Nancy, Please (2012) Reviews

• Better than it should be

  filmbizarro2013-05-20

  Everyone loses something, now and then, that might not be that important to begin with, but finding it would make things so much easier. Your own laziness forces you to spend time on finding that one thing instead of starting over, which both makes sense and kinda doesn't - you've already done it, why not just look for it? Who would have guessed that this insignificant little part of life would be the basis of "Nancy, Please"? I shouldn't really have liked it that much, yet I do. It's a strange feeling when you on one hand could hold things against it, but on the other hand you are enjoying the experience too much for any of that to ruin it for you. Paul Brawley, a PhD candidate at Yale University, is close to get kicked out if he can't complete his thesis in time. The only problem is that all of his notes are in a copy of Dickens' "Little Dorrit", which he has lost when he moved in with his girlfriend. Soon he remembers that maybe his ex-room mate Nancy still has it, and after calling her many times he's assured it's there. When he's actually going to pick it up, it doesn't seem like she is responding anymore. He's going mad trying to figure out why she won't give him the book, and starts planning ways of getting the book - such as letting himself into her place and just grab it. This affects Paul so strongly that he's beginning to build up a hate towards Nancy, and his desperation is growing by the day. While the idea of such obsession is fantastic, I am willing to admit that the movie should be as insignificant as the idea of losing a particular object. The movie doesn't try to prove me wrong, either. Yet there is something in Paul Brawley's desperation and descent into madness (a very believable madness, that doesn't go over-the-top) that just grabs you and keeps you interested. It's not a movie with great turns. I can't even say it has a great conflict, let alone resolution. But we've all been in Paul Brawley's shoes, and it's quite interesting to speculate around the entire situation. Is Nancy a complete bitch, or is that just Paul's side of it? She's certainly different and a bit difficult, but is that enough to justify Paul's hate towards her? "Nancy, Please" doesn't mind swaying a bit outside of the frames or regular drama. It has hints of an unsettling psychological thriller, one particular scene being a dream. There's also a black comedy tucked into it all, which won't make you laugh but it's one of those situational things where you can just sense a lighter mood. So while still being pretty much purely a drama, it sways just enough for us to fear the edge. We're never entirely safe, I suppose. "Nancy, Please" is a lot more entertaining that it probably should be, considering the insignificance of so much in the movie. That's intentional, of course, that a book with notes he could easily rewrite is what drives him crazy to begin with. It's when his mind is thinking for itself that it's actually going somewhere. It works as an interesting character study based on something that one can relate to. Also, the idea of poor communication causing things to go completely awry is not unusual with all of these e-mails and text messages we have nowadays. I liked it quite a bit, but I have no idea how it would play on a revisit since the curiosity and not knowing where it is heading is part of the fun. It's a clever, interesting, fun yet slightly unsettling at times. More reviews at FilmBizarro.com

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• Great concept, middling execution

  tlatlatecolotl2014-12-28

  This is a superhero of a story trapped in the awkward, gangly body of a middling film. We follow Paul, an entitled, dissipate ---but still somewhat likable--- young man taking the next step of what seems to be a charmed affluent life: great relationship, moving into a new home, good job teaching at Yale. We see him effortlessly floating through life, being passively charming, enabled by those around him (especially the women in his life). The best word to describe him is "loose", in that it characterizes his casual teaching approach, his droll engagement with others, his arm's-length distance from most things. But this chill, hipsterish looseness begins a slow simmer and heats to an obsessive boil when he discovers that a meaningful object (his note-riddled copy of Dickens' "Little Dorrit") has been left behind in the apartment he shared with the titular Nancy, an apparent embodiment of the "difficult roommate" stereotype, of which we first learn via passing conversational exposition, a montage of selected Facebook photos, and a couple of voice mail messages. Paul's increasingly-desperate insistence on recovering his book from Nancy is contrasted with an attempt to identify and neutralize the source of constant scurrying behind the walls of his new home's attic study, and upon his success at capturing the squirrel responsible for the latter, we witness a glimpse of the streak of cruelty he reserves for those who inconvenience him. Nancy, his main perceived antagonist, however, continues to elude him, and in his inability to get what he wants, he becomes convinced that she is willfully conspiring to ruin his life. The film does an excellent job of presenting Paul's gradual undoing out of sheer frustration, risking the loss of everything he has in the process. But all this build-up is for naught, as his final confrontation with his nemesis is handled awkwardly and almost timidly, which minimizes the impact of suddenly thrusting us out of Paul's tiny little insular world of comfortable entitlement and into the harsh reality of other people's lives; others who are, at best, perceived to be mere pests, but at worst represent the very cause of all that is wrong with the world, others whose priorities may be quite different because their lives are quite different. With a few stylistic enhancements and a tighter rein on the narrative, this story could have succeeded as dark psychodrama in the vein of Hitchcock or Polanski, effectively drawing in some of the inferred Dickensian contrast between the haves and the have-nots. As it is, however, the film suffers from assuming the same standoffish stance to the material that the protagonist takes towards his enviable life, implying a certain ambivalence to the underlying social message that provides meaning to Paul's journey from annoyance to paranoia, and ultimately fails to convey what could have been a tense tightrope walk across the growing chasm separating the privileged from the rest of us.

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• I Thought Maybe This Was a Filmography of a True Story?

  weasl-729-3106822014-08-21

  I googled, but could not find much on this film. It feels like a true tale, but there' no evidence easily dredged up to support that feeling. Maybe because I am such an old-school dog for justice, I really identified with the protagonist. I have been through some similar crap. Today it is so easy for psychopaths to dominate everyone around them, because individual rights have been so diminished from when I was younger. Many laws such as noise ordinances are no longer, as a rule, enforced although they remain on the books so that the rich and powerful need not be annoyed. The irony is that in their neighborhoods, they very rarely have to deal with the rude intrusiveness of those who would violate the noise ordinance to begin with. I can very much relate to Paul's lack of sympathy when he goes to the cops and from mostly everyone to whom he communicates. When you're right, you're right. SCREW popular opinion! This is apparently a small film not seen by many at all. But it's definitely worth a watch if you like gripping movies that hold your attention until the end, which, incidentally, came out quite differently than I expected.

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