Self Reliance
Self Reliance
Self Reliance, which marks the directorial debut of Jake Johnson from ‘New Girl’ and ‘Minx’, was not born because of COVID – well, perhaps. It’s a concept he has been throwing about for several years. But the virus and lock down that followed gave him all the time he needed to execute it. Luckily, it manages to surpass the self-pity that some of its peers in cinematography that revolve around ‘isolation is hard’ face, with a lot of Johnson’s able deduction of absurd everyman.
The specific sub-genre “often the first film directed by a well-respected comic actor” can be quite tricky. For every ”Eighth Grade,” there must be at least twelve ”Fool’s Paradise”s, evaluations of how a skillful performer fails to translate his skills to the directorial seat. This moniker is further compounded by the (hopefully) receding genre cliche of the ‘LA COVID comedy’ which are standard issues of wannabe L A comedians cooped up indoors seeking meaning about the whole connection in the absence of people and made full of people in each others’ homes during 2020 lockdowns.
Johnson, who also has scripts credits besides being the lead, is Tommy a sad white collar man living in Los Angeles in his middle aged years. He has a routine office job, working with numbers in some cubicle; he has just come out of a bittersweet 23-year relationship with Natalie Morales and his dream girl; everyday life is just a boring slog. So when the actor Andy Samberg (As himself) hails in a tam and a uniform and asks him to get in, he simply just shakes his head and says yes. (Needless to say, the film is from The Lonely Island.)
As it happens, it is Samberg who has custody of Tommy; Samberg flies him to some shack and there are two Gluecks who frame an offer to him: He is to join a new reality show on the dark net, for which it’s enough to have 30 days of survival in places no one wants to go and where invisible ‘Hunters’ try to kill him as soon as he crosses the entrance.
Surveillance will become necessary because only what is going to happen in advance can justify such steps. The one loophole that will save him: The Hunters cannot afford to lay other people’s lives in danger. So if there is someone else with him, he lives. If he manages to survive this month, there’s a million usd waiting for him at the other end of the tunnel.
Doesn’t it sound simple enough? He has to keep in close quarters with strangers at all times. The problem with “Self Reliance” and Johnson is that they are wrong, it is not that simple, especially for those of us who feel like side characters in our own lives and it happens a lot. After few days of developing such paranoia that all of the people around him are potential killers, he decides overdue that he needs support from his relatives. The problem is we get it but the level of insanity in the premise and Tommy’s estrangement from them due to years of resentment towards his father (Christopher Lloyd) not being in the picture makes his mother and sisters (Mary Holland and Emily Hampshire) rather over protective to be of any assistance.
Rather, Tommy has to seek out other people, often strangers, to satisfy this now more than just figuratively life and death need to have company. It is here that “Self Reliance” manages to come up with some of its great – albeit rather surprising – thoughts about people and the need to get away from them. First, he gets ‘James’ (Biff Wiff, no less, he now of ‘I Think You Should Leave’ fame, clad with nothing but a toothless beardy grin) off the street as his shadow. The pair becomes friends, and their surprising bond becomes the most heart-warming aspect of the film. (There are bits of Tran, Nick Miller’s everlasting companion in “New Girl”.) Next, a series of curveballs seeded in a Craigslist ad looking for other contestants,’ bumps him into Maddy (Anna Kendrick).
At its core, the entirety of the essay “Self Reliance” seems to represent a time period when a lot of people had to slowly emerge from the corners where they had been tucked away socially for a period of two years. The Conor O’Malley in this film, Matthew, comes into play during the middle of the picture; the occasions are rather instructive though not exaggerated. All of them more or less of course fail on the second-type of romance/comedy film, especially those in the “Garden State.” But Johnson cleverly adds sufficent darkness to their relationship to prevent all of it from becoming a sappy romantic comedy.
Now the trouble comes up when Johnson becomes too engrossed with the inner workings of the game, clearly having too many concepts about what the competition is or what it could do on Tommy, but not entirely buying into any of them. Is it some form of a life and death game? I don’t think there are enough moments of clear and present danger although, Johnson himself knows how ridiculous it is to see him run with somebody trailing him like in an After Hours movie. One more reasoning offered by a fellow competitor who bumps into Tommy and Maddy (GaTa), is that this is a kind of entertainment all right for the audience but most of it is devoted to the ridicule of the hero. Johnson remains torn between borrowing more from either “The Most Dangerous Game” or “The Truman Show”, which leaves the resolution lost somewhere in between satisfying gravitas or feel good sunniness.
For a comedy, it also has apologies also has desperation to and taking recourse on Dryden Johnson’s reticent characterization and a couple of long improvisation sequences (like a minutes long conversation with a possible hitman about the characters featured in the ‘Super Mario’ series) or the ridiculousness of people like Andy Samberg and Wayne Brady appearing as hired brand ambassadors for this inscrutable show. These episodes form a nice interlude but are rare and ‘Self Reliance’ does not have the grit to be fully dramedy in the way this ratio demands.
At different times in the movie ‘Self Reliance,’ there are ‘production assistant ninjas’ who come out of hiding and inform Tommy while he is alone that they wish to share with him information about his being “one of their favorite characters” and that they bring orders from the production asking him to change things up so that their audience does not get bored. This is how I suppose it is to be a contestant on a reality show or in Johnson’s case, an actor who is continually in the public domain, to be made to do things for the entertainment of others.
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- Genre: Comedy
- Country: United States
- Director: Jake Johnson
- Cast: Jake Johnson, Anna Kendrick, Natalie Morales, Mary Holland, Emily Hampshire, Christopher Lloyd.