[originally published on GreenCine in 2008]
Is there something in the misty Northwest air that makes its filmmakers incline toward the dreamy, the open-ended, the unresolved? Seattle has had no slick Hollywood “breakthrough,” instead turning out poetic little movies that seem embarrassed about conventional storytelling.
This can be a good thing. Case in point: Lynn Shelton’s My Effortless Brilliance, a 2008 feature that browses through the delicate business of broken friendship. After a brief prologue, the film travels to a forest cabin where the grandly-named, once-promising novelist Eric Lambert Jones (played by Harvey Danger frontman Sean Nelson) has gone to maybe patch things up with the testy Dylan (Basil Harris), an old friend who got fed up with Eric’s narcissistic ways. For a day and a night, they drink, chop wood, talk around it.
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