SPRING FORWARD | |
Conversation may be a dying art, but you can’t tell it from Murph (Ned Beatty) and Paul (Liev Schreiber), who never shut up. Paul keeps cussing, which pisses Murph off, though he’s more patient with Paul’s immaturity than most men would be. They’ve been partnered up as workmen for the Parks and Recreation Department of a small Connecticut town, which means they pick up overturned trash in the park and repair the rusting manger of the town’s Christmas Nativity scene. Truthfully, they don’t seem to do much work at all; they mostly just talk. About sex and death and what God wants and whether Wal-Mart is a good thing or a bad thing and about the new notions of what it is to be a man that Paul is picking up from male-empowerment books. While Paul is beginning his life again after a short prison stint, Murph is nearing retirement, so writer-director Tom Gilroy, making his film debut, has structured the movie to play against the changing seasons of Murph’s last year as a workingman. Remarkably, Spring Forward was shot in sequence over the course of an entire year, all of it taking place outdoors in the parks and woods Murph and Paul tend. In one marvelous scene, the guys sit at a park table and share a joint, and as their talk gains the silly profundity of a good high, the sunlight on their faces grows dark and then light again as the clouds above, heedless of the film being shot below, pass in front of the sun, temporarily blocking the light. Another director might have re-shot, but Gilroy and cinematographer Terry Stacey were probably thrilled that nature was adding its own texture. And somewhere in that picnic table exchange, the men pause in their talk, and Murph scrunches his chin into his hand and takes a deep breath, gazing up into the trees, where the wind is rustling autumn leaves. With that pause, Gilroy allows the film itself to breathe a little too, as do those of us watching, and then the conversation resumes. Because in real life, but not so often in movies, people don’t talk all the time. Sometimes — and Ned Beatty is the absolute master of this — people stop talking and stare at their feet or stare out at nothing in particular and consider what they’ve been hearing or let their mind travel to some distant point in the past that’s been re-ignited by conversation. Great actors tend to say in interviews that good acting is all about listening, which must be true, for rarely have two actors listened to each other as intently as Beatty and Schreiber. Spending a year acting opposite and listening to Ned Beatty must have been an astonishing experience for Liev Schreiber, and it’s that sense of parallel learning — of Schreiber coming into his own as an actor beside Beatty, just as Paul grows into a man while standing alongside Murph — that gives Spring Forward a resonance that is moving beyond all measure. (Chuck Wilson)
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