Movie Review: Nobody Walks, Or Takes Any Responsibility Either

Nobody Walks, the second cinematic effort by Ry Russo-Young (who is, in fact, precociously young), is a small film in scale, chronicling the romantic travels of three women at very different points in the arc of their maturity. Thematically, though, the movie is wide in scope, exploring the frayed connection between love, art, and responsibility in postmodern times, arguably the most ostentatiously sexual but least erotic epoch in human history.

The movie begins with the arrival in Los Angeles of Martine, a twenty-something artist who wears her sexuality like gaudy costume jewelry: cheap, easy to spot from a distance, strangely alluring and repulsive at the same time. From New York, she’s in town to stay with a acquaintance once removed, Julie, and to receive help laying down the sound for her movie from Julie’s husband and professional sound engineer, Peter (played subtly and intelligently by John Krasinski).

As soon as Martine arrives, she’s like a meteor crashing into a tranquil pond, a molecular disturbance by dint of sheer sexual force. After seducing her seat mate on the plane for a ride, she quickly conquers Peter’s hunky assistant, and then days later, Peter as well, who can barely muster the will to even feign chivalrous resistance, folding like a cocktail napkin. What predictably ensues is domestic disaster-the smoldering unraveling of the family’s fragile peace-ostensibly all because the germ of Martine’s feral sexuality spreads like an epidemic.

But we learn the fabric of that family, especially moral, must be already in tatters for Martine’s presence to be so explosively consequential. Peter’s ill-discipline almost spontaneously transforms into a pubescent infatuation, graduating into something so consuming he hints he would leave his family for Martine, although it’s never clear why or how he became so enchanted so quickly. After he learns Martine has also taken up with his assistant, he bristles with indignation, accusing her of “betrayal”, a charge so soaked in hypocrisy it must simultaneously elicit both guffaws and disgust.

All the while, Julie (played with impressive restraint by Rosmarie Dewitt) struggles to deflect the infatuation of a cocksure patient she provides therapy to (and he sorely needs it). Initially adamant in maintaining an appropriately professional distance, her resolve begins to melt from the angry heat the revelation of her husband’s infidelity radiates.

Almost all of the adults in the film are superficially attractive: beautiful, charming, successful, even cool. But their hipness is evidence of an arrested moral development, the insistent refusal to take seriously the consequences of their decisions, no matter whom it affects. Martine confesses with chilling candor that she sleeps with Peter to secure his help on her film. In an attempt to account for his infidelity to Martine, he insipidly observes: “Marriage is complicated”. Julie’s ex-husband is an aging rock star (played briefly but effectively by Dylan McDermott) frozen in lost glory days he should be embarrassed by. Julie’s oversexed patient is an underdeveloped high school freshman trapped in a forty-something screenwriter’s body. Julie’s teenage daughter is constantly besieged by creepy advances from her Italian tutor, who is literally monstrous.

In each case, the underlying ugliness of the adult in question is a matter of a stunted eros, a full-throated sexuality unbound by real love or responsibility. When asked by Julie and Peter’s five year old to supervise him in the pool, Martine is initially slow to realize he mistakes her for an adult. Of course, she only counts in the barest, chronological sense.

Julie’s daughter, Kolt, though barely sixteen, has the deepest reflections on love, struggling to disentangle and comprehend her intoxication with Peter’s assistant, as well her classmate’s infatuation with her. The high point of the film is a poem she reads to her slimy Italian tutor, savagely dissecting his disfigured soul. It could have been written about nearly any adult in the film.

Julie is the most complex grown up, a former rock star groupie who cleaned up her life, became a psychologist, and discovered happiness in the the mature combination of freedom and obligation. By her own account, the self-transformation took twenty years dedicated to the hard labor of growing up, made even harder when the job is taken up afters years of procrastination. It seems meaningful that she is the only main character who is not an artist: Martine’s work, a looping film of mating insects, is depicted as pretentious and vapid, and Peter is more a technician/handmaiden to the artistic vision of others. The extraordinary sounds he creates, technologically wrenched from context and amplified so far beyond their normal scale to be unrecognizable, mimic the tortured picture of human eros drawn when similarly delinked from the context of authentic commitment.

In the end, Julie earns some redemption, choosing her family and the obligations she has to it over short term sexual gratitude. When asked by Kolt how she would know when she meets the “right” person, Julie’s response is painfully pragmatic: to paraphrase, at a certain point you’re ready and so you just pick someone. The sad message of the movie seems to be that in today’s unerotic but sexually promiscuous times, choosing responsibility means choosing at the expense of romance. The audience is left hoping that Kolt, a budding poet, finds a more hopeful way to reconcile the joys of art, love, and of a truly human sexuality.

Nobody Walks comes out October 19th in select theaters.

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