Listen Up Philip, a darkly funny new movie starring Jason Schwartzman as the writer Philip Lewis Friedman, begins with a clearing of a throat. Listen up, all! A voice-over narrates as a whiskery Schwartzman marches down a sidewalk. The voice explains that he is man, “characteristically not in a hurry, but perpetually enraged by slow foot traffic before him.”
It’s the perfect summation of the movie, which premiered earlier this month at the New York Film Festival. On the eve of publishing his second, sure-to-be-a-hit novel, Philip is obsessively preoccupied with his career trajectory. He’s so distracted that he spends all his energy looking for anything that could possibly be holding him back. And when he finds it, you can hear him scream silently in his Randian mind: get out of my way, mindless peons. The "serious" New Yorker who takes his "art" to suffocating, obnoxious levels—that's Philip.
It’s not a minute into the movie before Philip unleashes this rage on an old college girlfriend. For all his neurosis, he seems aggressively pleased to be in a world of jerk writers, among men who say things like: “I’m a nice guy. Read an article about me. I’m self deprecating.” The most determinedly jerkish of the bunch is Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), who we learn is one of the most prolific authors of the 1970s and 80s, with a breakout novel called Madness and Women (ha!). Zimmerman courts Philip in order to be his mentor. They bond over a similar idea that creative men live perpetually at risk of other people, particularly women, sucking them dry. Zimmerman soon teaches Philip two main principles: write outside of New York and cyclically hurt the people in your life. Again, that particularly applies to women.
So what about these soul-sucking she-beasts? In less subtle directorial hands (this was written and directed by Alex Ross Perry), the women would be peripheral. Instead, we see how the writerly men around them treat them as peripheral. They are viewed as characters, distractions, crutches, and chains, to men like Philip. And all of our sympathies attach to them the more they are scorned and treated like scapegoats.
The actors playing these women don’t hurt this matter: Krysten Ritter plays Ike’s daughter with vulnerable fury, Joséphine de la Baume is lovely as the golden and territorial professor Yvette. Dree Hemingway is hilarious as a flirtatious photo assistant, as is Kate Lyn Sheil as one of Philip’s exes.
But it’s Ashley (played by Elisabeth Moss), a photographer and Philip’s girlfriend, who gleams as the most intellectually fascinating character in the movie of people who believe they are intellectually fascinating. Her moments without Philip are a series of little revelations: she sells his clothes on her stoop, she gets a cat, she kisses a scumbag at a bar. Practicing ballet alone in her apartment is one of the most poignant instances of a character fully enjoying and learning about themselves through their solitude.
At the end of the film, Ashley and Philip are fighting. The narrative voice-over (excellently spoken by Eric Bogosian) supersedes Ashley’s speech, so that we see her talking, but only hear commentary about it. The narration choices are tricky and fascinating: the narration is at once an all-seeing voice that knows the internal minds of each person and also the way that Philip is writing this story to himself.
What we learn: Ashley’s speech reminds Philip of a quotation he wants to use to open a novel. The audience is left trying to lip-read Ashley’s words instead of listening to this narration. We are begging Philip just to hear the people in his life, rather than coddling the voices in his own head. Listen up, man.
Listen Up Philip
It’s the perfect summation of the movie, which premiered earlier this month at the New York Film Festival. On the eve of publishing his second, sure-to-be-a-hit novel, Philip is obsessively preoccupied with his career trajectory. He’s so distracted that he spends all his energy looking for anything that could possibly be holding him back. And when he finds it, you can hear him scream silently in his Randian mind: get out of my way, mindless peons. The "serious" New Yorker who takes his "art" to suffocating, obnoxious levels—that's Philip.
It’s not a minute into the movie before Philip unleashes this rage on an old college girlfriend. For all his neurosis, he seems aggressively pleased to be in a world of jerk writers, among men who say things like: “I’m a nice guy. Read an article about me. I’m self deprecating.” The most determinedly jerkish of the bunch is Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), who we learn is one of the most prolific authors of the 1970s and 80s, with a breakout novel called Madness and Women (ha!). Zimmerman courts Philip in order to be his mentor. They bond over a similar idea that creative men live perpetually at risk of other people, particularly women, sucking them dry. Zimmerman soon teaches Philip two main principles: write outside of New York and cyclically hurt the people in your life. Again, that particularly applies to women.
So what about these soul-sucking she-beasts? In less subtle directorial hands (this was written and directed by Alex Ross Perry), the women would be peripheral. Instead, we see how the writerly men around them treat them as peripheral. They are viewed as characters, distractions, crutches, and chains, to men like Philip. And all of our sympathies attach to them the more they are scorned and treated like scapegoats.
The actors playing these women don’t hurt this matter: Krysten Ritter plays Ike’s daughter with vulnerable fury, Joséphine de la Baume is lovely as the golden and territorial professor Yvette. Dree Hemingway is hilarious as a flirtatious photo assistant, as is Kate Lyn Sheil as one of Philip’s exes.
But it’s Ashley (played by Elisabeth Moss), a photographer and Philip’s girlfriend, who gleams as the most intellectually fascinating character in the movie of people who believe they are intellectually fascinating. Her moments without Philip are a series of little revelations: she sells his clothes on her stoop, she gets a cat, she kisses a scumbag at a bar. Practicing ballet alone in her apartment is one of the most poignant instances of a character fully enjoying and learning about themselves through their solitude.
At the end of the film, Ashley and Philip are fighting. The narrative voice-over (excellently spoken by Eric Bogosian) supersedes Ashley’s speech, so that we see her talking, but only hear commentary about it. The narration choices are tricky and fascinating: the narration is at once an all-seeing voice that knows the internal minds of each person and also the way that Philip is writing this story to himself.
What we learn: Ashley’s speech reminds Philip of a quotation he wants to use to open a novel. The audience is left trying to lip-read Ashley’s words instead of listening to this narration. We are begging Philip just to hear the people in his life, rather than coddling the voices in his own head. Listen up, man.
Listen Up Philip