[Untitled]

[Untitled]

96 Minutes

What is it that prohibits directors from making truly great films about the art and avant garde worlds? Pollock was a pretentious, bloated mess; Basquiat was a sometimes brilliant, sometimes thoroughly aggravating examination of one of the past century’s most important, misunderstood figures; and nearly everything concerning Warhol has suffered from profound identity crises, which in a way has been somewhat fitting of its subject. Now there’s [Untitled], which succeeds admirably at encapsulating the insufferable tone of the art world but doesn’t give an audience much to care about otherwise in its inability to follow through on the course it sets out to in its beginning.

Boiling down to a tale of twin sibling rivalries, one between the brothers Jacobs and the other between commercial and critical success in the world of art, [Untitled] is conflict incarnate. Adrian Jacobs (Adam Goldberg) is an immensely unsuccessful avant garde composer specializing in the type of “real world” percussion and tones Harry Partch arguably pioneered while his brother Josh (Eion Bailey) is a commercial artist suffering under the delusion that even though all his clients are hospitals and hotels, he is nonetheless on his way to being a “great artist.” The brothers are devoted to their delusions, confined to their respective worlds even as they think they’re somehow above them. Adrian feels he is different from the overly pretentious peers he suffers through and looks down on; his introduction to a modern artist who is the gallery equivalent of his musical rebelliousness the best signifier of this. Josh believes his relationship with his gallery rep, Madeleine Gray (Marley Shelton) is something other than fiscally symbiotic even as she tells him that what he needs to worry about more than anything is “quantity.”

Both Goldberg and Bailey work wonderfully within their roles, Goldberg managing to keep his character from becoming a prickly stereotype and Bailey managing to make his barbs at his little brother’s expense seem fraternal and supportive rather than just disappointingly pointless. Their rivalry moves to another level when Adrian winds up seduced by the icy Ms. Gray. Gray gains Adrian’s attention when her crinkly outfit interrupts his performance, introducing the motif of Gray as instrument of her own. Clad almost exclusively in outfits that create noise, she turns into both a muse and device for Adrian, their affair consummated when he asks to borrow a particularly percussive skirt of hers.

Where Adrian is drawn to her because of the musicality of her surface identity, Gray’s attraction to the younger Jacobs is harder to pin down. Marley Shelton plays Gray as a woman attracted to artists destined to be overlooked or even outright ignored in their time; early in the film she states that when the critics hate a new artist, that’s when she knows she wants to work with them. Adrian, then, is a perfect opportunity, a composer unlikely to receive positive attention any time soon because of his cold, alienating personality and the way it comes through in his confrontational music. Josh, who had been nurturing a crush on Gray, is devastated when he finds out and uses the incident as the motivating force before his decision to finally confront Gray about her refusal to show his works in the “front room” of her gallery, threatening her with a promise to leave and thus cause her to lose her primary source of funding.

Unfortunately, in a film built around conflict, this becomes the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back. Where [Untitled] had navigated a delicate tightrope act of tension, ugliness and intellectual brutality up to this point, the various dissolutions and feel-good resolutions that come out of it sink the film. The climax reveals that outside of conflict the characters don’t have much in the way of depth, only a wink or nudge or two away from descending entirely into stereotype. Its biggest flaw comes from the too easily disposed relationship between Adrian and Gray, which conveniently sheds her already well-detailed possessiveness so that the plot may move forward, albeit in a mostly castrated fashion. That the film succeeds for as long as it does is only a testament to the strength of its casting and the excellent eye for detail that director Jonathan Parker brings to the work. But in the end, [Untitled] is exactly like the art it at times crucifies- much better in theory than it is in execution.

by Morgan Davis