It’s high past time pop culture discarded cringe comedy orbiting man-child protagonists, and who better to perform that service for humanity than a woman of color? Man-child films, after all, are predominantly authored and led by white dudes, which isn’t to say that this particular genre niche needs to be reclaimed by non-white dudes. Rather, the niche needs to be dissolved and forgotten, if not because the movies that make up this niche trend toward the uninspired then because we’re long past the point where they have anything valuable to offer their audiences.We get it: modern adult white men are stuck in perpetual states of arrested development. In 2017, you can remind yourself of that just by watching the news or checking Twitter.
Enter Janicza Bravo, director and co-writer on Lemon, a blistering, 80-minute indictment of and elegy for unfledged whiteys, mature in age but markedly not so in spirit or intellect. You know this movie. You’ve seen myriad versions of it staged over, say, the last two decades of pop culture or so, from The 40-Year-Old Virgin to Knocked Up to Adult Beginners to Step Brothers, to the majority of Adam Sandler’s oeuvre. But you haven’t seen this movie as staged by Bravo, an outsider to the self-validating dynamics of the fraternity of white male screw-ups. She’s thus better equipped to provide fresh commentary on that fraternity than any random white male might be. Even better, she’s more talented, too.
Her film is an exquisitely wrought portrait of white guy ineptitude disguised as superiority and acumen, though this assumes you equate “exquisite” with wallowing in abject human misery for an hour and a half. In her feature debut, Bravo demonstrates a raw skill behind the lens suggesting a higher ceiling than most of her peers, though her film is no less awkward than anything they’ve made, either. Lemon is a tragicomic ballad of chagrin and stunted masculinity, and yes, it is at times a literal shitshow, a comedy of bodily functions to complement its endless parade of embarrassments. But the sight of Bravo’s co-writer and leading man Brett Gelman fishing a cell phone out of a used toilet doesn’t at all undermine the sophistication and style of her filmmaking. Lemon is a movie whose ideal audience is composed of people best described as “sick fucks”; it’s an endurance test where viewers pit their tolerance for naked displays of ugly masculinity against Bravo’s assured directorial chops. It’s also the best, or maybe most vital, presentation of whiteness in theaters in 2017, or for that matter the last half decade or so of pop culture.
Lemon is shapeless, but not unstructured. It’s centered on Gelman’s protagonist, Isaac, an absolute loser in all things professional and personal. He’s a struggling actor, and an inept instructor of acting to students who are either themselves inept, or undermined by his ineptitude. He’s seen and treated as a child by his awful parents. As the story commences, he’s on the precipice of singlehood, too: His girlfriend, Ramona (Judy Greer), is fed up with him, and lies about going away on business trips for the ostensible purpose of freeing herself from his clutches. Lemon’s framework is built around the inevitable heat death of their relationship, and the fallout of Isaac getting dumped. It’s painful for him but even more so for us. Unlike Isaac, we can see the emotions of other characters in the frame quite clearly. What makes Lemon so wrenching to watch is precisely his knack for ignoring them in favor of his own.
Bravo and Gelman (who, by the way, happen to be married) take us on the grand tour of Isaac’s downward spiral after Ramona leaves him: He berates one of his students (Gillian Jacobs) and feeds another (Michael Cera) with unwarranted praise to the bloating point, eventually flipping allegiances on the latter out of jealousy. He celebrates Passover with his family, and he entertains a flirtation with Cleo (Nia Long), whom he meets on the set of a commercial shoot and somehow manages to charm in spite of himself. (Actually, it’s the reverse—Cleo entertains a flirtation with Isaac.) Through his various misadventures, Isaac remains self-centered to such an extent as to appear stoic. He isn’t, of course. He’s just trash. But he’s trash we empathize with, the product, perhaps, of inherited gender toxicity passed down to him by his dad, Howard (Fred Melamed). Howard is the specific kind of asshole who will aggressively show off his possessions to all in earshot, but God help you if you put a scratch his walls or a chip his table. He’s a real treat.
Is that Bravo’s ultimate point? That we should sympathize with men like Isaac because they’re the end result of grotesque heritages? Not quite—Isaac might be sympathetic to a point, but that doesn’t excuse his rampant awfulness—but our feelings toward Isaac are, for good and for ill, rooted in our feelings for Gelman, whose performance is a tour de force of willful male atrociousness. More central to the film’s success than Gelman, though, is Bravo, giving us a different view of characters like Isaac from the other side of her camera. Bravo’s voice speaks volumes of her subject that we’ve not heard spoken before. She’s a gem. Her movie is, too, though you have to dust off the grime to appreciate all that glistens beneath it.
Director: Janicza Bravo
Writer: Janicza Bravo, Brett Gelman
Starring: Brett Gelman, Judy Greer, Michael Cera, Nia Long, Gillian Jacobs, Shiri Appleby, Fred Melamed, Rhea Perlman, Martin Starr, Jeff Garlin
Release Date: August 18, 2017
Boston-based critic Andy Crump has been writing about film and television online since 2009, and has been contributing to Paste Magazine since 2013. He also writes words for The Playlist, WBUR’s The ARTery, Slant Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, and Birth. Movies. Death., and is a member of the Online Film Critics Society and the Boston Online Film Critics Association. You can follow him on Twitter and find his collected writing at his personal blog. He is composed of roughly 65% craft beer.