Primer

Most of the talk about Shane Carruth's debut feature, which premiered to appreciative audiences at Sundance last year, focused on his paltry $7000 budget. And it's true; for a film made so cheaply, with such minimal location work and non-union actors, the thing comes off pretty well. The movie looks great, avoiding the grainy flatness that tends to hamper low-budget digital films when blown up on the big screen. The film was obviously made with a digital camera, but the effect comes off as gauzy and otherworldly rather than cheap-looking.

And the actors all do their jobs fine, particularly Carruth himself and his co-star David Sullivan. The film never really gets into any interpersonal drama, so most of their job is to get through garbled, technical monologues, but they both acquit themselves nicely and have considerable presence on screen.

But I think the reason critics focsued on the film's low budget is because they don't understand what the hell is going on in the actual movie itself. After watching Primer once, I was pretty sure I had nodded off somewhere in the middle. After rewatching the bulk of the film, I've come to the conclusion that it's purposefully vague, difficult to follow and confusing. So it's nice, in a review for a film that confounds you at every turn, to be able to talk at length about the inexpensive cameras used by the crew.



Like I said, I can't really give you a complete rundown on what's going on in Primer, because after 1.75 viewings, I honestly have no idea about the film's final half hour. But I can at least bring you up to speed in general terms.

The story follows two friends (Carruth and Sullivan), part of an amateur collective of inventors hoping to stumble upon a worthwhile innovation and make a quick profit. They've designed a device that looks like a small metal box. Though they don't ever name the intended purpose of the device, it soon becomes clear that it allows for some radical bending of the laws of physics. Eventually, the friends come to understand that they have developed a time travel device.

But this isn't a time machine like you'd find in most popular fiction. There's no flux capacitor or magic antennae or control panel where you select the year to which you want to transport. Primer tries above all else for a gritty realism, a heady science-fiction vision of what might happen if two guys really did manage to build a time machine in their garage.

Here's how the machine works. The two friends, Aaron and Abe, turn the machines on and then go far away to a motel, where they hide out all day. All they do is follow the stock market. They don't answer cell phones or turn on the TV or anything. Then, at the end of the day, they go inside the time machine and turn on an alarm. They wait the exact amount of time that they spent in the motel room, and when they emerge from the machines, they have traveled back in time to the point at which the machines were turned on.

You follow me? So they get to spend that day over again. Usually, they do some day trading, buying stocks they already saw did well earlier that day and selling those that will take a tumble.

All of this material is handled wonderfully. In its early stages, the film is confusing, but in a good way. You can follow the big picture of what's happening (friends work on a bizarre invention, guys learn to manipulate time to make money on stocks, etc.) even if the details are hazy or unclear. I'm sure a nuanced understanding of physics and the principles of space-time as they're currently understood would be helpful, but I was able to at least get the ideas that Carruth was going for. More importantly, I was actively engaged and entertained by the story.

But after about an hour, the film goes completely off the rails. It becomes a narrative mess, jumping all over the place and refusing to explain any of the character's actions or motivations. Oddly, this isn't so much a function of the time travel mechanics, but more a lack of fundamental storytelling. The material about time travel creating paradoxes, such as a potential calamity caused by Aaron answering a cell phone while "hiding out" in the motel room, continued to make some logical sense within the reality of the movie.

It's the attempts at dramatic character interaction that fail to create any sort of cohesive storyline. Characters seem increasingly erratic in their emotions, speaking as close friends one moment and then engaging in angry screeching rants the next. As well, there are lots of intense conversations about characters with whom we're not familiar, characters whom in some cases I could swear weren't even featured in the film.

For example, at the film's opening, we meet Aaron's wife Kara (Carrie Crawford). But later in the film, Aaron and Abe continually argue about a woman named Rachel. I see from IMDB that there is a character named Rachel Granger, who's married I assume to a man named Thomas Granger, who figures into the plot late into the film. But I can't recall ever actually seeing Rachel Granger appearing in the film at all, and I certainly don't understand why the two main characters would be arguing over her.

This is what I mean...Carruth has obviously set up a dramatic reality in which he wanted to set his time travel film, but he hasn't taken the time to establish this reality or clue us into its nature. Plus, he's made such a cold, technical film, a film more obsessed by devices and mechanics than human beings, it's impossible to finally care about the fates of individual people with whom we've spent maybe 5 minutes of screen time.

So unfortunatley Primer is simply not satisfying. Its time travel story gets totally lost in the thriller material at the conclusion, and there's no dramatic payoff because the dialogue makes so little narrative sense.

Let me close by saying that I'm positive some of you out there have seen the film enough times to understand what's happening. I'm sure there is some logic to the movie and that, after enough consideration, I could eventually figure out what's going on. But I don't really care. There are many films that require multiple viewings to fully appreciate - movies like Mulholland Drive and Oldboy and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But those movies hook you on the first viewing, and their audacity, energy or entertainment value convinces you to check them out again and see what you missed initially.

But there's no intrinsic value to making a movie extremely complicated. It doesn't confer any special quality to that movie. And Primer was complicated in a frustrating, rather than enlightening way. If I wanted to be befuddled by scientific riddles, I would have actually attended my undergraduate physics classes at UCLA. But I didn't, because I was too busy watching movies. Get what I'm saying?