Beautifully filmed—but ultimately too opaque in its plotting—Grear Patterson’s debut feature “Giants Being Lonely,” which premiered in competition at Venice, is a high school coming-of-age film that ultimately forgets its protagonists in its effort to be stylish. Utilizing first-time actors and an indistinct setting (southern, but otherwise hazy in terms of place and time-period), Patterson’s film is awash with the woozy, dreamlike cinematography that most will call Malick-ian. Overt in its references—including Malick, Bogdonovich’s “The Last Picture Show” and Gus Van Sant‘s “Paranoid Park”—“Giants Being Lonely” is both visually appealing and hollow in equal measure.
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Focusing in on the lives of two baseball players on the titular ‘Giants,’ Bobby (Jack Irving) is a star pitcher adrift. Clearly in love with high school beauty Caroline (Lily Gavin), he is also having an affair with his foul-mouthed baseball coach’s wife (Amalia Culp, only referred to as Mrs. S). Competing for Caroline is Adam (Ben Irving, brother to Jack), less a star baseball player but on the team nonetheless, if only because his villain of a father is the coach (played by Gabe Fazio, strikingly pulling off his single note). All this coupling and recoupling suggests more melodrama than Patterson’s film allows, as characters float in and out of sexual and romantic situations, almost as if indifferent.
While the film does obliquely reference the typical benchmarks of a youth-focused film, “Giants Being Lonely” is more concerned with the mundane wanderings of its characters. Caroline may be the object of both Bobby and Adam’s attention, but she and the narrative are so passive that the film is less interested in who she ends up with than lingering on her expression as these boys compete for her attention. Referred to as the ‘most beautiful girl in school,’ Caroline is given little interiority, treated only as an object by both protagonists. Whatever preference (or lack thereof) she exhibits for Adam and Bobby is lost, as she aimlessly floats from scene to scene, emoting listlessness at every chance.
However, the problem is not with Patterson’s decision to eschew narrative order in favor of atmospheric feeling. Instead, the film fails to flesh out any character, burdening his first-time actors with archetypal roles and stilted dialogue. When a third-act twist introduces actual violent, dramatic stakes to a film that has been, at most, lackadaisical in its approach to character and plot, it ultimately registers as rushed and false. Everything is subtext, as scenes float by with little grounding or purpose outside of compositional beauty. Adam—who eventually becomes centralized within that violent coda—is two-note in his construction, not existing outside of his infatuation with Caroline and the hatred of his father.
Those arresting visuals, though, are truly stunning in their isolated moments. Patterson and first-time cinematographer Hunter Zimny know how to compose a shot, juxtaposing the Giants’ bright yellow uniforms against the black sky in one particularly striking sequence in which Bobby plays through sickness to win a game. The baseball sequences—minus the almost comically profane coach—are the only scenes with any narrative weight, truthfully building camaraderie between Bobby, Adam, and the other players. Only when the plot pushes outward—focusing on Caroline, Bobby’s alcoholic father, or Adam’s passive mother—does Patterson’s film somewhat collapse, unable or unwilling to follow through on these threads.
Still, even with all these narrative gaps, “Giants Being Lonely” is a profoundly beautiful film. Not only in its compositional choices but also in its otherworldly sound design, which oscillates between formal and experimental, mixing classical score and ambient noise in equal measure. When violence does occur in the final few minutes, and the film becomes bathed in blue and red, it only highlights the unnatural glow that interrupts the naturalistic beauty that came before. Perhaps that’s the point, in which the daze of youth is interrupted with the reality of violence, but it ultimately feels unearned. Patterson and Zimny, though, are talents to watch for as they have made a stylistic—if somewhat derivative—first feature. Once they move through their litany of filmic references and further establish their voices, we can expect great things. [B-]
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