Putting aside the fact that almost anything with Aubrey Plaza is worth watching, Lawrence Michael Levine’s Black Bear seems at first glance like a film one can safely avoid. From its opening scenes, it promises to range pretty high-traffic territory: A group of attractive elder millennial “creatives” have decamped to a lakeside cabin to do the kind of ill-defined creative work to which city life can, apparently, be so stifling. Gabe (Girls’s Christopher Abbott) and his pregnant girlfriend, Blair (Sarah Gadon), are the cabin’s custodians. Allison (Plaza), a stranger to the couple, is an enigmatic (or at least compulsively dishonest) actress-turned-writer-director, and her presence threatens to rip through this sylvan tranquility like so much out-of-season rifle fire. Yawn. You want to shake these people, or their creator, and say, "There’s more to life than residencies!"
But there’s a clue that Black Bear aspires to be more than just another installment of Leisure Class Airbnb Love Triangle. The film’s first shot is of Allison sitting on a dock, staring out over water that vanishes into a white plane of fog. Cut to the notebook paper motif of the opening titles. The lake is an homage, if not an especially sly one, to the blank page, the elusive and ineffable creative process. It’s perfect, whether or not on purpose, that Levine’s setup is so banal. It feels the way 99% of ideas do at the drawing-board stage, and thus does the audience get to fret, right along with Allison, "Is this idea really any good?"
What follows is a sequence of getting-to-know-you scenes so sharply observed that they’re like wading through thistle. We see Gabe meeting Allison for the first time. He schleps her luggage over her objections, asks pointedly where her husband is, and makes it plain that we’re in store for the sexual tension, jealousy, competitiveness, and passive aggression that follow people like this everywhere. We watch Allison and Blair, the latter a blandly blond Betty to Allison’s Veronica, make fake nice with each other and prepare to do battle.
Gabe and Blair, for their part, barely pretend to tolerate, let alone love, each other. Levine, who wrote as well as directed Black Bear, has a precisely tuned ear for the conversational maneuvers of the hostile and insecure. Over the course of dinner and drinks, Blair impugns Gabe’s family, refers to him as a “former” musician, and tells Allison in his presence that it’s a privilege to interact with her, a real artist, at last. This determined undermining, the essence of every siege, will be familiar to anyone who’s spent time around artists. They do it best because they get so much practice doing it to themselves.
Before long, the masks come off, then the gloves, and, for a promising moment, it‘s the content and not the form of this battle royal that engages the audience. The three argue about things that elder millennials of an artistic-intellectual bent really do think about, such as gender roles, family, social upheaval, and the decline of tradition and meaning. Allison switches sides at will, just to pit Gabe and Blair against each other. Blair storms off.
The tragic specifics of what happens next deserve to remain a mystery, but suffice to say they involve a bear. Fade to black, and then the film’s artifice is abruptly exposed. We‘re transported back to the dock with Allison, staring into the fog. She’s an actress, being directed and filmed from a boat out on the lake. She‘s married to her director, Gabe, who, with the help of her co-star, Blair, has been deviously manipulating Allison’s emotions to get better, more visceral performances out of her.
Everything we’ve seen up to this point belongs to the film we’re now seeing in production. This film production will, in turn, be revealed as the subject of the real film, which is to say the one that the real Allison, who is really a writer-director, is working on. In other words, every single thing in Black Bear is imaginary, except for two shots of Allison writing in a notebook. The black bear from the film within the film wheels through one scene on a dolly, a taxidermy deus ex machina, as if to remind us that the live bear we see at the end of each section belongs to the dream world of Allison’s creativity.
This triple meta, Matryoshka doll narrative nesting is nothing new. Levine’s country house framing device is a nod, fitting for our plague year, to Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. Yes, Levine uses it to satisfying and occasionally striking effect, but the structure has consequences for the film’s emotional heft. As in, say, Nocturnal Animals, half of these people aren’t even real within the movie we’re watching, and there are definite limits to what we’re prepared to invest in them. Nor does Black Bear care about the big ideas that Gabe wants to rant about; these represent, in Allison’s imagination, the pompous, vibe-crushing pontifications of the Mediocre White Dude.
The big idea for which Black Bear makes the most time is the relationship between creativity and a lot of bad juju: paranoia, jealousy, lying, voyeurism, manipulation, and cruelty. But this connection, fascinating though it may be, is more signposted than explored. Three times, we see a character observe a scene of intimacy and/or betrayal through a windowpane. Get it? Allison lies about all sorts of things—about not being married, about her mother being dead, about being anti-feminist—in order to exercise her imagination and fuel her creative process. Fine, we get it, but “fiction is just lying” is standard writer’s workshop mysticism, already played out by the likes of Tobias Wolff and Mary Karr decades ago. There’s nothing new here.
What Black Bear has instead of brains is brawn. It is full of phenomenally physical performances of social discomfort, drunkenness, veiled animosity, lust, grief, rage, you name it. Plaza is famously deadpan, but she has wide comic and dramatic range even within the confines of her sullen, jaded skepticism. (For what it’s worth, Plaza waking suddenly from a deep sleep is Michael Richards-tier physical comedy.) Plaza and Gadon play not only different versions of Allison and Blair, but also actresses portraying Allison and Blair in front of a camera and crew. That each of these performances is so different reflects a subtlety and versatility that really deserve a better, deeper movie.
Unfortunately, Black Bear is a reminder that thinking about “creativity” in the abstract won’t save you from producing nothing more inventive or profound than a melodrama about hot people cheating on each other at a country house. Creativity, like sex, is more fun to do than to talk about, and Black Bear’s script is all talk: overdetermined, symbol-laden, and just this side of pretentious. It knows how imagination is supposed to work, but it doesn’t seem to have any. “What do you call a bear with no teeth?” one member of the film crew asks another. “A gummy bear.” That about sums it up.