Quirky Indie ‘Restless’ has Quirkier Video Release

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Movies Editor

Completed in 2010, Gus Van Sant’s “Restless” premiered at Cannes in May 2011 (opening the “Un Certain Regard” portion), and finally opened last September in the U.S., running for three months in extremely limited release (one to 126 theatres) to widely mixed reviews and poor box office. Last week Sony released it in a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack including a peculiarly intriguing bonus feature.

“Restless” is an off-beat low-budget indie film that first-time screenwriter Jason Lew adapted from several short stories and a play he’d written. Lew’s college friend Bryce Dallas Howard got excited enough about the concept to get her father Ron Howard to co-produce the film with Brian Grazer, and when a name director like Van Sant liked the script, funding fell into place and they started shooting in late 2009.

A different sort of romantic coming-of-age tale, it follows a depressed teenage boy named Enoch, obsessed with death ever since he survived a car crash that killed his parents, and a vivacious but thoughtful teenage girl named Annabel, who is fascinated by life and nature even while she knows she has terminal cancer and only three months to live. Both have a habit of attending funerals of people they don’t know, and when they meet they gradually develop a relationship that allows each to learn something about life and death from the other, as well as Enoch’s invisible friend Hiroshi, the troubled ghost of a World War II kamikaze pilot.

The subject matter may seem morose, but Van Sant balances the ostensibly tragic theme and dramatic moments with lighter material and sometimes irreverent darkly comic humor that has a natural, even therapeutic humanity to it. While to some it may simply be one more romance with a dying lover, it’s not just a shameless tear-jerker like “Love Story,” and it’s also not a broad black farce like “Harold and Maude.” The film is carried by the touching, sensitive performances by its two leads, Henry Hopper (son of the late Dennis Hopper) and Mia Wasikowska (who had the title role in Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” and the 2011 “Jane Eyre”), as well as Ryo Kase as Hiroshi and Schuyler Fisk (daughter of Sissy Spacek) as Annabel’s older sister.

Besides the 91-minute film and the usual assortment of trailers, deleted scenes, and “making-of” featurettes (all of which are in high-definition), the disc includes a 76-minute cut of the film with music and sound effects, but silent-movie-style title cards replacing the dialogue. Van Sant has said in interviews that he shot silent takes of scenes to make editing easier, so he wasn’t tied to showing character actions happening only with specific lines of dialogue. It’s a technique he started when shooting “Milk” after Sean Penn mentioned that Terrence Malick did it, allowing the actors to tell the story visually in glances and gestures instead of relying on words. This gave the director the option to extend screen silences or even eliminate lines of dialogue altogether when characters’ feelings were clear from the performances.

In the case of “Restless,” editor Elliot Graham decided to put together a complete separate dialogue-free cut of the film using those takes, possibly motivated by one of the cast members joking that with all the silent takes they should just do it as a silent film. Interestingly, back in December a review from Australia theorized it might have worked much better as a silent film than the dialogue-heavy theatrical release then playing. Perhaps the unexpected critical acclaim of “The Artist,” a new film actually designed as a silent, inspired the inclusion of the silent version of “Restless” on the Blu-ray. (“The Artist,” the talk of last year’s Cannes Film Festival, has been playing in the U.S. since November, also in an extremely limited but slowly expanding release that is still on fewer than 900 screens, despite getting 11 Oscar nominations.)

The silent version of “Restless” is a fascinating and instructive exercise that demonstrates just how little dialogue is necessary to convey the essentials of story and characterization. It’s essentially the entire film, including all the sound effects and most of the same music, but with no talking. The problem is that using only the takes of the actors not saying anything tends to make it appear as if they’re communicating by mental telepathy when a title card presents a line of dialogue but nobody’s lips have moved. Part of the convention of actual silent films is that we see the characters talking, but the title cards tell us only what we need to hear. Skillful editing of title cards with closeups of characters talking makes it easy to follow who is saying what.

This version employs the primitive technique of early silent films that tells which character is talking in each title, although this is almost a necessity when we can’t see the actors saying anything! Another early silent film technique largely abandoned by the mid-1910s, is having periodic long titles explaining what will be discussed in the following scene. This is useful to shorten the scene but again is very disconcerting when the actors merely stand around staring at each other instead of arguing as the title has described. Moreover, certain actions made clear in the talking version become either confusing or take on a different implication when the silent version decides not to include a title here and there. It’s also a bit odd at times to hear audible sighs or laughs, as well as footsteps, movements, etc., but not have the actors say anything. Fewer or no sound effects would have been less distracting, and the silent version could have been far more effective by including the takes with the actors speaking the dialogue indicated in the title cards. Still, it’s an interesting experiment.

“RESTLESS” on Blu-ray—Movie: A- (sound version), B- (silent version) / Video: A / Audio: A / Extras: B

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