I'm Still Here

I know I've been a bit delayed in wording my response to I'm Still Here, the Casey Affleck-directed documentary on his pal Joaquin Phoenix's journey announcing his retirement from acting and instead pursuing a hip hop career. I've been taking some many days to mull it over, especially considering that it's likely one of the most thematically dense movies you'll see all year. It's as comparable to the low-brow gross out comedy of Borat as it is as ponderous of a study into contemporary stardom that blurs the line of truth and fiction as Abbas Kiarostami's masterpiece Close-Up. It at once satirizes the conventions of documentary filmmaking, public scrutiny of celebrities on all fronts of contemporary media, and the reality of these actors' lives themselves. Some of the crudest scenes of comedy offer some of the ultimate visual metaphors (in one scene, in particular, Phoenix literally gets defecated upon).

Watching it with a full audience in a theater was a fascinating thought exercise in itself. People were never sure when to laugh, and then they started to laugh at every single piece, and then the film took a turn to the point where it seemed like the audience never wanted to laugh ever again. The film opens with stock footage of Phoenix in his childhood, taking a swim in a Panamanian river by a small waterfall with his father. I seemed to be the only one who found humor in how absurdly self-serious the movie made itself right off the bat, but I certainly thought the tone was meant to be ironically funny. The film goes on for a less interesting stretch of time in the beginning that sets up the premise of the film with Phoenix announcing his retirement to the press, but I suppose Affleck compensates for that in interest by showing some rarely seen extended clips of full frontal male nudity and various other shenanigans of debauchery from Phoenix's aides to hold the audience's full focus.

The one question I always get after telling people I'd seen the film was whether or not it was a hoax. The film did itself a favor around the beginning by addressing the hoax accusations reported in places from the start head-on; not only insisting that it wasn't, but incorporating the accusation as another struggle Phoenix goes through during the film in his quest to be taken seriously. In doing so, Affleck pulled off the enormous challenge of leaving a lingering possibility in the audience's mind that it could, quite possibly, be true. And in the more likely event that the scenario was largely set up, it further blurs the lines between which sequences of the film are actuality and which ones were not. This giant question mark lingering over your head throughout your viewing of the movies is further obscured and complicated leading up to Phoenix's climactic breakdown around the time of his Letterman interview, which seems all too devastatingly real in Phoenix's realizations of what he's become (namely, a joke).

No matter what your opinion on Joaquin Phoenix at this point, I think it must be acknowledged that he's nothing if not devoted. Rolling with this ostentatious characterization of himself through unimaginable odds and public scrutiny, he bravely improvised a public portrait of the pitfalls of fame and a man, mirroring himself, at his breaking point. It's a brilliant exercise and achievement in performance that's likely to remain one of my favorite male performances by year end, and just as likely to go unacknowledged by mainstream rewarding bodies.

Casey Affleck incorporates a few interesting touches to the already mind bending concepts already at play in the premise of the film — Kubrickian shots of deep focus, and a sped up encounter with groupies similar to A Clockwork Orange. A final Malickian long take of Phoenix returning to the Panamanian jungle from his childhood captured on the video footage shown at the start of the film, looking like it was lifted straight out of The Thin Red Line (personally, to me, one of the funniest scenes of the film; though the audience I was with did not seem to get the humor). An odd companion piece to another documentary from earlier in the year, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, also analyzing the show business lifestyle with a sense of humor. I'm Still Here clocking in at about two hours is probably too long to sustain the interest and novelty of the story, but in the end its a fascinating exercise in filmmaking and the results are a wonder to behold.

Grade: B+