Before Cloverfield, Apes and Batman, there was The Pallbearer

Most people think of Matt Reeves for all the high-profile projects that have made him a respected name in Hollywood over the past 15 years.

Me, I always think of him as "the guy who directed The Pallbearer."

The Pallbearer is a largely forgotten romantic comedy from 1996, Reeves' first feature, which might be a touch more melancholy than your average rom com as it starts out with a suicide. Its cast suggests it deserves to be remembered, if not for its quality then at least for the abundance of talent present within the frame. You start with Gwyneth Paltrow, David Schwimmer, Toni Collette, Michael Rapaport, Carol Kane and Barbara Hershey, but by no means do you finish there. I'll get into that a bit more later. 

The reason I remember The Pallbearer so well -- or at least, so fondly -- was that it made my first-ever top ten list in 1996. As you know I'm rewatching my #1s in 2022, and by no means do I intend to expand that to other films in my top ten -- not in any formalized way, anyway. But I decided to watch this one, my #9 of that year, just to interrogate whether or not I was crazy to have chosen it. Incidentally, it's the only film in my top ten I hadn't already seen twice other than Secrets and Lies at #5.

It was also worth revisiting because Reeves' latest film, The Batman, is due in theaters in two weeks.

It's certainly an interesting start for Reeves, indicative of the immediate next step in his career but not of the later steps that have come to define him. After co-writing and directing The Pallbearer, he co-developed the TV show Felicity with J.J. Abrams, himself a future maker of prestige tentpoles. Felicity of course launched the careers of Keri Russell and Scott Speedman, not to mention Abrams favorite Greg Grunberg, who appears in The Pallbearer. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

After these two properties concerning the melancholy romantic lives of young people, Reeves went full blockbuster. Cloverfield may not have initially profiled that way, and it did sort of concern the romantic lives of young people as a bridge with his prior work. But once you add a Godzilla-type creature into your movie, it's got a blockbuster mentality whether it's a success or not. And Cloverfield was a success, spawning an eventual franchise of increasingly diminishing returns.

The returns did not diminish for Reeves. He followed Cloverfield with a remake of Let the Right One In, called Let Me In, which I actually thought was really good. I shouldn't say "actually" like I'm surprised, since Reeves' first two features made my top ten of their respective years. I say "actually" more because those American remakes of foreign films are usually truly inferior in quality, and while this obviously wasn't as good as the original, it made some excellent choices and even included some interesting deviations from Tomas Alfredsson's film. Plus Reeves' technique really stood out, particularly some choices with where to place and move his camera.

Reeves disappointed me for the first time with his Planet of the Apes movies, but not until the second one. Twenty fourteen's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes proved Reeves could truly do no wrong -- at least at that point -- as again he used interesting camera setups, particularly regarding the moving of vehicles or characters on vehicles. More importantly, I really liked that film even though I had really disliked Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which kicked off the new trilogy in 2011. It wasn't until War for the Planet of the Apes in 2017 that I thought Reeves made his first stinker. Maybe he shouldn't have gone back to the well a second time, and his creative drive suffered for it.

Now apparently he has spent the last five years making The Batman, whose nearly three-hour length suggests he needed every one of those five years. I'm skeptical, of course, but Reeves' name on the project indicates I have good reason for optimism.

It's hard to fully comprehend the trajectory of Reeves' career, if not recently then at least from where it started. We tend to think that you're either the rom com guy or the blockbuster guy, and never the twain shall meet. But maybe Reeves was one of the first MCU directors, in effect, someone who was effectively plucked from obscurity and ended up making some of the best movies in that series -- you know, like Joe and Anthon Russo. Except Reeves did his own plucking, teaming up with J.J. Abrams, a genuine fellow collaborator, to will Cloverfield into existence. The rest is history.

Speaking of history, let's start to look a bit at my history with The Pallbearer, long in length but short in quantity.

The outlier you want to honor

I suspect I knew even in 1996 that The Pallbearer was not destined to be a classic. It wasn't heralded at the time -- though it did play Un Certain Regard at Cannes -- and I probably knew even then it was more of a "me movie."

It just goes to show that even from the start, I have never been interested in only honoring films that had a chance at a best picture nomination or an independent spirit award.

I suppose The Pallbearer actually did have those credentials -- the movie was put out by awards darling Miramax, and Paltrow would win best actress only two years later for Shakespeare in Love, also a Miramax film. I knew that this particular film, though, did not have much hope for that sort of recognition.

From the start it has been important to me to recognize films that had spoken to me specifically. The Pallbearer was not that for any of its plot reasons -- which I will touch on in the next subheading -- but it definitely caught me at about the same age as the characters, who are supposed to be 25. I was 23 in early 1997 when I named it my ninth best movie of the year, though I may have been 22 when I saw it. (The movie came out in May of 1996, when I was definitely still 22, but I have no memory of whether I saw this on the big screen or on video. Probably the latter.)

The risk, of course, is that by the cold light of day 25 years later, you might regret the choice. Having watched The Pallbearer a second time now, I don't regret it. At the start I thought "This is a bit broad, and I'm not sure I get what I liked so much about it." By the end that had changed to "Oh yeah, I get it now."

I'm not sure it would make the top ten of modern re-ranking of these movies -- in 1996, The Pallbearer found itself ahead of stalwarts like Trainspotting, The English Patient and Jerry Maguire, so that's a pretty tall order. But with every new movie Reeves made, it strengthened my certainty that there was something there in The Pallbearer, and this viewing has proven me correct. 

The Graduate meets Dear Evan Hansen

I said I would touch on the plot, and now it's time. Spoiler alert if you really don't want to know anything about this 26-year-old movie. 

The story reminded me of two other stories, one that came out twentysomething years before it and one that came out twentysomething years after it.

David Schwimmer's character, Tom Thompson, is identified as the possible best friend of a young man who has just killed himself, even though he barely knew him. In order to help soothe the man's grieving mother, he stumbles into a number of lies and increasingly greater intimacy with the dead man -- including giving his eulogy, and of course acting as a pallbearer at his funeral.

If Dear Evan Hansen wasn't directly inspired by this movie, I have to think its creators were at least aware of it. The plot of that film involves a high school student who, through a sitcom-worthy succession of miscommunications, is believed to be the best friend of another boy who has just killed himself, and accidentally leans into it after first lying to help soothe the grieving parents. 

The movie of Dear Evan Hansen came out last year -- and was terrible -- but the play dates back to 2016. So just barely twentysomething years.

Part of Tom's comforting of the man's mother, Ruth Abernathy (Hershey), involves sleeping with her. Like his initial lies, of course this is not intentional. Nothing Tom does is intentional -- that's one of his defining character traits -- and most of those things are born out of his overdeveloped sense of empathy for other people. The escalates when Ruth is just a little too handsy, gives him a few too many meaningful looks, and before long they're having sex, not once, but regularly.

Of course, this only happens because Tom is spurned by the woman he actually loves, his old high school crush, Julie DeMarco (Paltrow). She turns him down politely -- she says she's about to leave on a trip, which eventually turns out to be true -- but it's enough to throw Tom into Ruth's arms. When Julie does ultimately return his affections, the fact that he's been sleeping with Ruth creates complications for everyone.

Smell The Graduate, do you?

That one would be intentional. You can't intentionally allude to a property that doesn't exist yet -- obviously -- but Reeves et al would have definitely wanted to make us think of one of the great movies of all time that has the tone they wanted to emulate.

Effectively uncredited pallbearers

I mentioned Greg Grunberg earlier. Well, he wasn't the only familiar face in The Pallbearer who gets no lines of dialogue.

Both Grunberg and Zak Orth, a guy who went on to act a lot back then but has been heard from less lately, appear as "Abernathy cousins." The camera actually goes to them three different times over the course of the narrative, but they never get to say anything. Would have cost more I suppose.

The really interesting one, though, was Kevin Corrigan, who appears as an actual pallbearer -- and I could only tell it was him by catching a glimpse of the side of his face. This is a bit strange as Corrigan had just played a starring role in Nicole Holofcener's Walking and Talking the year before, to say nothing of appearing in films like Goodfellas and True Romance. Hardly a face who should just disappear into the crowd.

Interestingly, although Wikipedia lists Grunberg as uncredited in this film, he does appear in the end credits. You can't make a guy who hasn't done anything yet uncredited, can you?

The heyday of David and Gwyneth

Today, we may think of David Schwimmer as the guy who became super whiny and annoying on Friends, and Gwyneth Paltrow as the woman who introduced us to the concept of vagina eggs. It's easy to forget they could both once be enormously effective screen presences.

Schwimmer makes a perfect neurotic schlub, though neurotic in ways far more human-sized than Ross Geller. You can easily see him being the heir apparent to Dustin Hoffman, which this film was obviously trying to position him to be. But he shows really great comic timing and line readings here, while projecting a sympathetic quality that can't be faked. His peak period may not have lasted long, but it was rich.

Paltrow stayed in our good graces a bit longer before all the Goop stuff. She was really just ascendant at this point, having made a lasting impression in Seven but still being pretty unknown, despite being the scion of Hollywood royalty. The Pallbearer shows us why she became such a go-to for this sort of role for a decade to come. Without wanting to suggest I judge her by different standards than I judge Schwimmer, I must also admit I am a heterosexual man, and I find her simply adorable in this film. She has this way of listening with her mouth half open and her eyes half closed that just turns me into pudding. But the effectiveness of this performance is no mere function of her physical attributes. Her reactions are all completely naturalistic, and she communicates hesitation that spills over into standing up for herself with remarkable fluidity. She basically just lights up the screen.

                                                              **********

That's probably way more subheadings than anyone needs about The Pallbearer. I probably should also talk about the early appearance of Toni Collette, but I've already written too much. Hey, when I find myself in a fruitful period for my writing, I'm really writing, I guess. 

Question your assumptions: The Graduate

It has occurred to me recently that there may classic movies I am "giving a pass."

In other words, I saw them once, a long time ago, and have since been according them a respect in my personal film rankings that is more akin to their general sense of widespread acclaim, than the specific love I may feel for them myself.

Evidence of this abounds, and it can be found at work in my Flickchart rankings. I have used the movie-dueling site to work toward a definitive ranking of all the movies I've ever seen, from first to worst. And while I know an exact ranking of these titles is an impossible task, in no small part because my feelings toward most movies are in a permanent state of flux, I do strive to make the rankings as precise as I can with the means at my disposal. In other words, I try to make them "feel right."

Inherent in the task of ranking movies you haven't seen in a while is that you have to assign them a certain value relative to the titles about which you can speak more authoritatively, either because you've seen them more often or because you've seen them more recently. In these valuations, some movies inevitably sink lower than they should; others artificially rise.

More often than not, the ones that artificially rise the most are the ones about which I felt positively, but about which I know others went gaga. These are usually what are considered the classics -- classics I might have liked a lot or even loved, but have seen only that single time, many years ago. I am likely to elevate these classics to where they're doing battle with some of my tested all-time favorites, the ones I've seen a half-dozen or more times. I think, "I know these movies are great, so I have arbitrarily decided to assign x amount of greatness to them."

So I think it's valuable, from time to time, to go through and revisit these movies to get a better sense for what you're really dealing with. And so it is that I bring you a new periodic series called Question Your Assumptions, where I take whatever opportunities I have to re-watch highly regarded movies that I may be artificially inflating to greater heights than they really deserve. I mean, I know I liked these movies quite a bit -- but should I really be ranking them among my favorites?

I may only be formally introducing this series with a banner now, but rewatching these movies is something I've been informally doing for a couple years now. Just off the top of my head, I think of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Annie Hall and Chinatown as movies I have subjected to this questioning of assumptions, all within the past three or four years. In the case of Butch Cassidy, my affection was greater than I remembered. Chinatown, less. And Annie Hall about the same. In any case, it's worth knowing. And it's worth pointing out that these movies are all within my top 150 on Flickchart, so we're really talking gradations of greatness here.

And so it was that on Wednesday night, when my wife was out at a meeting and I had no idea what to watch, I reminded myself that Mike Nichols' The Graduate was streaming on Netflix, and had been for some time. The Graduate was a perfect candidate for this nascent series -- it's currently sitting at #111 on my Flickchart, and I've only seen it the one time, probably sometime in the mid-1990s.

Well, I must say, this is much more an odd duck of a movie than I'd remembered.

I'm not going to do anything like a thorough analysis of the film -- that's too high of a standard for me to live up to in the limited time I'm allotting myself to write these posts. More than anything, what I'll probably accomplish is to mention some things that struck me on a second viewing, particularly the things that ultimately impacted whether I'm ranking these movies too high, or in some cases, not high enough.

Why is The Graduate so odd? Well, I suppose you'd be surprised if I didn't tell you.

I had forgotten that Benjamin Braddock's love interest, Elaine Robinson, does not even come into the movie until it is more than half over. According to the traditional structure of any kind of romance, either comedy or drama, you would meet the protagonist's primary love interest early on in the movie. Whether or not it was revealed that this character was his (or her) love interest at the time is not important, because all you're trying to do is start building audience sympathy for this person. We need to be rooting for them early, even if we're not consciously aware of it.

What Nichols and Dustin Hoffman -- and, it should be said, Katherine Ross -- do so effectively here is to get us to love Elaine Robinson in just one scene. And it was a scene I had forgotten entirely. Eager to fulfill only the most minimal requirements of his date with Elaine, a date he was coerced into and one that flew in the face of his lover's explicitly stated desires, Benjamin takes Elaine to a strip club. He's sure that by behaving curtly toward her and humiliating her with his choice of venue, he will queer any feelings Elaine might have toward him and nip in the bud any possible discussion of a second date.

What Benjamin doesn't realize is how he will react to the human toll of this humiliation. As a go-go dancer with tassles on her nipples lowers these extensions closer and closer to Elaine's head, and Elaine looks at him with a sense of deep sorrow and shame over the way he's chosen to insult her, Benjamin loses all his former resolve. He meant to crush Elaine, in a way, but he didn't anticipate what it would feel like. "Do you dislike me for some reason Benjamin?" The question is so sad and plaintive that when Elaine flees the seedy joint, crying, he can think of no better way to prove that he's not that guy than to engage her in a deep and loving kiss. It's as though he's recognized all the out-sized cruelty of Elaine's mother in that one moment of humiliation to which he's an unwitting party. Impulsively, recklessly, he casts aside Mrs. Robinson's foreboding words and gives himself into the passion of the moment. From that time onward, we want these two to be together. (Incidentally, I couldn't help but think of Taxi Driver -- still just a twinkle in Martin Scorsese's eye at this time -- and Travis Bickle's oblivious attempt to take Cybill Shepherd on a date to a porn theater.)

The script of The Graduate is so economical in these scenes of establishing the budding romance between Benjamin and Elaine that it's the very next day that Mrs. Robinson forces Benjamin into admitting to Elaine that he slept with her mother -- and yet we feel the loss of their relationship as something tragic and epic. So firmly has the inevitability of their connection been established that it takes only a single date to get us to that point.

Thus continues a series of erratic decisions by Benjamin that probably began when he first called Mrs. Robinson from that hotel, and only get more erratic from here on out. Benjamin vows to marry Elaine, even though she officially doesn't ever want to speak to him again. Benjamin moves to Berkeley to effectively, albeit politely, stalk her. The stalking actually works, sort of, and Elaine starts to entertain the notion of marrying him. Until her father intervenes, nearly coming to blows with the man and seeming to finally put a permanent end to any possibility of Benjamin and Elaine. In almost the very next scene, Elaine is not only officially engaged to this other guy (Carl), but actually at the church ready to marry him. If there isn't something surreal about these sequence of events, I don't think I understand the definition of surreal.

From here, Benjamin begins a mad hunt at high speeds to find that church and prevent Elaine from marrying her rich Aryan dufus. There's real blood and passion and craziness in this man, and his chase memorably culminates in the scene at the church, banging that window, screaming that name, and -- against all odds -- actually whisking the bride away from the altar onto the back of a bus leaving town. Followed by that memorable closing shot, where the two compulsive young lovers have made their ecstatic choice, and then are quickly overcome with the sense of spiritual disappointment and ennui that comes with all the questions that lie ahead of them. The thrill of their hunt is almost immediately replaced with the anticlimax of achieving their goal.

Like I said, an odd duck of a movie indeed.

And also an incredibly funny one, especially in the first half, when Benjamin trips all over himself first avoiding Mrs. Robinson, and then ultimately giving in to her, but in a fashion made klutzy by his overwhelming sense of guilt and wrongdoing. Hoffman plays these scenes perfectly. Especially funny are his dalliances with the hotel clerk played by Buck Henry, who also wrote the movie.

(As another parenthetical aside as it relates to another classic movie -- are those flashes of Anne Bancroft's skin, where we are meant to get an idea of her nudity without actually seeing it, a direct homage to Pyscho?)

Clearly this is a seminal film full of quotable lines, iconic moments and memorable performances. It ushered in a new era of Hollywood and was one of the earliest of a type of awkward comedy that has blossomed in the years since. Hoffman also became kind of a template for stammering, stuttering nebbishes who would particularly take off in the films of Woody Allen.

But is it my seminal film full of quotable lines, iconic moments and memorable performances?

Yeah. Yeah I think it is.

I don't know that I like it more than I did the first time, but I think I appreciate it more as an extremely unconventional film that must have blown the minds of the people who saw it at the time. At the same time I find it scruffy and shaggy and imperfect in many ways.

I suppose if it had been a bit more "perfect" in the traditional ways one might think of a movie being perfect, it wouldn't have made a name for itself. It wouldn't be The Graduate.