Team Picture has been referred to as the last in the Benten DVD boys’ trifecta of Mumblecore releases (numbers one and two were LOL and the Aaron Katz two-for, Quiet City and Dance Party, USA). It’s a fitting way to cap the distributor’s institutional affiliation with this movie moment, which inspired more words from journalists than were probably articulated across all of the films’ running times combined. Surfacing right at the peak of the M-word hype, Team Picture may be the picture that was bot most helped and most hurt by its association with that generic name.
As the legend goes, after director Kentucker Audley (who is the same person as Team Picture star Andrew Nenninger) had his short Bright Sunny South play at Sundance in 2006, he fell in with Joe Swanberg. Soon Team Picture, a barely-feature-length feature, shot in Memphis for $1500, was booked at last summers’ mythic mumblecore double-header at the IFC Center and the Harvard Film Archives. Team Picture thus got to premiere in New York alongside some of the most covered genuinely independent films of the last decade, without having to put in time on the festival circuit first.
That was the good news. Unfortunately, that platform had its disappointments. Most of the press on the events brushed over Picture in order to concentrate on the Swanberg supergroup collaboration Hannah Takes the Stairs, and future festival play was out of the question because, for most premiere-obsessed programmers, a movie that had already premiered in New York was old news. In that sense, regardless of the film’s pedigree by association, Benten’s release of Team Picture is directly in line with their stated mission to give second life to “overlooked gems that deserve greater recognition.”
Viewing Team Picture a year removed from Mumblemania, and aside from the fact that the film’s director/star does, in fact, mumble, both in character and on the commentary of the DVD, it seems as solid an object argument as any that these films make for an uneasy package deal. As I noted during the New Talkies era, films like Hannah Takes the Stairs often feel like dispatches directly from the lives of people who would go see a movie like Hannah Takes the Stairs. Team Picture may be a portrait of the same generation depicted in Hannah, but it feels less wedded to What We Look Like Now, and more of a universal portrait of a stumble towards adulthood.
Nenninger’s David, shirtless in denim cutoffs, rocking a straw hat as if in knowing parody of a yokel at leisure, is at once a recognizable little boy lost type and an idiosyncratic hero. His drift away from comfortable complacency via step-by-step destruction of his droney job, relationship with a cranky girlfriend and kiddie pool “enjoyment” zone is as timeless as post-adolescent frustration gets. And Audley’s heavily saturated video images, from sun-soaked Southern foliage to the matte pastels of a Chicago motel room, are stitched together with an economy that feels a bit more controlled––if still threadbare––than the improv-oriented, serendipity-dependent narratives that are starting to become the gold standard of American super-indies.
The Benten box includes the 62 minute version of Team Picture which screened last summer, as well as an epilogue called Ginger Sand. Shot with the help of Frank V. Ross and Joe Swanberg in Chicago and again starring Nenninger and his Team Picture sidekick Timothy Morton, the short catches up with the two boys on a wintry weekend at an indeterminate length of time after the action of Team Picture ends. Both the boys and their friendship seem to be in a very different place since we’ve last seen them. Their easy chemistry together has disappeared, a kind of weary responsibility has replaced the nervous excitement of their common blank slate futures, and a melancholic realization is starting to set in: we become grown-ups on our own.
There’s maybe an easy metaphor to pull out of this sack, about the dissolution of Mumblecore both as a buzz word and as a community, but the great thing about these movies when they work is the refusal to traffic in false conclusions. If we are, then, at a reckoning point for this moment, it seems only appropriate to drift off on an ellipsis…
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