The Cult Comedy Living in Oblivion Gets the Crazy-Making Business of Making Movies EXACTLY Right
Movies about making movies proliferate in angry defiance of the public’s general wishes because a disturbingly large percentage of young filmmakers have experiences making movies, or even just a movie, that they find so fascinating, funny, outrageous and impossible-seeming that they should form the basis of a semi-autobiographical comedy about the crazy world of filmmaking and the colorful oddballs who populate it.
These narcissistic auteurs willfully ignore that so many films have been made about the loony business of making motion pictures that it’s damn near impossible for filmmakers to inject anything even remotely fresh or novel into this well-worn territory. And it’s human nature to find your own life experiences inherently fascinating, particularly when you’re dealing with people as prone to narcissism, egomania and navel-gazing as show-business folks.
In that respect, Living in Oblivion, Tom DiCillo’s beloved 1995 exploration of the agony and the ecstasy of independent filmmaking, is the exception that proves the rule. When DiCillo wrote and directed Living in Oblivion, his indie-film world credits were strong. He’d served as the cinematographer on Jim Jarmusch’s seminal 1984 classic Stranger Than Paradise among other serious independent motion pictures and documentaries and made the leap to director with 1991’s Johnny Suede, which gave Brad Pitt one of his first big roles.
DiCillo nevertheless struggled to get movies financed, and then struggled through the tedious, arduous, crazy-making experience of actually filming those passion projects, possibly because, with the exception of Living in Oblivion, his movies aren’t very good. Interesting? Yes. Distinctive? Indeed. Ambitious and quirky? You betcha. Good? Not really, with this very notable outlier.
In the mid 1990s, DiCillo used the raw material of his own life to form the basis of Living in Oblivion, his breakthrough film and a low-key cult classic of pitch-perfect show-business satire. Living in Oblivion doesn’t just have a singularly auspicious, perfect cast for a low budget independent film from the mid 1990s: it has a cast that doesn’t just capture the spirit of the time and place it is depicting with such casual but uncanny verisimilitude so much as they embody it in physical form.
The wonderful Steve Buscemi stars as the DiCillo surrogate, Nick Reve, an adorably weasel-faced auteur trying his damnedest to make art with next to nothing in the way of money or resources and a cast and crew whose ego-and-sex-fueled dysfunction has a way of spilling onto the screen as life imitates art and vice versa.
Fellow indie film icon Catherine Keener does an out of character glamour girl turn as insecure actress Nicole, who is better known for an oft-discussed shower scene in a Richard Gere movie than her sometimes questionable and frequently questioned talents as a dramatic actress while Keener’s future husband and ex-husband Dylan McDermott does some of his finest, funniest work as Wolf, the eye-patch-wearing, alpha-male cinematographer, whose aggravations include Chad Palamino (James LeGros), a pretty boy mainstream movie star who sleeps with Nicole almost immediately and treats Wolf, and everyone else, with smarmy show-biz condescension.
In one of the film’s many in-jokes, a huffy Palamino tells Chad he only agreed to work with him because he knew Quentin Tarantino. Buscemi is of course a famous Tarantino collaborator and perhaps not coincidentally also a talented writer-director whose own lovely debut film Trees Lounge, lurked in the near future, while Brad Pitt, whom the character of Palamino may be based on, would go on to star in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds and Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood.
National treasure Kevin Corrigan adds to the Indie Film All Star vibe as a crew person while Peter Dinklage gives a career-making performance as Tito, a very angry, very serious actor who comes on set justifiably angry about the way little people actors are portrayed in entertainment, particularly in dream sequences, where they serve as human props, insulting signifiers of lazy surrealism and cut-rate Freudianism. There’s an element of pointed self-criticism and self-deprecation in the way Tito explodes over the stereotypical way he’s cast in a film-within-a-film because it’s not really all that different from the way he’s cast in the film itself.
Dinklage doesn’t enter the equation until an hour in but he steals the film’s final act with his trademark gloomy intensity and angry comic arrogance. When Tito turns on his director after barely suppressing his rage his whole time on set, he’s being a bit of a prima donna and a jerk but Dinklage gives the character a battered, wounded dignity and hair-trigger temper that makes the situation both funnier and more dramatic.
Living in Oblivion is dramatic in an artsy, bohemian, Jarmusch alum kind of way, partially because the movie-within-a-movie is a real Sundance-ready, gritty, low-budget exercise in independent filmmaking at its scruffiest and scrappiest. But it also has that arthouse vibe because that’s who DiCillo is as as a filmmaker. DiCillo isn’t afraid to be pretentious in his heavy-handed symbolism and regular interjections of shuddering, solemn arthouse drama, for better and worse. Living in Oblivion is for the most part a very funny and very effective comedy. It’s less effective but still engaging as gossipy, dishy bohemian behind-the-scenes soap opera about bed-hopping, ambition, unrequited lust, sex and betrayal. It’s least engaging in the arthouse ponderousness of the films-within-a-film, which are sometimes played for knowing laughs, and sometimes served up relatively straight.
Yet Living In Oblivion finds ways to undercut its own pretension, like a very funny opening act that’s essentially a stand-alone film in its own right, where an achingly somber, Bergmanesque sequence involving Nicole and an older actress is continually interrupted by some cartoonish mishap that breaks the dour mood with a vengeance.
Living in Oblivion doesn’t end satisfyingly so much as it just kind of stops, almost as if they ran out of financing and/or film stock and had to cease production abruptly. By that point the movie has generated so much goodwill, however, by being one of the few films about filmmaking in recent memory that is genuinely original and fresh that it’s hard to begrudge its frustratingly abbreviated, arbitrary-seeming ending.
And in Steve Buscemi and Catherine Keener, Living in Oblivion had two of the most important, prolific and essential components of 1990s independent cinema. It’s no exaggeration to say that it’s hard to imagine the last quarter decade in American independent and low-budget cinema without these two icons.
Living in Oblivion gives each of these singular talents one of their finest roles but DiCillo uses these actors in unexpected ways. Keener is of course a lovely woman but she has never been as luminous or as Matinee idol gorgeous as she is here. Keener would go on to establish herself as a quirky, formidable character actress but in Living in Oblivion she cuts an almost anachronistic figure of old school leading lady magnetism. She’s almost too beautiful for the movie, if that’s possible.
It takes profound talent for someone as gifted as Keener to play a questionably talented, deeply insecure actress as she does here. Buscemi similarly tends to get relegated to rat-faced character actor roles but Living in Oblivion casts him smartly against type as a leading man, albeit of the neurotic and intense variety, and a straight man (relatively speaking) whose job, both within the movies-within-the-movie and the movie itself, is to hold everything together through sheer force of will in the face of swirling madness and uncertainty.
LeGros was a staple of 1980s and 1990s indie cinema, much of it forgettable, a surprising amount of it either iconic or hugely cult, including Near Dark, *batteries not included, Drugstore Cowboy, Point Break, Singles, My New Gun, Guncrazy, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle and Safe. For a good decade, LeGros was damn near an indie film mascot, but he’s hilarious and obnoxious as a golden-maned, ridiculously self-infatuated pretty boy.
DiCillo’s scrappy little triumph is animated both by deep-seated and richly merited cynicism and frustration about the insanity and frustrations of the filmmaking process and an equally deep love of film. As a filmmaker Nick Reve is largely an on-set psychiatrist, specializing by default in the abhorrent psychology of the oddballs attracted to the long hours and low pay of the independent film world. Much of Nick’s vision is pompous and pretentious but there are moments throughout the film when the tedium and anxiety that characterize so much of the process breaks and something transcendent and surprising and achingly beautiful happens as the filmmaker discovers their movie, and their own voice, in the process of filming.
Living In Oblivion is at once a loving valentine to independent film and a giant middle finger to all of the compromise, craziness and ego that goes along with it.
Yes, seemingly every filmmaker thinks their experiences making their first film against impossible odds would make for a terrific behind-the-scenes dark comedy. The big difference is that in DiCillo’s case, he was actually right.
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