We Look For Love, No Time For Tears

.

I was not surprised to read that Weightless was filmed in a small nowhere town a couple hours outside of Syracuse, New York -- I was raised in a small nowhere town a couple hours outside of Syracuse New York and Weightless gets it right. The mobile home trailers that look like they fell out of a tornado fifty years ago, plunked down into snow and mud in an otherwise unoccupied field, only then to sprout some dead trees and car engines around them as the years fell off. Once upon a time these might have been where farmer's grew things but now, nothing grows. That feeling extends to the people, two feet in the mud and not a lot of prospects. But at least there's a bar nearby. 

Alessandro Nivola plays Joel, a man who'd rather spend time at work clambering among the frozen heaps of a garbage dump, digging up green glass, than do much of anything else. His life's not all loneliness - there are always other lonely people around to drink with and screw - but he seems to lean into the loneliness with some ease. When he is with people you get a sense that he doesn't trust himself - a tension that stretches along the length of Weightless, threatening to snap. Perhaps some isolation is for the best.

Turns out that Joel has a kid, though - a son named Will (played with serene mystery by newcomer Eli Haley) that Joel's never bothered seeing before, at least until one day when Will's mother just up and disappears. And suddenly there's Will, sitting on a mattress in Joel's trailer, roundly staring back, reflecting some, perhaps too much, of Joel's own weirdness back at him. Weightless then is one of those movies, you know the ones - one of those movies where adult responsibility is forced on an irresponsible loner, where life lessons get learned and love crests over a cold landscape like sunlight...

... except not really. Weightless, a low-key marvel, plays itself so close to its chest, akin to how these characters relate to this world and how this world relates to these characters, that it subverts nearly all of those cliches by just remaining its idiosyncratic and inwardly looking self. Love stories trail off like ellipses, and you're never really sure that anybody is doing the right thing, being the right person, for anybody else. Tensions and bad choices pile up, choke off, and yet Nivola especially, ever the emotional craftsman, gets you so invested in this twisted up soul that you're hooked, line and sinker, the entire shebang.

Weightless ends and, for all that it reminded me of my home, a place that I've run from, I wanted this time to stay - to spend more time with these folks and see them through. This movie feels like some sort of understanding, a piecing together of things that I've never been able to much suss out before - not with this shape, this form. A pile of prismatic green glass turned into an kaleidoscope of cool light, stretched across a ceiling, watching one big toe poke through a sock. It all felt profoundly familiar, in the best way.

.

.

Weightless opens in NY and LA tomorrow.

.