions of this film, as they are still solidifying into something coherent in my mind. I was angry in places, I was heartbroken, I was surprised and disheartened by many of the interview subjects describing the people they had lost. Steel must have interviewed people within months of the suicide, and it shows: the anger is fresh, the reversion to petty details about the life of their friend or family member is quick. It almost seems unfair for us to be hearing them in this state, still struggling through their grief. I don't know. With the exception of the first, shocking leap from the bridge, to me the footage of the jumps was less upsetting than that of the minutes leading up to the leap: Steel captures the subjects pacing, praying, leaning, deciding. Those images I will never forget. Steel's technique in presenting these people to us as something other than doomed abstractions works well most of the time, although many of the subjects overlap, and it becomes difficult not to see it as one big, miserable jump. He has a tough task in not romanticizing shots of the bridge, and there were moments when the swooping, sweeping shots of the bridge's beauty, the glittery water below turned my stomach. I sat there wondering, what are you doing? What is all this, anyway?

An interview with a young man who survived his jump provides some clarity about the simple final moment of decision: as he stood at the railing sobbing, no one stopped to ask him what was wrong, indeed, the one woman who did, a German tourist, simply asked him to take her picture. "That's it, fuck it, nobody cares, I'm doing it." Of course the moment his hands left the ledge he thought "What have I done?"

Steel spends a lot of time irising in on random people on the bridge, some of whom pause at the railing, priming us, each time, for trauma. Are they going to do it? Who is that? Are they just hanging out? A friend enters the frame to greet a figure we are tracking and the whole theater sighs with relief. They all look the same up there: some keep moving, some swing a leg over the railing. Isn't that just the way it is?

If there is a purpose to a film like this it is probably to draw attention to the debate over a barrier for the bridge. A popular suicide spot in Toronto (number two to the Golden Gate in numbers) formerly known as the Bloor Viaduct was given a suicide barrier and a new name (Prince Edward Viaduct) in 2003, and while you could argue that if people are gonna do it they're gonna do it, that's not a reason to give them the perfect opportunity. In fact that's how the survivor of his jump described it: "perfect." Had it not been for the easy access, he says, he wouldn't have considered it. All of the subjects are revealed, from the interviews given by their loved ones, to share a profound struggle with depression or long histories with mental illness, and if anything the film sheds some light on a mind, and a person, at risk. Did we need to see them splashing to their deaths for that? Their broken bodies being fished from the sea? Could they have imagined that their final moments were being caught on film for an overstuffed theater full of people drinking pop and eating popcorn?

So, it was a bigger night than I bargained for. I laughed, I cried, I didn't sleep at all.