by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $13.99
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Bruce Ross, Jamie Day
Intro:
… a tense and thoughtful dialectic wrapped around a tender rekindled romance …
This two-man play-as-film is set in New York City. The two leads are played by American actors, Bruce Ross and Jamie Day. Ross as the Lithuanian-American writer Kostas, who fled his home country in the space between its independence in 1990 and its decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993, and has fully assimilated as one of many working writers in the Big Apple. Day is the Russian-Lithuanian Dima, left behind during that transition, and in the interim, he has adopted an American conservative perspective on the world and the people in it. He takes great pains to insist that he’s not of the MAGA variety, but his words throughout this lengthy exchange between former lovers rings familiar of those same shades.
Over the course of an evening, the two discuss just about everything under the sun: politics, religion, war protests, their connections to their homeland, and of course, the still-healing wound that is their separation.
Like with the progenitor of this style of two-man play cinema, My Dinner with Andre, a lot of the issues are brought up more for the means of interrogation than outright validation; looking into the processes of assimilation, whether it’s between countries or sexual identities (as far as outsiders are concerned, at least), and challenging bi-erasure and Western tankies with equal pressure.
And in the midst of it all is how Kostas has processed all of this through his work, including a book delving into the break-up.
Despite the film’s title, there aren’t any major long-winded ‘writer-porn’ moments that delve into the sanctity of putting words down onto paper or word processor. Instead, it’s examined as an extension of the larger themes, as a means of coming to terms with such turbulent lives, resulting in the one-in-a-million opportunity for closure that encompasses the entirety of the narrative. ‘Write what you know’ is the oldest advice in the business… but what happens when even you yourself don’t know what words fit the feelings involved?
The Writer is a tense and thoughtful dialectic wrapped around a tender rekindled romance, employing a lot of theatrical tricks with the lighting and camera angles to both emphasise and elevate the fact that this is ‘just’ a conversation between two people who deeply care about each other.
Bruce Ross and Jamie Day do wonders with the material, both the deeper debates and the vulnerable confessions, and director/co-writer Romas Zabarauskas shows a gentle side to his purposeful provocation, both textually and metatextually, about whether distance from home really makes the heart grow fonder.
