by Thomas Willett
September 13, 2012
John Krasinski and Olivia Thirlby in “Nobody Walks”
It has been quite a year for writer Lena Dunham. From her debut feature Tiny Furniture joining the Criterion Collection to her self-penned HBO series Girls earning praise, she has managed to bring a fresh take on the modern 20-somethings as they try to find themselves in New York. With Nobody Walks, she attempts to take her New York State of mind and transplant it in Los Angeles. With cowriter and director Ry Russo-Young helping out, is this a stateside Lost in Translation or just a misunderstanding?
The story follows New Yorker Martine (Olivia Thirlby) as she decides to visit a foley artist named Peter (John Krasinski) in Los Angeles to help bring artistic merit to her videos. Together they discover the wonders of ambient noise throughout his apartment. They bond over trying to find the right sounds and eventually begin falling in love. Of course, not everything is so simple. The other house guests include Peter’s wife (Rosemarie DeWitt), and two children. It starts off as a promising story about sound artists, but quickly turns into a domestic dispute over infidelity as Martine becomes the new mother figure.
If there is any issue with the film it is in the shift from a promising first act to the familiar conclusion. With the opening focused heavily on the process of recording sound, there is a sense of something new and exciting. The concept that a relationship could be built over ambience seems oddball enough to work. The film decides to abandon most of that good will and focus on the problems with the family, which are a little more pretentious and familiar. By the end, the film attempts to become a self-reflective tale told through silence similar to that of Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere. The results are hit and miss, but the overall movie is a disappointment.
This is not to say that the acting is terrible. John Krasinski and Olivia Thirlby are excellent together and every minute that they are recording sound is some of the most inspired chemistry this year. Once supporting characters come into play, notably Rosemarie DeWitt, the issue shifts and that is when the film decides to get reflective and predictable. The two leads lack the energy they began with as the movie comes to an end and are eventually back in their native lands. The choice to also have a scene voiced over by poetry makes the efforts feel more forced.
There is little sense that Lena Dunham was the head writer of this. Besides the lead character being from New York, Dunham doesn’t use Martine as a surrogate to throw around dialogue about awkward moments. It is a more reserved script which sees the characters react on a somber level. This may be more attributed to writer Ry Russo-Young, whose work is more reflective (Orphans, You Won’t Miss Me). There is also very little comedy from this story that is instead replaced with artistic observations about everyday life. Another problem is that there really isn’t a distinction between New York and Los Angeles social politics, as both sets of characters blend naturally together without any cultural differences. This isn’t that big of an issue, but causes problems when trying to decipher characters.
Nobody Walks could have been the great movie about foley artists in love. Instead, it was just another tale of infidelity and self-reflection. There are some good performances in here that unfortunately get buried under the plot’s desire to be more important than it is. What it could have used was more of the Dunham wit that has become well-known thanks to Girls. It isn’t a terrible movie, but it isn’t a particularly memorable one either. It suffers from what most movies dealing with 20-somethings as artists do: pretentiousness. If this movie provides anything, it is hope that there is a good foley artist love story out there to revolutionize the indie drama.
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