By There was a moment during our interview with Adam Christian Clark, Bitsie Tulloch, and Marguerite Moreau that caught me by surprise. Tulloch began to tear up when talking about a key scene at the end of Caroline and Jackie. Without giving anything away, she said that the scene still felt real to her. There was a little quaver in her voice as she said this, the sort of spontaneous reaction that’s hard to fake.
Caroline and Jackie is Clark’s first feature film. He’s got a background in reality television and a major love for the work of John Cassavettes. (Oddly, I think Cassavettes movies feel more real than reality television.) Tulloch’s sudden emotion made a lot of sense. Caroline and Jackie feels real in a complicated way, even when things happen that seem unpredictable. It’s just the nature of family.
[This review was originally posted as part of our coverage of the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. It has been reposted to coincide with the film’s theatrical and VOD release.]
Caroline and Jackie
Director: Adam Christian Clark
Rating: TBD
Release Date: TBD
Families are odd things. There’s just something about blood relations that make us love people who may otherwise be intolerable, or we may find pity in the craziest or cruelest behaviors. It’s not always the case, but if you look at your own family, there may be an aunt or uncle who’s insufferable, but you still love that person. Or maybe it’s a parent or a sibling who’s the same way — you fight constantly, but you mean it when you say “I love you.” It’s never quite logical. Sometimes we’re forced to draw apart from family since those relationships can get so heavy.
That’s essentially the source of drama in Caroline and Jackie. Just how close can we be with our family members, especially if they can make our lives a kind of hell? Just how much weight can we take?
The film starts out pleasant enough with a dinner for sisters Jackie (Tulloch) and Caroline (Moreau). Jackie’s boyfriend Ryan is there (played by Tulloch’s Grimm co-star David Giuntoli), and so are a few other friends. But when they return to Jackie’s place, Caroline springs an intervention on her sister. Everyone else was in on it the whole time. This is just the first of several events in the evening that’ll put the sisters and the guests through hours of emotional strife.
It all gets so uncomfortable given how raw the performances are. While not everyone is a mess of neuroses and histrionic outbursts like a few characters, the audience can at least identify with Charlie (David Fuit). He’s new to this circle of friends and awkwardly unformtable with all that’s unfolding. He’s like a squirming surrogate for the passive audience.
Clark’s adoration of Cassavettes and Robert Altman is all over the direction. There’s lots of improvisation (the film wasn’t scripted but instead meticulously outlined and rehearsed), and the dialogue overlaps lot. To be honest, it took me a bit of time to get into the film’s rhythm. I just got lost in the overlapping dialogue early on. It seemed like an affectation at first, as did some of the murky cinematography. As I learned in the post-premiere Q&A, the film was unfortunately projected slightly out of focus and also 40% darker than it should have been. Looks like one projectionist didn’t get that Terrence Malick letter.
But once the intervention kicked it, I got what the film was doing and kept on getting it. Caroline and Jackie felt more real as the film progressed, and it just happened to start getting real with an extremely uncomfortable scene. There’s genuine concern from the guests, but there’s also that unavoidable tinge of self-righteousness and inadvertent cruelty whenever people critique a friend’s lifestyle. It actually makes the end work so well. It’s brimming with vulnerable and private emotions, but it’s also got a sense of absolute exhaustion. It’s the feeling of a long night with these people.
The key complication in Caroline and Jackie’s relationship is a sense of guilt and obligation. (Maybe those two words are key in many dysfunctional families.) It’s never stated outright in the film, but the sisters grew up in some form of abusive or unstable household. Jackie, the more timid of the two, tells Ryan that her sister protected her growing up. Now as adults, you get a sense that Jackie is grateful to have had a protector, but their relationship’s become far more complicated.
Tulloch plays Jackie with a sort of quiet desperation, like someone reticent at heart. Moreau’s Caroline is more assertive by comparison, and also more persuasive. As more about Caroline is revealed and as she interacts with the others, I sensed this deepening gulf between the two sisters but also this tie between them that was unbreakable. They’re all they’ve got in the world — two people, lonely and traumatized, joined at the wrist. It’s all the love and cruelty of family. The relationship can get petty, it can get ugly, but that’s blood for you.
The issue with a lot of improvised movies seems to be a kind of aimlessness or wandering without purpose. Caroline and Jackie does wander, but thankfully the outline is intact. To call it an outline makes it sound like some flimsy structure, or maybe a little chalk on the blacktop to differentiate between hopscotch squares. This outline seems something more like a jungle gym — it allows the actors to play on a fixed structure that’s sturdy and built into the ground.
If the film wanders, it’s the way you wander when you go for a walk after a heated argument. It wanders with that antsy, heightened feeling that’s part of the fight or flight response. With family, with boyfriends or girlfriends, with good friends, you know you’ll see them again, so you gather your thoughts to make up or continue the fight. The film gives space for the characters to work things out in their heads, and then on to the next round and whatever happens, and whatever happens feels uncomfortably real.
Just look at Charlie every now and then. He knows it and much as you do — oh man, it’s so painful and true; maybe I shouldn’t be here, but I’m going to stick around to see what they do next.
