It Is a World of Hateful Philistines, Mr. Jacobs

I don’t even want to think about what kind of problems “(Untitled)” is going to cause for film archivists, search engines, video store employees, librarians, etc. Believe me; I’ve been there. Titles like this would make my blood boil. But if the title weren’t such an obnoxious pain in the ass, it wouldn’t have been so apt.

It’s not that the movie itself was obnoxious. The movie, actually, is really good. It’s the cast of characters that’s exceptionally grating. In fact, the first thing I scribbled on my little piece of paper in the darkness of the movie theater was, “dickhead artists.”

We open with a painting by one Josh Jacobs. A crowd is gathered around it. It’s an abstract—a few dots and some colors fading into one another. Suddenly, we hear a ding, and the crowd disperses. We realize then that they weren’t looking at the painting. They were waiting for the elevator alongside which the painting had been hung. They get on, which leaves Adrian Jacobs (Adam Goldberg), Josh’s brother, staring at it by himself.

Josh is doing fairly well with his painting. They’re being sold en masse to hotels, banks, and corporations as lobby décor. Adrian, a sound artist, is not doing so well. Josh lectures him with a comical pretension, a smarmy concern for his brother’s well being. He tells Adrian that if he would just sacrifice a little bit of his vanity to get a larger audience, he could do well. Like him. Adrian, however, has no concern for others’ thoughts on his art. What matters is what people will say after he’s dead. His philosophies make themselves very evident later, when he performs his concert of atonal music, scaring off even his own parents.

One person he doesn’t scare off Is Josh’s date for the night, the pale, thin, bespectacled Madeline (Marley Shelton), who has a pension for clothing that is loud in the literal sense (squeaky leather, beaded skirts, a jacket that crinkles like a Frito bag). She’s intrigued by the quiet, brooding Adrian and asks him to perform at her Chelsea gallery (an honor Josh has never received). The event—Adrian’s documents looking more like architectural diagrams than sheet music—doesn’t go well, but afterward, Madeline asks him to her loft for a few drinks—and thus proceeds one of the funnier sex scenes I’ve seen. Mind you: Madeline wears extremely complex clothing.

So that’s the set-up. The rest of the movie spends its time trying to sort out the endless pushing and pulling between the belligerent forces of artistic ambition, money, and integrity. Everyone shows his ugly side. Adrian becomes hypocritical, Madeline becomes greedy, Josh becomes desperate, and then they all take turns backhanding each other like it’s some absurdist episode of Gossip Girl.

It would’ve been easy to make this film a straight modern-art-is-bullshit comedy. The elements are there. The funniest characters are Madeline’s other artists. Ray Barko does unorthodox taxidermy. His work includes: an angry chimp sucking on the hose of a vacuum cleaner, a distraught mini goat on a tricycle, a Ramboesque bobcat armed with a stapler gun, and three chickens which appear to have been thrown headfirst through a dartboard. Monroe, a nervous, soft-spoken man prone to weeping, does….well, not much. He’s a minimalist. One of his pieces is called “Post-It Stuck to Wall (2007)” and another is “A Light Bulb Turning On and Off (2008).” Yes. That’s what they are. Grant, the assistant curator, points out their “superficial banality—that’s both sexual and imposing” and you want to roundhouse kick him, but you’re laughing too hard.

So there’s that. There’s definitely a few jabs at (air quotes) high art and those involved in it. However, “(Untitled)” manages to distance itself from pure parody with an underlying respect of its subject matter. A few of these crazies pushing the boundaries might just have something. There’s just a lot lost in hypocrisy and inevitable subjectivity. And in fear.

Fear governs the life of one of the movie’s most interesting characters, Porter Canby—a young, naïve, and very wealthy man, deathly afraid of being bland. His philosophy is that if he doesn’t understand something, it must be worthwhile. And thus he’s taken advantage of—bullied, duped, and robbed—again and again, until his home is filled willy-nilly with all the bizarre, creepy shit he’s been told to buy. You can’t help but feel sorry for him, watching him struggle to fit into a world he’d be better off without.

But the movie in no way implies that the world would be better off without “that world.” As much of an asshole and a hypocrite as Adrian is, you want him to succeed—he cares so deeply about his work. There’s something to be said for that, something magnetic about it. Progress must be made somehow, and it’s usually a rough ride. Some suffer. Some sell out. Some even die. But not us. We can laugh at these idiots from our comfy theater seats. And kind of wish we were one of them.