Uncertainty

Uncertainty

115 Minutes

Uncertainty is a film about making choices. More precisely, it’s one about not making them – the thorny business that can result when important decisions are pushed off the to the last minute. A troublesome pregnancy, a Fourth of July afternoon, a found cell phone; all are thematic fodder for a story that’s a little too impatient for its own good.

The first hint of that impatience comes at the three-minute mark, when the movie decides to show its dedication to this theme by splitting itself in half. This is in answer to a banal Independence Day quandary – a family barbecue or a friend’s party – which sends the two sections spinning off in wildly different directions. One half is an introspective family drama. The other is an intense chase thriller.

This first decision, which attains its importance as a way of not broaching the real issue (that pregnancy), is hashed out, somewhat didactically, by Kate (Lynn Collins) and Bobby (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) a young couple with a lot of time on their hands. They handle it poised atop the Brooklyn Bridge, which predictably functions as the midpoint between two wildly different worlds. Yet the disparity between those two worlds is never really examined to any extent. The two halves also never reach any semblance of cohesion, beyond the shared pregnancy storyline and some cute similarities that read as tacked-on textual afterthoughts (in Brooklyn, they take in a stray dog; in Manhattan, they watch Kurosawa’s Stray Dog). It leaves the dueling storylines feeling more like victims of an intro-to-creative-writing exercise than a real structure.

The abandonment of this early conceit leaves the film feeling half formed, and discards its most interesting approach, the up-down schematic of the two boroughs’ reversing cultural currency. Without any real tending, the twinned picture of the two falls back into easy cliché: Manhattan is the city, hectic and exciting, dangerous and corrupting and Brooklyn is the country, sleepy, ethnic and wholesome. It’s a convention that was old before Sunshine presented it back in 1927. More locally, it was the partial focus of 1948′s The Naked City which also set its climax suspended above the East River.

At first, the severing of the two halves works well, although both pieces still seem perfectly capable of standing on their own. The thriller section, at least at first, plays out with dazzling economy, invoking a kind of half-realistic world where the everyday and the life threatening collide. Fleeing pistol-toting gunmen with the ability to trace their cell phones, the characters find themselves tripped up by something as simple as a Metrocard swipe. The crosscutting between these scenes and the ones at the family barbecue, besides enforcing this theme, serves to effectively amp up the tension.

But by the second act Uncertainty has run out of steam. The thriller plot winds down into a strange period of slackness, where there is no action and the seeming climax, an extortion plot against the gangsters chasing them, has passed. This extended calm not only forces it into the same narrative space as the domestic half, it forces us to think about the implausibility of what we’ve just seen. All sorts of questions, easily abandoned when the pace was hurtling along, spring up, revealing the low-budget gears that power its needlessly complicated double plot.

There are still a lot of impressive things about Uncertainty. Shot in shaky hand-held, it thankfully avoids the cuteness that seems stock-in-trade for this type of indie picture. The couple, who we end up spending a lot time with, are closely and realistically drawn, thanks to mostly improvised dialogue from the two lead actors, both of whom do a better than good job.

But its representation of the city is not nearly as striking, strangely flat and restricted. For some reason, the characters keep returning to Chinatown, which feels like either laziness or a half-hearted allusion. Equally irritating is the character’s continuous selfish disregard for the safety of others, either bringing a stray dog to a family barbecue or attending a friend’s party while running from some very dangerous. These repeated events hint and the couple’s crazy extortion plan hint at a theme of self-obsession, but never bear any fruit on the subjects. It’s another loose string in a film that has so many, all crying out to be pulled.

by Jesse Cataldo