THE BALTIMORONS -- Mumblecore Throwback Charms in Age of Slop

Review by Daniel Lima

Michael Strassner and Liz Larsen in Jay Duplass’s THE BALTIMORONS.

Sometimes a film comes out at just the right time to be appreciated for what it is. Ten or fifteen years ago, the prospect of an airy, weightless romcom running entirely on charm and vibes from one of the mumblecore guys would have made me break out in hives. In the cinematic landscape of today, however, The Baltimorons stands out simply by portraying a complicated, messy world grounded in reality. It’s hard not to get swept up in it, even as the flaws are readily evident.

Taking place over one long Christmas Eve in Baltimore, the film follows a man who, after an emergency dental visit, ends up spending the day with his dentist. He is a genial thirty-something recovering alcoholic who has abandoned his creative ambitions for a “real job”; she is an acerbic middle-aged divorcee who finds herself alone for the holiday. Through a series of mishaps and misadventures, the two grow closer, revealing parts of themselves to each other they never thought they’d reveal to a complete stranger.

Anyone with a passing familiarity with the work of director Jay Duplass, and the mumblecore subgenre he helped define, will know what to expect here. Emerging in the 2000s, mumblecore films were typified by low budgets, naturalistic dialogue, nonprofessional actors, location shooting, handheld camerawork, aimless plots, and directionless characters. They provided an antidote to slick artifice and twee sentimentality of both studio comedies and the kind of indie that would go over well at Sundance, affecting a realism that reflected the lives of the filmmakers producing them.

The Baltimorons follows these conventions to a tee. Though the dialogue isn’t improvised, it clearly is meant to mimic how people talk to each other in real life rather than the stylized patter of a Judd Apatow or Diablo Cody. Stars Liz Larsen and Michael Strassner (the latter also getting co-writer credit) are practically unknown, as is most of the rest of the cast. The city of Baltimore is captured warts and all, shot on location with unfussy handheld camerawork that shows the city as it is. The plot is mostly an excuse to hang out with these characters and share their world, making only a cursory attempt to fit things within a traditional narrative structure. In just about every way, this is classic mumblecore.

The beating heart of the film is the chemistry between Larsen and Strassner; if they have no spark, there is no movie. Fortunately, the two bounce off each other beautifully. Strassner provides the kind of genuine, understated warmth that could thaw even the most ornery spirit, and Larsen is as good capturing that ornery spirit as she is the excitable, bubbly person underneath it. The material they have to work with is less than stellar, a consequence of the adherence to how real people talk rather than a comedy film, but they inject it with such verve that even though there’s precious few laugh lines, spending time with them was constantly pleasant.

If the film had the look and feel of a modern comedy, that might not be the case. Unlike the textureless, airbrushed streaming slop that makes up most romcoms today, The Baltimorons feels like a snapshot of a real place. The ensemble is not made up of beautiful celebrities, they are a diverse group of people that are reflective of the average citizen. Their living spaces have the familiar clutter that always accumulates, their hangouts are the cozy places you could imagine spending hours in, and scenic nightlife is photographed with the same detail as a dingy repo yard in an underpass. That the film moves so lackadaisically, with none of the urgency of a traditional narrative, goes a long way in selling the character of the setting.

Of course, mumblecore did go somewhat out of fashion for a reason. Over the years, the same traits that made these films unique ossified into a style in its own right, paradoxically making the effort to get away from the cliches of more mainstream fare into a cliché itself. As novel as something like this is today, it hews so closely to the template of those earlier films that it can hardly be called “fresh”. That besides, the attempt to strip away Hollywood artifice also rendered many of these films little more than a stylistic exercise, offering little beyond the feeling of being immersed in an insular little world. That constraint is certainly felt here, as the film has little going on under the surface. If you aren’t bought into this burgeoning relationship, there’s nothing here.

Which isn’t to say there is no character drama. Though the film is largely a two-hander, it is Strassner who gets a complete arc, as he grapples with both his sobriety and the adult responsibilities he has on the horizon. Strassner has said that the script is rooted in his personal experience, and while the attempt to explore it like this is commendable, The Baltimorons is at its weakest when it is directly addressing his turmoil. These are the parts where the film looks the most like a conventional indie dramedy, and the gear switch into that from the deliberately unconventional mumblecore trappings is not smooth. Some scenes work better than others, and there is at times a certain inelegant beauty in watching the characters fumble their way through deeply emotional conversations, but it largely ends up casting off the best aspects of the movie.

Yet these aren’t the moments that stand out when thinking about watching this. It’s the joy on the faces of two strangers who have met someone they can connect to. It’s the lived-in feeling of the Baltimore streets they walk across, the coziness between them driving through an icy winter’s day. Perhaps I would be less kind to The Baltimorons if I were watching this in 2012, but today, I find myself won over. How lucky we would be if more films were content in just being this human. 

The Baltimorons is now in theaters.

Rating: 3.5/5