In 2017, “The Big Sick” was the big sale of the Sundance Film Festival (beaten one week later by “Mudbound”). Those were the days, when streamers were spending big to acquire quality independent movies. The bottom has since fallen out of that market. Now we get cautious nibbles in place of all-night bidding wars. Sadly, audiences aren’t showing up for such movies like they once did, which means that a film like “See You When I See You” — an earnest, emotional indie from director Jay Duplass and the team behind “The Big Sick” — might be more aptly called “Will Anyone Ever See You?”
Neither is quite as snappy as screenwriter Adam Cayton-Holland’s original title, “Tragedy Plus Time,” a reference to the Steve Allen/Carol Burnett/Woody Allen-attributed equation for comedy, but also a pithy way to describe Cayton-Holland’s “memoir of loss and the funniest person I ever knew” (the book’s subtitle). Like “Ordinary People” as viewed through the eyes of a sad clown, the book describes how the death by suicide of Cayton-Holland’s kid sister shook the standup comedian and his family.
In the movie, the main character is named Aaron (whom Cooper Raiff plays as a tricky mix of abrasive and endearing), so preoccupied with his own guilt and grief that he takes for granted the feelings of his surviving sister Emily (Lucy Boynton) and parents Robert (David Duchovy) and Page (Hope Davis), who might have breast cancer, but is keeping it to herself. Aaron spends most of the movie either drinking, moping or stalking his ex-girlfriend Camila (Ariela Barer), a social worker who turns out to be incredibly patient and sympathetic when he finally explains his reason for ghosting her.
It’s the latest example of the Sundance Film Festival’s new favorite genre, the “traumedy,” in which something devastating has already happened to the main characters, and laughter serves as a kind of healing tool — or else a way to make the pain of excavating that core wound more palatable for audiences. We’re a long way from the carefree laughs of “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Napoleon Dynamite” here, though not quite as insufferable as the genre’s more serious-minded alternative, to which I might advise: Trauma is not drama. It’s better off as subtext, the way such damage works in reality, complicating matters as we try to deal with all the other challenges life throws at us.
One-third of the Grawlix comedy troupe, Cayton-Holland is a naturally funny person, and his instinct is to apply humor to even the toughest subjects (which, audiences may recall, was Kumail Nanjiani’s recipe for dealing with his wife Emily V. Gordon’s mysterious illness in “The Big Sick”). In the film, Aaron manages a comedy site called Kumquat, though his pitches turn super-dark in the wake of his sister’s death. So does he, treating every little setback as a personal attack by the universe. “Is that poop!?” he bellows when a bird does what a bird does on his head (another comedy-equals-tragedy-plus-time example most people find difficult to appreciate in the moment).
Raiff, the filmmaker and star of such indie comedies as “Shithouse” and “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” could be the generation-younger equivalent of this movie’s director, Jay Duplass, who played a similarly complicated sibling/son in Amazon’s “Transparent” series. “See You When I See You” benefits from Duplass’ own emotional maturity. The improv-driven films made with younger brother Mark (among the most successful examples of the early-2000s mumblecore movement) succeed because his characters are so in touch with their feelings.
Aaron still has a lot to work through about his sister’s death. He remembers Leah (Kaitlyn Dever) as the wild and spontaneous one in the family, as demonstrated by a childhood memory in which she acts unpredictably during a lakeside photo. There’s something off about the way this opening scene looks: It’s too gauzy, and also weirdly oversaturated. But that flat, cheap, made-for-television vibe doesn’t go away when the film catches up to the present. DP Jim Frohna, whose only other feature was shooting for “The Big Sick” director Michael Showalter, has worked most in TV. But DIY-inclined Duplass was never much of a visual stylist, eschewing such distractions in favor of whatever reads as the most honest and true.
That’s a problem here, since he’s obviously working from a more traditional script — one in which flashbacks to the night Leah died keep intruding, along with ghostly fantasies in which Leah appears to him, only to be sucked up into the sky via underfunded visual effects. Cayton-Holland’s writing can be quite eloquent and insightful at times, but the movie lacks the kind of spontaneity that made Duplass’ past work seem so alive (from those early collaborations with his brother to last year’s solo directing debut “The Baltimorons”).
It feels a bit too much like going to therapy, right down to the scenes where Aaron goes to therapy, which he stubbornly resists. He doesn’t want a funeral or any other kind of ceremony, going as far as to steal the urn from his parents’ house. “You’re just nervous your eulogy’s not going to be the best thing ever written,” Emily analyzes. Audiences can sense where everything is headed: toward self-forgiveness and a full-family group hug.
That’s the problem with traumedies. They peddle the fantasy that if we can just name or face the root cause, then all will be well with the world. “See You When I See You” may be a bit too simplistic, but it is sincere. On his own journey toward a solo directing career, Duplass has made a movie with audiences in mind — a relatable story for anyone who’s ever lost someone or just felt lost yourself.
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