Review: Friction (2009)

[Steve Rhodes]

FRICTION
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2010 Steve Rhodes

RATING (0 TO ****):  ***

I just finished watching FRICTION, so I'd like to write about it now while 
it's still fresh in my mind, but I have a major problem.  My head is still 
spinning.

Structured -- I think -- as a mockumentary about a documentary which may or 
may not itself be a mockumentary, FRICTION has more layers than a big fat 
onion.  It appears to have a bunch of very talented non-actors playing 
actors who are playing non-actors.  Or maybe it is a mixture of real actors 
playing ... oh, I give up.  Whatever it is or isn't, it is a whole lot of 
fun and quite intriguing too, as we watch a real-life married couple bicker 
and watch an older teen (August Thompson) engage in some innocent flirtation 
with the married man's wife, causing a mixture of heartburn, heartbreak and 
heartache.

Written and directed by Cullen Hoback, who did the absolutely delightful 
MONSTER CAMP, FRICTION nicely blurs the lines between a scripted drama and a 
traditional documentary.  I came to really like and care for the actors or 
characters in FRICTION.  Of course, I'm not sure where their real personas 
ended and their fictional ones began.  Frequently in the story they would 
carefully explain it to us, but we soon learn not to trust anything we are 
told in this Escher print of a world with its very flexible notion of what 
is real and what isn't.

In the movie, Amy and Jeremy Mathison, who play themselves -- or so they 
claim -- are associated with a summer arts camp in New Hampshire.  Due to 
poor advertising, the enrollment in the camp the year the movie was made had 
dwindled from 84 the previous year to just 7 students.

FRICTION's director Cullen Hoback, playing a director named Cullen Hoback, 
decides to make a documentary about a movie that he was going to make there 
but couldn't.  Or something like that.  A lot of what we see are things like 
the rehearsal for scenes that were deleted from the movie that was never 
finished.

Like real life, FRICTION does have its dead spots, but it kept my interest 
the whole time, and most of it was both funny and bizarrely compelling.

After our screening, Cullen Hoback, playing Cullen Hoback the director of 
the movie, appeared on stage to answer our many questions, pretending, of 
course, to be telling the truth, which he might or might not have been 
doing.  Playing myself, I told him that I was the film critic Steve Rhodes 
who saw and loved his last film (MONSTER CAMP) and wondered how he got the 
idea for FRICTION.  I don't want to tell you what the fictional Cullen 
Hoback told the fictional me, since I don't want to give anything away.

I'd recommend you -- or someone playing you -- seek out this movie and enjoy 
it for yourself.  It is a little treat worth savoring.

FRICTION runs 1:29.

The film is being shown as part of San Jose's Cinequest Film Festival 
(www.Cinequest.org), which runs February 23 through March 7, 2010.

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Email: Steve.Rhodes at InternetReviews.com

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