The Time Being: At Least is has Langella

Do you remember Wes Bentley? He’s the actor that played the “serious eyebrows” drug dealer kid from American Beauty. I have a vague recollection of him having some sort of voice over monologue about the beauty of ugly things while a slow camera pan followed a plastic grocery bag down the street on a windy day. These kinds of attempts at art house depth can get beyond themselves. It is really hard to “sell” an audience on the philosophical beauty of street trash, especially when it’s delivered in such a fart-sniffingly pretentious way. New movie The Time Being releases this week. It focuses on the emptiness that an artist both requires and suffers from in order to attain greatness. Wes Bently, who I am quite tepid toward, co-stars alongside the great Frank Langella.

Daniel (Bentley) is a painter who has secured a month-long gallery show exhibition for his latest series of black and white rotting fruit portraits. Daniel has a lovely wife and child that are treated as window dressing for the most part. The emotional distance of this family is shorthanded throughout the story and so there is no real connection the audience can hang its hat on beside this manufactured “you’re supposed to empathize” shorthand.

There are a lot of slow visual interludes which act as a shorthand for giving the audience pause to meditate upon the meaning of things, but because they are clunkily done without much thematic connection, these actually act simply as an easy way to infer a generic film-school background. Other films utilize such devices in much more successful ways, for examples of this, see Marc Forster’s excellent film Stay; or note the falling rose petals theme of the aforementioned American Beauty.

During the exhibit’s opening night, one of Daniel’s paintings is purchased over the phone with the stipulation that Daniel drive the painting to the buyer himself. Daniel drives and drives and drives and drives until he reaches the secluded house of Warner Dax (Langella). Daniel thinks perhaps Warner would like to commission a painting, but the terse Warner draws Daniel into a mysterious series of assignments. It becomes clear that some sort of bond is forming between the two men, to the detriment of Daniel’s home life, which we have yet to find a reason to care about.

As the slowness continues, the movie becomes a meditation on regret—an old painter’s obsession with it, and a young painter’s chance at redemption. This is a decent starting point, but the execution of it deflates because too much focus is held on Daniel and his moments alone as opposed to the wonderful but too, too few and short scenes where Langella’s Warner character mops the floor with him.

Also, Daniel’s transformation as an artist sinks as he decides to acknowledge that he cannot live without his bland family. He goes from painting the edgy harsh lines of death in fruit to a series of people swimming in water—à la those undersea paintings you can purchase at your local shopping mall. I found the switch insulting on an aesthetic level, especial amidst all the pretention being explored within the film itself. And I think this lends to a muddied conclusion that carries on the self-fulfilling “art is pain” nonsense, which is trite, while also going completely against this concept in the execution of Warner’s final painting.

All in all, this film isn’t a bad way to waste a couple of hours so long as you can stand the type of bland pretention described above. Frank Langella is always amazing, so at least there’s that, but the movie is far from any sort of masterpiece. Also, Wes Bentley needs to get out there and stretch a little bit.