Seven Red

That’s right. Seven Red’s love affair with the films of Joseph Gordon-Levitt continues, but not with the forgettable and cringe inducing adolescent pap (500) Days of Summer, in which Zooey Deschanel plays yet another character that helps a forlorn dude find his proper way in the world. Rather, we like Uncertainty, which strikes me as a kind of response to the decision-mania of all the recent ethical culture industry films I’ve discussed here before.  If those films feature an obsession about the “right decision” as their key narrative engine, Uncertainty does the same, and perhaps even more so, but revs the decision engine up so high that it breaks down, turning the Decision Film back on itself.

Gordon-Levitt plays Bobby Thompson, a Canadian emigre and struggling musician who lives in Brooklyn with his girlfriend Kate, a Broadway dancer, played by Lynn Collins. We learn that they’ve only been dating for something like 10 months, which – together with their professions – makes their dilemma all the more pressing. At the beginning of the film, which takes place on July 4 and 5, they walk to the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge and Bobby convinces Kate to just flip a coin on it, and let fate decide. The coin flips, lands, and they run in opposite directions, one to the Manhattan side of the bridge, the other to the Brooklyn side. What follows are two completely different stories, meant to be taking place at the same time, but both involving both characters. Each, in other words, would be a result of the coin flip. If you can get past this major conceit of the plot, you actually get two very engaging stories. (The second conceit you’ll have to get over is the color plotting, so to speak, where the Brooklyn-Queens story is “green” and the Manhattan story is “yellow” – the Manhattan story also features “red” as its secondary motif, completing the traffic light visual metaphor).

In the Brooklyn and Queens story, Bobby and Kate visit Kate’s family for a July 4 barbecue. On their drive over they pick up a stray dog, the owner of which they subsequently seek. But the real story here is the interpersonal relationships – it’s a family character study, really. Kate’s family is Latino, and her mother is a kind of hovering matriarch that increasingly sees her control over Kate and now her younger sister slipping away. She disapproves of Bobby – though she claims to like him – largely because he is a struggling musician with no central prospects for success. Kate’s younger sister also appears to be taking some kind of precarious showbiz route, as she is currently deciding to put off a college scholarship in order to pursue acting, a decision she’s apparently made after a rather mediocre turn as Puck in a high school performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Needless to say, the mother is horrified by this choice, and wants Kate to talk her out of it (presumably using her own difficult life as a negative example). The other key character in the Brooklyn-Queens story is Kate’s Uncle Diego (“Tio Dio”), a former boxer who is completely mentally disabled by his fighting days, and presents a condition similar to Alzheimer’s. The point of extreme tension comes when he blurts out “Where’s Hector?” in the middle of the meal.

In the Manhattan story, you get a thriller. Bobby and Kate are going for dim sum and maybe an apartment party for July 4. They end up in a cab, where they find a cell phone (really a Trio). Bobby tries to call around to the owner’s friends, skeptical that the cab driver will seek to return it. But this is no ordinary phone left in a cab. Rather, it holds crucial information to some very bad dudes, all of whom are tracking it down through the streets of Manhattan. We first realize the problem when the first person trying to claim the phone is gunned down right in front of Bobby and Kate on the streets of Chinatown. They are subsequently chased throughout the city, until they come up with their own plan to turn the tables on their pursuers – vaguely the Russian mafia involved in crooked dealings with a disgraced public official.

If we put aside the modernist symbolism of the “found object” (the Trio, the dog) serving as some kind of metaphorical result of the decision, we get an interesting turn. Do the two stories that follow the coin flip leave us with an alternate reality film in the style of a Run, Lola, Run, or, less impressively, a Sliding Doors? No, not really. Because the options don’t derive from the decision that Bobby and Kate have to make. In fact, neither story bears any resemblance to the decision they have to make. It isn’t a question of a decision leading to one or the other of these stories. In Run, Lola, Run, you get a series of possibilities – possible lines of action based on the decision. In films like Sliding Doors, you get a similar series, where reality could go one way or another way based on minute decisions and chance circumstances. While the coin flip opening of Uncertainty would seem to point to a similar structure, the film doesn’t work in either of those ways. Neither of the two stories  is an actualization of a decision, a consequence of the coin flip, or even a possible sequence of events; they are, instead, as the philosophers might say, real but not actual rather than possible but not real. They’re virtual series.  It’s even as if the decision on genre itself at the level of the work was suspended by the filmmakers – a family drama or an adventure film? Which? Let’s hold on to both! Showing Uncertainty next to Run, Lola, Run would in fact be a fantastic way of teaching the difference between the possible and the virtual that runs much of poststructuralist thought (say, the Deleuze of Bergsonism through Difference and Repetition). Perhaps that’s a heavy-handed way to view the film, but I think the readings are there.  In any case, this turn to the virtual character of the stories ends up being even more affirmative than the films that ask us to contemplate the ethical quality of some decision. What you’re left with at the end of Uncertainty is not a past decision to be evaluated, but the future, suspended there. As the film closes – one version of Bobby and Kate on the Brooklyn Bridge, one on the Manhattan Bridge, Kate notes that whatever decision they make, it will be good. Bobby asks Kate, “But will it be the right decision?” Kate pauses, then nods: “Yeah.” This is a more thoroughgoing and radical push on contemporary ethics than all the Gone, Baby, Gone‘s you can conjure up.