We Are Your Friends

When a movie like We Are Your Friends disappoints, you can almost hear the naysayers’ self-satisfied approval, because this is the kind of movie people like to see fail: it’s about an aspiring DJ who’s trying to break into the EDM (Electronic Dance Music) world. There’s something about the way this movie wears it 21st-century-youth-culture heart on its sleeve that will likely wrest either scoffs of contempt or unabashed praise from its viewers. I wanted to like We Are Your Friends, and I was hoping for the best: that it would be a funny, clever movie about friendship and struggling to find one’s way, as one does, in one’s 20s.

Part of the problem is that we haven’t yet embraced Zac Efron as a serious actor, although I believe his day is coming (see Neighbors). Efron, like Leonardo DiCaprio during the late 90s, hasn’t yet shaken off the pretty-boy-teen-heartthrob-pop-star image. Eventually, like DiCaprio, Efron will do something that forces mainstream audiences to wake up and acknowledge his talent. Remember how dudes hated DiCaprio during the Romeo + Juliet and Titanic phase of his career? But cut to nearly twenty years later (after films like Gangs of New York and Catch Me If You Can and Inception) and DiCaprio is a favorite among the dude-bros. It’s with more than a little cynicism that I contemplate the fact that dude-bros are my measure for an actors’ mainstream success. But it’s also a reminder that an actor’s talent can break through eventually, given enough time and shortness of cultural memory.

But the larger problem is the fact that We Are Your Friends isn’t very good. It’s ostensibly about the friendship between four guys—best friends—living in the San Fernando Valley. They all dream of getting rich—the quicker the better—and moving out of the Valley, which apparently represents a site of permanent failure. (This feels like a reference only L.A. people will understand. To me, “the Valley” conjures up memories of the great 1983 teen comedy Valley Girl.) The other guys in this friend-group are played by Shiloh Fernandez, Alex Shaffer, and Jonny Weston. Their performances are all strong, but the movie doesn’t develop their friendship enough.

Scenes of these four guys just hanging out would have gone a long way toward cementing their friendship in our brains. We get a little of that. Cole and Dustin room together—in Dustin’s parents’ house—and we see them working on the roof, or cleaning dried leaves out of the empty swimming pool. There’s one scene of Cole and Squirrel (Shaffer’s character) sitting on the beach shooting the breeze, but it lasts nary 60 seconds. In fact, I kept waiting for the director, Max Joseph, to cut sooner.

The film loses sight of this friendship as Cole’s story develops. He becomes enamored of a celebrity DJ named James Reed (Wes Bentley), and falls in love with James’s girlfriend Sophie (Emily Ratajkowski). Occasionally, Max Joseph (who co-wrote the script with Meaghan Oppenheimer) tries to remind us that he wants us to care about the friendship of these four, but those efforts become increasingly desperate, like when one of them mysteriously dies after a particularly hard night of partying. We never learn what killed him, but Joseph milks the incident for as much character motivation as he can.

I could live with We Are Your Friends if it at least tried to explore the creative process in some meaningful way—even the creative process for an EDM DJ. But the movie doesn’t even give us much of that, perhaps because the filmmakers believed no one but fans of EDM would bother to see this movie, and thus they're preaching to the converted. But it’s not really a movie for people who like that kind of music either, since the EDM we get is pretty banal at best. In fact, I’m not sure to whom this film is supposed to appeal. Perhaps die-hard Zac Efron fans will get the most out of it, but I found little of the charisma and charm and humor of his performance in Neighbors. Maybe if the film were about Efron trying to be a singer, he could have something more interesting to do. At least there would be some singing. 

What exactly is the conflict here? It seems to boil down to a “follow your dreams” movie, so the conflict is anything standing in the way of your dreams. But the movie doesn’t honestly examine itself. The moment when the guys start to question their own dreams of being rich is presented as a kind of self-delusion, which the movie determines to break down by the finale. You can totally follow your dreams, this movie reminds us. Max Joseph even introduces an interesting side-plot, involving a slick real estate businessman played by Jon Bernthal, to prove to these young men (and to us) that the whole adult world is corrupt and only their dreams are pure.

Ultimately, the conception of We Are Your Friends is too lazy to spin any of its promising story threads into something of quality. Instead, this movie feels steeped in all the worst of 21st-century youth culture. It’s considered a moment of great generosity when James Reed gives Cole a Macbook Pro as a gift. I’m surprised Reed didn’t say, “This is a Macbook Pro. It’s equipped with some of the most cutting edge music software available, so now you can make music people will want to listen to.” In my notes, I wrote down a complaint about the character's "costumes". It’s one of the problems of telling modern-day stories about people in their 20s. Everyone wears T-shirts and jeans and Converse shoes. That’s not the kind of apparel that grabs your attention in a movie, and trust me, with a film as disappointingly bland and incomprehensible as this one is, you long for something colorful to look at.

Interstellar

This is my theory: One wintry evening by the fire, writer-director Christopher Nolan was reading Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time to his kids when suddenly he realized his next movie project was right in front of him. In A Wrinkle in Time, three children travel through space by basically bending time in half to cover the same distance much more quickly. (Remember the Tesseract?) The novel even includes a handy diagram of how this works as it’s explained to the children by three old women named Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit. (They are actually shape-shifting star-goddesses that later turn into magical talking unicorns.) Yes, we may in fact have Madeleine L’Engle to thank for Interstellar, which plays like a grown-up version of her supremely odd children’s novel but fashioned for a 21^st century audience. Nolan's characters somehow manage to loop time too, only there isn't a giant talking brain controlling everything in Interstellar. (Actually, this might have been an improvement.)

Inception, Nolan’s last non-superhero project, wrung high praise from movie-goers who felt that their beloved maestro had borne unto them a mind-blowing cinematic experience. The same expectation is in the air for Interstellar, as the breathless, exhilarated tweets and blurbs from certain critics and fans indicate. But I wonder how many of them will admit that what Nolan offers in both Inception and Interstellar is really just mass confusion. As a director, Nolan is fond of grand themes and big concepts, but he falters in his efforts to knit them all together into one cohesive piece of filmmaking. Interstellar is much too thin in places while being far too thick in others. And regardless of how the film was incepted into Nolan’s mind, I wish his editor, Lee Smith, had taken some garden shears to it. At 167 minutes, it’s a magnificently overblown plod through the tedious infrastructure of space and time.

(The next three paragraphs contain mild spoilers.)

The plot of Interstellar isn’t quite as bonkers as that of Inception, but its concepts are equally faux-complex and misguided. The film is set in the not-too-distant future when a worldwide blight has pressed the human race for so long that extinction looms like an ominous shadow on the horizon. A former engineer and pilot (played by Matthew McConaughey) who’s now a farmer in some Midwestern location, accidentally stumbles across NASA, which was secretly restored by the government in order to mine other galaxies for livable planets.

So McConaughey, three other scientists, and two robots (who talk and crack jokes and look like rectangular Rubix cubes) embark on an unprecedented journey that may or may not save the human race from total extinction. Apparently, the real point of Interstellar is to bring new validation to the space age because it represented such a strong mythic tradition for certain generations.

We’re meant to believe that Matthew McConaughey’s accidental meeting with NASA—which quite literally launches him into a space quest—is some kind of cosmically ordained event. But later, we find that he’s not really the key to it all. It’s his daughter, who’s played as a child by Mackenzie Foy, as a grown-up woman by Jessica Chastain, and eventually as an elderly woman by Ellen Burstyn. There’s a scene near the end of the film where McConaughey hurdles through space only to find himself inside time represented as a physical dimension. There he can see the past unfolding again, and communicate with his daughter, now a grown-woman, in the present. The explanation for this and other ideas in the movie is always a bit fuzzy, just like it was in Inception.

As much as Nolan—who wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan—claims to love and appreciate the film medium, and as much as he pontificates about making movies for people who love movies, it’s remarkable how little Nolan has learned about the whole process of telling a story cinematically. Interstellar is technically well-made and has scenes of grandeur and beauty, but it doesn’t actually tell its story visually. The Nolans’ script relies stubbornly on clunky dialogue to move the film along. The script is full of seemingly complex ideas that apparently have no way of being explicated except through scenes of endless prattle between characters.

It’s hard not to compare this movie to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is overrated but still worth seeing. One can certainly see the Nolans reaching for the same level of transcendence. But where 2001 succeeds is in its stubborn resistance to dialogue. There are long moments of nothing but the film’s ostentatious visual grandeur and the equally high-minded concepts beneath the visuals. 2001 is showy but beautifully made, the story is relatively simple, and despite some long and boring parts, Kubrick’s film works on a level that Interstellar does not. Looking at 2001 might evoke boredom, awe, wonder, terror, annoyance, and fear. I never felt any of these things in Interstellar. I wasn’t really even bored with it, just uninvolved.

Where 2001 imagines big, self-important themes visually (and thus, somewhat more subtly), Interstellar pounds away at them in the writing. There are whole chunks of textbook-sounding dialogue or big pronouncements from characters revealing to us the film’s noble themes: heroism, love, life and death, and, perhaps most importantly, the unmitigated majesty of the space program. We get repeated grumblings about the good old days of space exploration such as, “We used to look up at the sky and wonder…Now we just look down.” The film achingly longs for the past, and it’s tempting to read this as coming directly from the Nolans, as though they’re two curmudgeons bemoaning the dismantling of NASA as the end of the American ability to dream and wonder.

The film does have exciting moments, tense moments, powerful moments, but they are delivered with a very heavy hand. It’s as though every scene in the movie requires those penetrating gongs from the 2001 theme, and we’re supposed to erupt in a chorus of weepy-eyed excitement and applause. The emotions in this movie are big and grand too, and they’ve been paired with a race-(against time) -in-space plot to elevate them. Big, noble themes require a big production and a sweeping, life-or-death journey. There’s no room for anything small here. Even when the movie goes dead silent, it’s a ruse. We’re waiting for the next gong to sound, or the next emotional wallop.

As I sat through Hurricane Interstellar, I remembered the feeling I got during Inception four years ago: I just didn’t care about its silly overcomplicated plot, and I felt disconnected from the movie because of how insipid, how exhaustingly “over-thunk” its concepts were.

Jessica Chastain is, for me, the only breath of fresh air in the movie. Anne Hathaway feels wrong for her part as the ambitious scientist, one of the crew members who accompanies McConaughey on a ship called Endurance. (Presumably an allusion to the ship that became trapped in the snow in Antarctica in 1914.) Hathaway exudes a certain brattiness when she needs to appear tough. (It makes one really appreciate Sandra Bullock’s performance—and screen presence—in Gravity.) And the movie’s only way of humanizing her is in making her out of the loop. (She finds out she was tricked about something major, which I won’t mention here for the sake of spoilers.)

McConaughey is fine, but he doesn’t really connect, as much as he tries to. There’s a scene in the film when he watches 23 year’s worth of video messages transmitted from his kids—who are getting older while he has remained the same age—and he dissolves into a blubbering mess of tears. The movie wants us to feel for him, but the scene isn’t affecting. There are multiple scenes of this kind, and it becomes clear that the filmmakers are just cruel to their characters, forcing them to suffer so that they can experience emotional torture and “connect” with the audience. It feels like a cheap, manipulative play for affection. Nolan is going for catharsis in space, but the humanity and the emotions in Interstellar feel forced and calculated, striving for importance with their bigness. 

With Michael Caine, David Gyasi, Wes Bentley, Bill Irwin and Josh Stewart as the voices of the two robots (neither of these character registers the way HAL or R2D2 do), Casey Affleck, John Lithgow, Topher Grace and Matt Damon.