There’s often a figurative hole in the middle of films about writers, especially fictional ones. While other kinds of artists like musicians, dancers, or painters can briefly display their artistry within a film, few movies take the time to give a granular depiction of the process of writing (exceptions like “Paterson” are delightful). Breaking the classic rule of show, don’t tell, films such as “The Vanishing of Sidney Hall” rely on repeatedly insisting to the audience that the writer is a genius, even when most other evidence suggests otherwise.
Showing its eponymous young writer (Logan Lerman) at three different stages of life, shuffled together to withhold any real plot developments until the end, “The Vanishing of Sidney Hall” ignores the fact that writers mostly sit quietly in rooms and ratchets up the supposed mythology and melodrama of the writers’ life. Yet all the while, the only writing over a sentence long that the audience hears from Sidney comes at the very beginning, in the form of a pretty creepy (he pictures his subject “as a little girl”) ode to masturbation that he reads aloud in a high school class. Bad writing is often derided as “masturbatory,” but somehow Sidney’s essay is portrayed as a bold act of truth telling. The single most irritating and telling moment of the film comes when he’s being castigated for this act and his teacher (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) suggests he write a book and then, cut to, Sidney is a meteoric bestselling author. With this cut, the director elides all of the study and work that goes into becoming a writer and suggests that there’s a straight line from juvenile teenage posturing to artistic greatness. Obviously that’s not the case, but it’s fitting here, since “The Vanishing of Sidney Hall” has far less to do with the reality of writing than some high school fantasy of it, concocted after falling under the spell of “The Catcher in the Rye.”
After being tangentially involved in the suicide of his high school’s quarterback Brett Newport (Blake Jenner, channeling Armie Hammer), Sidney turns the experience into a novel, with the impossibly bland title of “Suburban Tragedy,” that supposedly exposes all the rot and phoniness of suburban life. The novel is a huge success; not only is it nominated for a Pulitzer, but it captivates one young man so much that he imitates it and takes his own life. The second time period of the movie, easily the worst, concerns Sidney dealing with the fruits of success in New York as well as the fallout from his fan’s suicide and another more personal death, which eventually lead him to go into hiding off the grid. The third time period shows Sidney around age thirty as he travels the backroads of America incognito with his hound dog, eventually being tracked down by a supposed cop with a hidden agenda (Kyle Chandler). However, this story is told anything but chronologically, hiding the answers to questions for so long that they’re disappointing when they finally come. The over-editing allows Christensen to achieve some narrative echoes, like joining together multiple scenes of people storming out of homes, but mostly it just feels like a frustrating distraction from real questions of character and motivation.
What’s especially frustrating is that the second two time periods feel barely necessary. The second period is a cliché-ridden mess, offering nothing but some half-hearted infidelity and a phoned-in Nathan Lane performance. The third section has a lot of fun imagery (in general, the movie looks great, with cinematography from Daniel Katz), with the beautiful landscapes and Sidney’s heavy beard calling to mind “Into the Wild,” but the only real action in that timeline is Kyle Chandler searching for Sidney and eventually finding him. The meat of the story is in the high school section, which also includes Sidney’s pursuit of mysterious girl-next-door Melody (Elle Fanning). Many of the individual scenes and moments in this section work; Fanning is her usual withdrawn and enigmatic self and there’s an interesting tension when Brett enlists the wary Sidney to dig up a mysterious package they buried years before. Christensen, a short film Academy Award winner in 2013, has apparent talent in crafting scenes and eliciting performances, but he’s bitten off more than he can chew with the big picture here and probably should’ve abandoned the attempted breadth of this story, limited the timeline, and dug much deeper in establishing the links between Brett Newport’s story and Sidney Hall’s fictionalization of it.
As it is, the more effective parts of the film feel like an attempt to distract the audience from questioning whether or not Sidney Hall is a compelling character. Even if one accepts that he’s a genius (he’s got pictures of Proust and Wilde on his wall!), once the plot’s mysteries are revealed, Sidney’s decisions turn out to be pretty reactionary. While there are a few intriguing themes and ideas at play in “The Vanishing of Sidney Hall,” once the viewer perseveres through the over-editing the final product is disappointing. It feels like Christensen was determined to write about a reclusive author and worked backwards from that idea. Instead of playing three-card Monte with the different timelines, Christensen should have given Sidney a deeper sense of identity both as a person and a writer before he tried to make him into a myth. [D+]
