Review:3 Backyards

Reviewed by Chris Cabin  filmcritic.com

The three chief stories that unfold over the course of Eric Mendelsohn's lovely second feature, 3 Backyards, are ones we've all heard before but have rarely actually lived through. They are the makings of dozens of check-out gossip rags, third-rate human interest pieces and modern suburban folklore, perverse entertainments that serve as escapes from the everyday. They are also prime fodder for narrative filmmaking both in the independent realm and in big-studio pictures. At its worst, 3 Backyards indulges selectively in the tired structures that often accompany both sides of that coin. But Mendelsohn, who also scripted the film, ultimately transforms these stories into lyrical tone poems through his work with DP Kasper Tuxen (who also does breathtaking work in Mike Mills's upcoming Beginners).

This collaboration between Tuxen and Mendelsohn proves essential to the world Mendelsohn is envisioning. Tuxen's camera is highly active and fascinated by light and nature, pushing-in for extended periods, winding around door frames and swinging up into blinding sunlight only to dissolve and return back to earth. It's a singularly stylized film, recognizable as the work of the same artist from Mendelsohn's promising black-and-white debut feature, Judy Berlin -- but with a hundred times more confidence. Take the opening image: The camera slowly pushes in from the forest surrounding a suburban home and, through a series of dissolves, finally arrives in between a silent feuding couple, played by Kathryn Erbe and the great Elias Koteas. The feeling is that of both a waking dream and a voyeuristic indulgence, dropping in on the uncomfortable silence of two people so unsure of what to divulge to one another that the wife falls asleep in the middle of a break.      

There is indeed a voyeuristic bent to the entire film, one Mendelsohn plays with utmost subtlety. For Koteas's John, the key scene may be his spying in on his wife and kid while on the cell phone with both of them, pretending to be on a plane. But his interest in watching others piques when he finds himself following and becoming entranced by a young woman in a blue dress with a beautiful smile (Danai Gurira), whom he watches get turned away from two possible jobs. The possibility of his own divorce seems secondary to the outcome of this woman's actions to John, similar to the way Peggy (the wonderful Edie Falco) puts her painting in the backseat when she is asked by her celebrity neighbor (Embeth Davidtz) for a ride to the ferry. Stunned and excited by the breaking down of the wall between spectator and star, Peggy incessantly nags to find even more personal stories, to search out other narratives in this person to whom she only connects through movies, tabloids, and television interviews. The resulting tension is borderline unbearable and leads to a throttling, heartbreaking outburst.

The tension is equally palpable when Christina (Rachel Resheff), a precocious youngster, stumbles upon a disturbed teenager beating off in his tool shed, in what is the film's most underdeveloped scenario. The teenager teases her with a bracelet she left when she ran off, and tries to steal a kiss, but Mendelsohn disregards catharsis, and never makes the teen an outright evil figure, just a presence of whom to be wary. The aesthetic Mendelsohn and Tuxen have crafted at once invokes the strange lens that these people now see through, after coming in contact with these darker, peculiar shades of middle class life, and unveils the poetry and delicacy in even the most minor occurrences. For those who currently live in Suffolk County, the sheer richness of these lilting images may cause feelings of displacement.     

John eventually seems the most out of his element in 3 Backyards, and by the film's end, he has come to embrace his wife again. Things end a bit more ambiguously in the case of Peggy's story, which is partially why it is the most successful of the three. Blessed by a fantastic cast, Mendelsohn stages a small, near-perfect coup with Falco's exchanges with Davidtz in that perfectly bourgeois jeep interior. In fact, if it wasn't for the sense of community that Mendelsohn builds up before the fateful car ride, it might have felt out of place, isolated from John and Christina's world. But the way Mendelsohn sustains a hazy, moody atmosphere throughout this trio of odd encounters suggests nothing short of Raymond Carver penning pieces for Us Weekly.