I just watched the most harrowing war movie of the year.

Shiva Baby

Plot is fine, if you need it. The best filmmakers know how much is needed to get their story safely off the ground, and the rest – well, the rest is inertia, baby. An American kaiju movie, for instance, doesn’t really need any impetus more thoughtful or bespoke than “someone gave King Ghidorah the ol’ stink-eye, and he was already having a bad day” to get to the juice, which is a three-headed lizard god murdering an entire city with yelling and lasers. And from there you can just kind of Katamari Damacy it, rolling into the chaos whatever flammable components you happen to have on hand – maybe a Mothra sighting here, Godzilla being extremely not alright with having been woken up from a midafternoon nap there, skyscrapers uprooted and wielded with the same ease and carelessness as a Wiffle ball bat at a family cookout where your least favorite uncle showed up already half in the bag, grown men being stomped on with the kind of ker-splat-y indifference you deserve for being dumb enough to be a human in a U.S.-made kaiju movie, etc. Get a story off on the right foot, is what I’m saying, give the characters even vaguely plausible goals and neuroses, and the rest will basically sort itself out.

I use as my example seemingly unkillable monsters and the choreography of their ancient conflicts, the grimly ironic way in which their ritualistic destruction resolves nothing as far as the towering ghouls themselves are concerned yet causes unimaginable pain for everyone and everything around them, victims all of this limbic and terrifyingly primal renewal of the only motif the cruel beasts can remember, this uncurable violence deep in the genetic memory of their war-ruined bodies, because I recently watched Shiva Baby, a movie about an extended Jewish family and their close friends spending an afternoon together. The film is, I’m happy to say, an absolute delight, and for much the same reason the best American kaiju movies are: the chaos is come by naturally. This really isn’t snark – “messy” is one of the highest compliments you can pay a deliberately plotless film about family and culture and the minefield that is attempting to maneuver either one – it’s the standard against, if not the medium in which, stories like this are told, and it only takes the slightest amount of overwriting or overacting or overanything to render a deliciously messy drama unnatural, and suddenly everyone in the movie is Acting™, and we’re instantly plucked out of a good, scuffed-up narrative and deposited instead into an insufferably artificial milieu. But that fate never befalls my wonderful Shiva Baby. Shiva Baby is a great movie for a lot of reasons, not least of which is because it doesn’t try to force its characters into a narrative – it simply tears the lid off their culture with one hand while forcing your face into it with the other, deep into the thick and chunky chili of their crazy, all the while screaming, “eat it! eat it all! every last bite! I hope it kills you!”

Such is the power of movies.

Don’t Trust That Woman; She’s Me From Five Minutes Ago

A lot of commentary on this movie will probably orient itself around the nature of identity, particularly the difficulty that our protagonist Danielle has in claiming and maintaining a unique sense of self against the backdrop of a culture almost comically unreceptive to new interpretations of, or outright subversions against, entrenched behaviors and ideas. And that’s fine, and true. But I don’t want to just list the different Danielle’s – some of whom our leading lady is proud of, others she’s appalled people can still remember – and call it a day because that would be doing the movie a disservice: one of the slickest things about Shiva Baby isn’t just the total number of alternate Danielle’s but what the film does with the them, how the story presents and intertwines and cohabitates and bashes together like cheap action figures the many hers that she feels must exist as a counterpoint to the equally uncountable judgments and aggressions and cruelties both deliberate and accidental being thrown at her by the never-ending carousel of stone-stupid dialogues that comprises her cultural life. Oftentimes a scene will start, for instance, with the fallout from some decision in her past, or the consequences of an entire previous identity, and we’ll be shown how that decision or identity is still seeping into her present, how years later it can still sour the foundation of whatever new her she’s attempting to fabricate on the fly, all before it’s even explained who she was during that past, or what exactly happened that was so bad it’s still to this day kneecapping any attempt to build a new Danielle. This is a wonderfully disorienting approach that with sneaky-brilliance allows us to understand our protagonist in the aggregate, be confused about her in the details, sympathize with her frustration at constantly being bombarded with reminders of past indiscretions – assuming we even agree that they were indiscretions – and even be a little pissed at her, as if we were down there on the ground with her, for not telling us about that past event beforehand, and instead letting it come out from some family member whose name we don’t even know. I thought we were friends, Danielle.

And it’s all done in a way that could be mistaken for rushed or careless writing, if writer/director Emma Seligman wasn’t always nudging the action towards organic and logical developments like a parent assiduously redirecting their dumbass kid away from traffic. Danielle’s frosty relationship with the only other girl at the shiva her own age isn’t just shown but given context – there isn’t just a placard held up with the nature of their past written on it so we can compartmentalize and then move on, checking off some box on a list labeled “Conflicts,” but rather the nature of their fallout is presented in such a way so as to allow that past to become part of the present, contort it into the beginnings of some kind of a future, hold the entire recovering thing fraught against the contrary interpretations each of them have about what happened, and for added style points subject the whole damn thing to the sniping of bypassing supporting characters, unwanted commentaries that add so many dings to the hull of their returning friendship that you’re holding your breath and waiting for the breach.

So Help Me God, I Will Nut My Way Out of This

So we’ve proven mathematically that there are, in fact, a shitload of Danielle’s, and that Emma Seligman handles them masterfully. This is unambiguous. But one of the subtler points and great accomplishments of the movie is how it manages to connect these Danielle’s. There are plenty of through-lines we could trace between them, sure, but probably the most striking is a passionate interest in sex – sex as in gender, but especially sex as in fucking – and this fascination, which easily could come across as sensationalism or mindless salaciousness is actually incredibly well-realized and beautifully applied in a way that makes sense for her character and the cultural context in which she lives. We can be aided in our understanding of why sex of all things with the use of this quote from The Great Gatsby – that’s right, you fuckers, even in the context of a sub-ninety minute film that takes place almost entirely in one location and filmed on a microbudget and steeped impenetrably in the spoken and unspoken languages of Jewish culture I still found a way to sneak in a Gatsby reference! Fuck all of you! I could work a Gatsby reference into home movie footage of a gerbil dying! – in which Nick says of Daisy and her inability to understand the appeal that Gatsby’s parties have: “the rest offended her – and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg… by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.” Danielle, bless her angry heart, is pretty much the opposite of this. It’s the gestures that drive her crazy – not because she fails to understand them – because she’s not nearly as vapid or as sheltered or as ignorant as Daisy – but because their intricate and ancient choreographies appropriate more processing power in her brain than she can stand, juice that she’d rather apply to anything other than mindlessly tracing the outlines for proper social behavior that have been reflexively practiced by so many generations for so long that they’ve been grinded down to total meaninglessness, empty noise generated by the supposedly smarter class as they move along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. Say what you want about fucking, but it’s all kinds of vivacious.

And this escape from the parameters of her culture through sex can be used to explain a lot of Danielle’s, uh, stranger behavior. The spicy pictures she takes of herself in the bathroom, offering her sugar daddy a blowjob in another bathroom – these moments seem inexplicable in a vacuum, like Seligman is struggling to tell her story and can only facilitate more drama by turning her protagonist’s brain off and having her do something stupid for the sake of more narrative kindling, but these behaviors actually make perfect sense when you place them in context, and remember what sex means to Danielle. These steamy/awkward moments occur after stretches in the movie in which Danielle gets her ass good and thoroughly kicked, has been rendered helpless against the indefatigable whips of her culture’s constant rules and expectations, or just plain made to look stupid. So she does something blunt as hell – titties! blowjobs! – to cut through all these insufferable gestures that, taken individually, should be nothing more than meaningless movements and talk but in the aggregate always seem able to go full Voltron and knock her around with depressing ease. Danielle isn’t just a thirsty, thirsty, girl – she needs a weapon, and one as direct as humanly possible, almost offensively to-the-point, as blunt as everybody else around her is infuriatingly obtuse, and it’s a testament to how well Seligman understands and realizes her character that we the audience can follow this logic intuitively.

I Understand Where You’re Coming From, But if I Let You Breathe You Might not Die. You can see My Conundrum.

All of this is facilitated beautifully by Seligman’s direction. Notice that I didn’t say the direction itself is beautiful – it’s not, it’s workmanlike as fuck – but what it accomplishes is beautiful. This isn’t Citizen Kane or Tree of Life – we don’t need resplendently heartbreaking visuals reminding us of the overpoweringly visceral nature of film and how the actions of the characters are forever subordinate to the auspices of images, and we don’t need the conflict rendered on the scale of the stars themselves. It’s a bunch of Jews locked in a house together for an afternoon, undercutting one another mostly out of habit. And by making the camera eternally squat, close, and unflattering Seligman gives the movie exactly what it needs visually – a claustrophobic conveyance of what it must feel like to be in that situation, to never not be withering under the eyes of yet another person who has judged you before even talking to you, to not have even a square foot of space to yourself to think in, to breathe in. Oftentimes the edges and corners of the frame are obstructed by the profiled heads – literal talking heads – of gossiping family members, with Danielle sandwiched between them in an ever-shrinking bubble of air, until it gets to the point where she goes outside to catch her breath and in that small space between two houses she might as well be backpacking across fucking Greenland for all the real estate she suddenly has to play in. Seligman clearly wasn’t given much to work with for the shoot (honestly, the movie doesn’t just take place almost entirely in one house, but only a few rooms in that house) but instead of just packing it in and filming everything industrial-style she managed to brilliantly turn technical limitations into a creative asset.

Oh, No, Everybody is Just as Dumb as Me

So it’s great and all that Danielle is a intractable ball of discombobulated crazy, but all the fire in the world doesn’t amount to any noise or heat unless it’s got a sounding board to play off of, and this is where the supporting characters are masterfully incorporated. And I really want to stress that in this context we are talking simply about how they are applied to the telling of the story: Seligman may let her non-featured performers, you know, act, on a scene-by-scene basis but in the aggregate they are also presented as a collective, an entire other supporting character altogether that comes together like a gabby Jewish Voltron called Context or perhaps Inevitability, similar to one of the personifications from the old English morality plays except instead of abandoning Danielle as she prepares for her final judgement Jewish Identity actually insists on coming with her and talking, and talking, and talking, and are you really going to crawl into your grave with your hair looking like that, bubala, and oh, look at Mr. Good Deeds here, always has to make the other personifications look bad, he’s just like his mother… it’s yet another brilliant creative choice that aside from managing to technically squeeze another character into the already limited space of the film also stresses the suffocating nature of Danielle’s culture and why she fears it so – you become faceless, assimilated, judged and shamed relentlessly into a form of personality paralysis, with all of your future actions already anticipated and delineated by a monolithic wall of expectation that prides itself on being completely unbending, unchallenging, and unsurprising.

But, hey, actual people play these supporting parts, and they’re great too.  The non-featured actors clearly understand that they are essentially talkative wallpaper against which our lead will be contextualizing her anxieties and they lean into that sidekick obligation beautifully, like a team of Jewish Scottie Pippinses. And while having the wherewithal to play a part contained and unobtrusive is skill enough the actors also manage to elevate what limited moments of relieving individuality and heartbreak they are given, through these brief flourishes giving us glimpses of the people that have come to compose the collective. They do a phenomenal job of walking a line between being caricatures in Danielle’s eyes but people in their own – one older woman clearly is struggling to adjust to the fact that her husband has died (it’s not specified if it was recently or years ago) and Danielle’s mom reacting with an “oh, who gives a fuck” when the latter asks her if it’s alright that they’re using the cleansing water to wash a stain off of her shirt constantly ribs you into not just accepting Danielle’s conception of them as a faceless collective, even if they do seem to trend in that direction. The supporting actors know exactly what role they’re playing, and know that they’re more powerful in helping to tell the story by maintaining a kind of microwave background radiation of conflict for Danielle to deal with, striking that balance between stealing scenes and allowing themselves to be elided completely from the frame.

The Shiva Baby

Which brings us to the Shiva Baby herself. As a character Danielle succeeds because she isn’t what so many filmmakers accidentally create with their protagonists – a walking commentary whose near clairvoyance granted to her by her status as an insert character sucks all the potential for drama and humanity out of the story, turgidly and indulgently spending the entire runtime of the film dunking on essentially everybody with improbable if not impossible levels of insight, all while her writer/creator sits back and enjoys doling out the abuse from the smug and safe remove of hindsight and authorship. Seligman never comes close to falling into this trap, because Danielle’s a human through-and-through: she smashes into self-inflicted debilitations and swamp-like social mires with wonderful, Daffy Duck-esque inarticulacy. She lies constantly and awkwardly in order to elevate herself in the eyes of others, not so much because she’s being forced to by the cruel standards of the people around her (just like Danielle is never rendered too perfect, her extended family and friends are never rendered as cartoonishly vain or unreasonable) but because she is just that insecure, all by her lonesome. And instead of making her the ultimate badass rebel, her attempts to spite her own culture are oftentimes superficial and lazy and rely on the assistance of the very same people she claims to have contempt for – a degree in gender studies that her parents are paying for, an apartment that her parents are also paying for, a faux-progressive sugar daddy the likes of which Danielle has probably written at least one play about – and show someone who is of an insurgent mind but not so much a comparable spirit. It’s that conflict that tortures her as much as the milieu she is forced to dance for, and by having her blow her own foot off on the regular with a gun she was convinced she had trained on an enemy labeled “My Culture” elevates her above what could have been a generic and obnoxiously indulgent author surrogate character.

Oh, and I should probably mention that Rachel Sennott smashes the fuck out of the title role. She’s playing basically a walking bricolage of failed identities constantly wrinkling and folding into and out of one another like Linklater’s version of A Scanner Darkly except powered by non-stop anxiety and self-loathing, but also high on this completely unjustified belief that she’s going to flip the script at a moment’s notice and turn this whole “being Jewish” thing on its head, and somehow she plays it flawlessly. In any given scene Sennott can serve up a facial pizza whose toppings include the half-hooded eyes of someone trying just as hard as she can to telegraph that she doesn’t give a fuck but also carrying inherent in its affect the incipient light of self-doubt always ready to be triggered by the right – or wrong – word, with earnest confusion over how to interact with some of her, uh, more ancient family members also thrown in for added challenge. Honestly, she’s playing so many different angles at once I’m surprised Sennott doesn’t pull any fucking muscles in her face. And her plunges in and out of going big (multiple crying scenes!) and just dryly cutting away at everyone around her could have been a bumblefuck of a performance if handled too self-consciously but Sennott sublimates the many rises and falls of Danielle’s ego with uncanny ease. Overacting is coolly avoided, and instead we get someone whose many personalities are presented as a constantly-developing picture, always mixing more emotions and responses into that initially sarcastically-detached palette until by the end of the movie we are looking in at someone more richly realized than we could have anticipated when we first met her.

I’d Be Remiss if I Didn’t Bitch About Something

There are a couple of little imperfections in the otherwise masterfully dense lattice of interpersonal conflict this movie cooks up – moments that, given the deliberately messy nature of the narrative, actually stand out for being too parameterized. For instance, as much as I like Danielle absorbing a constant stream of physical misfortune during her quest to somehow thwart the expectations of each individual person at the shiva – accumulating so much damage to her outfit that by the end of the movie she looks like John McClane at the end of fucking Die Hard – it’s kind of deflatingly improbably that she gets into so many heated exchanges that all climax in something getting knocked over (in all fairness, some quick Googling tells me that washing and purification are integral parts to the shiva, so the process of making Danielle dirtier as the day goes on could be an ironic inversion of that. But it could have be done a little more organically, is what I’m saying. Making every new spillage the culmination of an argument too often comes across as an artificial accent, the kind of overly cinematic coda that is taught in screenwriting classes and if applied too often makes it feel like it was, well, learned in a screenwriting class).

And with regards to the ending (oh, no, spoilers for an entirely plotless movie, cover your little baby eyes when you read the next sentence, I’m totally about to tell you which Avenger gets teased for the sequel): while I appreciate the constant effort by the film to avoid including anything in its narrative that could come across as improbably cathartic it almost feels like we go a little too far in the opposite direction, with kind of a shrug, family – am I right? ending that doesn’t convey the impossibility of resolving so many conflicts neatly and in the course of one afternoon so much as it feels like the script just wasn’t sure how to present where all these interpersonal dynamics now lay, irrespective of their proximity to resolution. Having some fallout from what happened during the course of what was a, uh, spicy day for everyone doesn’t automatically tip the film into melodrama territory. Melodrama is when a response is disproportionate to the event that precipitated it (“you spelled my name with an extra ‘t’– my resolve, she wanes!”) and given the whole ‘lotta something that went down it would only be natural for the characters to reflect upon things a little bit. The hand-holding moment was a delight, don’t get me wrong, and damn near redeems the entire sequence, and I suppose the unchanged nature of the family is supposed to remind us that families, well, don’t change, but unless the collapse of multiple decades worth of social façades is something that happens at every shiva (“Oh, no, Trudy is vomiting out of her eyes and denouncing God again – pass the latke, dear”) it just seems weird that everybody just kind of shrugs and moves on.

The End

I don’t know if you’re glad that I didn’t become convinced halfway through watching this movie that there was a second secret narrative that only I could see, and that I needed to expose the truth before the Illuminati realized what I was up to and recalibrated their mind control rays to a more unescapable frequency, or whatever, but getting 78 minutes of unbroken engagement with the actual, presented part of a story sure was a tall glass of pink lemonade for the jumpier parts of my brain. And that’s one of the many joys of a movie like Shiva Baby: you’re thrown in, you’re awash in anxieties and aggressions and catharses and issues catastrophic and petty and moments only ever approximating grace, and humor you take solace in and humor you want no part of and all these things too unwieldy in their simultaneously hectic and hopelessly discombobulated flight from one end of the room to the other, from one moment to the other, to ever fully make sense of, and even when you think you’ve managed to at least succeed in the much humbler task of getting one foot on solid ground whammo! it’s all over. Drive-by emotionality is some of the hardest to pull off, but yields the realest results. Honestly, the whole movie is such a beautiful stew of lo-fi verisimilitude that it achieves one of the loftiest goals a plotless character piece can ever hope for: it delivers itself by virtue of its gloriously uncooperative realness from any kind of reductive “in literature, as in life…” conclusion, and instead just kind of exists as an experience, a deliberate incompleteness so complete unto itself it almost makes me think that instead of trying to put one of my snarky/smart capstones on the whole damned post I should just kind of quit while I’m ahea