When Chuck Klosterman turned his prodigious abilities as a popular culture essayist into his first all-fiction mission, the 2008 novel “Downtown Owl,” followers of the author have been handled to some traditional Klosterman obsessions (North Dakota, sports activities, the best way leisure shapes us as people) in a distinctly new form. The uneven nature of Klosterman’s novel, which focuses on three very completely different residents of tiny, fictional Owl, North Dakota, as they navigate small-town life within the lead-up to an enormous blizzard, wasn’t as compelling or entertaining as Klosterman’s different books however there was a attraction to its circulation and feeling. Briefly: It wasn’t a nice Klosterman effort, but it surely certainly was an attention-grabbing one.
Greater than a decade after its publication, the long-gestating film adaptation of Klosterman’s novel occupies comparable territory: not nice, however undoubtedly attention-grabbing. And, similar to the publication of the novel marked a brand new level in Klosterman’s profession, so too does “Downtown Owl” the movie sign a brand new step within the skilled pursuits of co-directors (and longtime companions) Hamish Linklater and Lily Rabe, who each make their directorial debut with this curious dramedy.
Rabe additionally stars within the movie (Linklater adapts the script; they each produced), which partially explains why the duo opted to show Klosterman’s three-hander right into a extra singularly targeted function, orienting the vast majority of the story round Rabe’s new-in-town Julia within the months main as much as the January blizzard.
It’s a tough ask: As thrilling as Rabe’s efficiency ultimately turns into, the selection to focus totally on Julia’s expertise and perspective removes a lot of our funding in Horace (Ed Harris) and Mitch (August Blanco Rosenstein), who got equal weight in Klosterman’s novel. Nonetheless, Rabe’s work right here, as a messy, “unlikeable,” and deeply flawed character, is the very best a part of the movie, an anti-hero price, nicely, if not cheering for, a minimum of watching with full focus.
Even these unfamiliar with the movie’s supply materials will know the way it ends, as Linklater and Rabe open the movie with a short have a look at the January 1984 blizzard that swoops by Owl, without end impacting the three key characters. Quickly, we’re flashing again to September when Julia rolled into Owl, an outsider about to be steeped on this specific model of small-town life. She’s taken a instructing job on the native highschool to get her away from her unseen husband, first chalking up the short-term project to work pressures, later making it plain that their relationship is virtually lifeless, and when she’s not ingesting herself foolish at one of many city’s native bars, she’s exhibiting up hungover and out of it in her historical past lessons.
Linklater and Rabe lean on some messy affectations to get their story rolling, together with every part from the lovable (an pointless animated sequence that introduces the city) to the ridiculous (Rabe gliding alongside the highschool hallway in a weird double dolly shot; fixed use of a fisheye lens in huge photographs) to the truly fairly good (introductions to Julia’s college students, together with Mitch, that reveal some critical truths in a winking trend). Largely, it simply takes some time to settle into itself, to get right into a compelling and sensical groove.
Then once more, that’s additionally Julia’s expertise as she makes an attempt to get hip to Owl life in matches and begins. She’s deluged with new associates and foes, like Vanessa Hudgens as fellow trainer Naomi (an virtually unbearably shrill and one-note position that the actress sometimes finds actual sparks in), Finn Wittrock as a smooth-talking coach with a secret, Harris because the welcoming older gent Horace, and Henry Golding as former Owl soccer star Vance Druid. As Julia will get to know the form of Owl, so too can we — and it’s not all the time pleasing, as Linklater and Rabe peel off the layers of this specific city with each relish and discomfort. If that sounds awkward, it’s.
Julia stays the cracked lens by which we view all of this, an unreliable narrator with a skewed sense of, nicely, nearly every part. The type Horace supplies a respite for the addled Julia, heaping on her each home-cooked meals and home-baked gossip, all the higher to obscure what’s actually taking place along with his personal life. Julia’s sense of propriety is so warped that she will’t acknowledge how nefarious Coach Laidlaw (Wittrock) actually is, nor how his varied misdeeds have impacted a detailed group of delicate college students (together with Rosenstein, Jack Dylan Grazer, and Arianna Jaffier). And she or he certain as hell can’t come to grips with the blooming obsession she feels for Vance, which reduces her to drunk hysterics on the common. (Late within the movie, as Julia sobs that she appears like she’s not achieved together with her 20s — regardless of pushing 40 — it appears like one in all many keys to the story which can be dangled after which snatched away.)
Briefly (and in very reductive phrases), nobody in Owl is nicely, and the looming blizzard is barely the following catastrophe to befall them. How Linklater and Rabe deal with that darkish fact will be puzzling, leaning on some characters and conditions whereas leaving others to wither, by no means fairly acknowledging the darkness that plagues this place, and in the end shifting towards a completely unearned conclusion. Klosterman’s imaginative and prescient of this tiny, insulated world was by no means this neat and tidy, a lesson that has not translated to its cinematic companion. It’s a slice of life, certainly, however a meager one at that.
Grade: C+
“Downtown Owl” premiered on the 2023 Tribeca Movie Competition. Sony will launch it at a later date.
