Black Bear

I’d really like to like Black Bear. I actually was really liking it a lot, even enjoying it, right up to the halfway point, where the whole thing comes crashing down faster than Kevin Spacey’s career. Black Bear is divided into two parts; The Bear on the Road, and The Bear by the House (let’s call them BB1 and BB2); both parts end with the appearance of the titular Ursus americanus, but could very well have ended with a sign saying ‘Dead End’. In a remote lake house in the Adirondacks, Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and Blair (Sarah Gadon), welcome Allison (Aubrey Plaza), an up-and-coming film director. Like the stereotypical artists, these three are creative and intelligent, but also childish and belligerent. Allison is a bald-faced pathological liar, Gabe is immature and manipulative, and Blair doesn’t let her pregnancy get in the way of a burgeoning alcoholism (the casting, by the way, is spot-on). Their interactions are fraught with patronizing passive-aggressiveness.This is plain good ol’ rubbernecking fun. The dialogue is both obscene and highbrow(I especially enjoyed the use of the word “solipsistic”), but sadly the biggest insult, to the audience’s intelligence, takes the form of a cliffhanger —for lack of a better term — that segues into BB2.The second half is a meta-textual quagmire wherein there’s a movie-within-the-movie, but that inner movie isn’t really the movie we were watching thus far, so presumably there’s a hypothetical third movie buried somewhere in this conceptual nightmare. If BB1 was a about a train wreck from which we could not take our eyes off, BB2 is just a train wreck, period. The only quality that crosses over from the first half is the acting, which is probably even better — but that just makes me feel sorry for the cast. All things considered, what we have here are two drafts of the same admittedly good idea, which doesn’t equal a single finished product. Instead of going back to the drawing board, the writer/director has simply opted to present the same underdeveloped premise twice in a row, both times neglecting to come up with a proper conclusion.