Mumblecore, in case you missed the seventy majillion articles about it in all the smart magazines, is the hot new thing in the indie film biz, and South By Southwest is no exception. Love it or loathe it, it's the mode of the moment, and probably half the movies I saw over the last few days could be jammed into that category with a minimum of injury. For those blessedly unfamiliar with mumblecore, it involves low budgets and a bunch of attractive but poorly dressed young white people who spend a great deal of time pouting because they are emotionally paralyzed and cannot communicate with each other. I'm sure you can imagine how exciting this all is. With The Lost Coast, writer/director Gabriel Fleming has presented us with a colossal leap forward in this boundlessly underperforming genre: the gay mumblecore movie!
On Halloween Night in San Francisco, two men and a woman — all of whom are attractive but poorly dressed young white people who are emotionally paralyzed and cannot communicate with each other — wander the streets of the city trying to score some X. (The scene where they finally succeed is one of only two funny moments in the film.) They are eventually joined by another attractive but poorly dressed young white person, who does not seem to be emotionally paralyzed (at one point, he makes a strong connection with a dog), but is a jackass. Jasper is the moody one, whose fiancee is in another country; he pouts a lot and is upset that he once had a gay relationship with Mark. Mark is the gay one, who maintains the same smirky facial expression whether he is yelling at someone or being fellated; he smirks a lot and is upset that he no longer has a gay relationship with Mark. Lily is the female one, who experiences the movie's only epiphany when she decides to get the hell away from these two yutzes; she frowns a lot and is upset that she basically has nothing to do in the whole movie except shuffle around looking sad.
The shame of this petrifyingly dull movie is that Fleming really knows what he's doing behind the camera; his pacing is all screwy, but that's the fault of his script, not his direction, and many of the scenes (especially an early-morning walk through Golden Gate Park that turns eerie, if a bit predictably grim) are absolutely gorgeous pieces of filmmaking. It would be fascinating to see what he's capable of when directing someone else's script. But The Lost Coast gives us no reason to care about the characters, nothing to understand about them, and no stake in the ultimate resolution of their relationships. It's simply a dull, self-absorbed film that hopes we won't notice through all the pretty pictures.