It’s inevitable that the digital video revolution will
bring forth a boatload of low-budget features, some of dubious quality, but a
film like Anne de Marcken and Marilyn Freeman’s Group suggests that
that future might not be as dim as feared. Using multiple cameras to film a
series of mock group therapy sessions, Group examines the issues that
keep women from achieving personal happiness with infinitely more care and humor
than lame-brained Hollywood efforts like The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya
Sisterhood. With its riotgrrl aesthetic in tow (appropriate, since Sleater-Kinney
frontwoman Carrie Brownstein is among the group’s participants), this Seattle
set picture shows us that there might be a little of that mentality in every
woman, and its cast covers nearly every imaginable female demographic from
conservative Christian to bisexual punk rocker. Thankfully, while building these
women up, the film never compromises them. There’s next to none of the
unnecessary plot machinations found in most chick flicks, since these women
enter the sessions with their problems in tow, leaving the focus here strictly
on their character development. An unusual sense of intelligence abounds here,
and after one gets over the initial skepticism that some of these women would
return for a second meeting, the film settles into a series of surprisingly
tense improvisational scenes that doesn’t rely on shocking revelations so much
as the natural dynamics that result when these disparate characters interact
with each other.
Group’s directors use its digital video smartly,
and employ Timecode-style split screens to show us simultaneously a
speaker’s speech and the reaction of the fellow group members. Often, the
extra cameras focus on the hands and body language of the actors and reveal
things that their faces don’t. Less successful are the frequent musical
interludes, which are rather ineffective at deepening our understanding of the
characters (one montage shows a character as she walks to a bench, pets a dog,
eats a sandwich, then walks away in slow motion), even though they provide the
only glimpses that we get of these people outside of their sessions. As for the
therapy sessions themselves, they are fascinating and exceptionally well-acted,
especially in the cases of Tony Wilkerson, who plays a compassionate nurse with
a paraplegic fiancé, and Carrie Brownstein, who is devastated when her father
has an affair with someone her age. I could have easily sat through another hour
of this group’s sessions (luckily, the film’s web site http://www.groupthemovie.com
offers a multitude of extra scenes, another advantage of its digital roots). The
surprising skill and compassion that Group’s makers exhibit turns what
could have been an uninvolving actor’s exercise into a compelling and complicated
emotional stew.
