(Team Picture is now available on DVD from Benten Films. Buy it at Amazon. The disc includes commentary from the director and, to augment its blissfully short 62-minute running time, a short film epilogue that, true to form, fails to wrap up everything up but arrives nonetheless at just the right note to go out on.)

Kentucker Audley’s Team Picture is a portrait in lackadaisia; rambling, ambling, ramshackle, bashfully modest even as it stitches its intentions proudly onto its sleeve. It’s a gently comic and comically pointed tale of youthful malaise, set in the heat of a Memphis summer and captured in an unadorned and unassuming fashion by its young director, who is also its star. He plays David, a drifter whose wandering heart generally peters out somewhere within the vicinity of the kiddie pool in his front yard. He describes himself quite accurately as “a grown-up boy,” and that is all one needs to know about the character going in — in a sense, that is all one needs to know about the film itself. Having said that, however, allow me now to dovetail into a digression I was hoping I wouldn’t need to make but which, in the moment, begs the question: is it best to consider a film like Team Picture as a work on its own terms, and not distill it to a list of the ways it is or isn’t like the films that it happens to vaguely resemble?

More specifically: I mean neither to deny or over-emphasize Audley’s influences or the minor zeitgeist in which he and his peers participate, but I do wonder whether a film such as this one is worth any more or less when considered separately from the grand sum of its cinematic company. Does inclusion in a movement, no matter how cursory, make this film — any film — better? Certainly, it gets the film seen: both this picture and its director leapfrogged into the public eye when it was included in IFC’s New Talkies series last summer, and in the Harvard Film Archive’s Independents Week: New American Cinema 2007 program; in both cases, it was programmed alongside new films by Joe Swanberg, Aaron Katz and Andrew Bujalski. Now it’s being released on DVD by Benten Films, and touted as the final installment of the boutique’s Mumblecore trilogy (following Swanberg’s LOL and Katz’s Quiet City). It’s not so difficult to catalog the difference between those films and Audley’s, but let’s not split too many hairs: it’s just as easy and, ultimately, perfectly valid to liken them. This is something I generally resist doing; I tend to argue for the autonomy of a given film. For once, though, I’d like to take the opposite approach and, perhaps taking a cue from its title, consider Team Picture in concert with its fellows.

A general criticism of these Generation DIY films is that they unapologetically and indulgently flounder about in the the same post-collegiate malaise their subjects are generally mired in; that they’re whitewashed bits of navel-gazing on the parts of their directors and actors, who are often one and the same. Post-collegiate malaise is not a new topic, of course. Nor is inter-collegiate doldrums or pre-collegiate jitters, or any combination of the above; is it worth mentioning that the protagonist of Team Picture reveals to his mother early in the film that he’s actually foregone the college application process entirely? The crux here is not the specific terms of David’s decision, but what he more generally represents: on the one hand is youth, blissfully ignorant of the practical realities of adulthood, and on the other is youth once more, but this time wisely aware of precisely what can be gotten away with.

We can then turn this back on the filmmakers, who by the consensus of some are getting away with quite a bit. They’re lazy at best and spoiled rotten at worst — and yet at the same time are educated in cinema, understand its language and, even more so, how it applies to the deliberate confines within which they’re working. They are making films. I don’t believe that it’s easy, making them the way they do; there may not be lights or big crews, but the intellectual side of the process remains the same. The element of choice is there, too; it is, in fact, amplified in converse proportion to all other diminished means. If all one has to do to make a film is press a red button on a camera, then whether that film is good or bad depends entirely on what one chooses to depict. Consequently, if one acknowledges the process implicit to a given work, then one must be willing to accept the film on its own terms and understand what it is trying to do — that it is trying to do something at all.

Here is what Team Picture is doing: it is predicating the point of transition upon which a traditional film might pivot. As I wrote last summer, upon the film’s theatrical release:

Audely isn’t making a film about characters who change, or grow, or follow any particular arc of development. Rather, like [Andrew] Bujalksi, he follows them to the point where they begin to realize that such change might be necessary, and it’s there that the film finds its natural and fitting end. The synopsis of the film reads: “Two young artists fall in love with the wrong girls. Shucks!” The reason the girl David falls for in the film is wrong is because she has ambition - which, from another point of view, makes her the right girl, because she casts his own ambivalence in a slightly harsher light. Shucks, indeed.

Audley has created a sort of developmental microcosm, tucked away in Memphis and drenched in an eccentricity that bespeaks a Southern heritage both natural and assumed (one gets the sense that David, like Audley himself, is well versed in the famous characters and caricatures of his home turf). The film’s colloquial charm is appealing, often irresistible; but like the best art, it also draws from a common wellspring even as it delves into social and individual particulars. When David takes a road trip to Chicago with a girl he likes, and she winds up kissing him but probably not in the way he wishes she would, the audience is invited to interact with the film on a deeper, more personal level. We’re invited to relate to these mismatched intentions, just like we can relate to the quiet underpinnings of Quiet City, or the maddening fluctuations of Hannah Takes The Stairs. Each of these films culminate in a pinpoint of precise emotional exactitude, and in those moments I’d wager they have more in common with each other than any particular aesthetic or technical notation can offer. But from those points they diverge again, roiling and reeling back into their own minute portraits of whatever it is their auteurs felt like putting under the microscope. Working in this miniaturist mode, a given filmmaker can create a great work (and indeed, within these auspices, I’d call Team Picture great), but that great isn’t going to have a capital ‘G.’ This in itself is not a bad thing; I’d typically argue that it’s a better thing.

But let’s take a cue from the media and consider these films in summation. They begin to affect each other, to bounce off one another. One film will inform how the audience views another. One film will lead an audience to another. Is this a bad thing? Hannah Takes The Stairs is no more the voice of a generation than is Team Picture, or Katz’s Dance Party USA. But they are all of the same generation, and just as they all represent wildly different aspects of it, so too are they bound by a series of connective points that, in conjunction, vastly expand the myopia to which they’re otherwise naturally bound. Their limitations are flipped, and suddenly we realize, along with the characters and perhaps even the filmmakers, that there’s more to life than this.

This, in spite of whatever surface similarities the critics might have bandied about last summer, is why these films fit so well together. And implicit in this hypothesis is the reason most of the filmmakers dismissed this categorization out of hand: because they all had new films to make. Myopia is one thing, stasis is another, and it’s always a welcome thrill when the one does not beget the other. In this case, Audley is currently in post-production on his second feature film; I can’t wait to see what it does to his first.

— David Lowery

Tags: DIY, early twenties, Kentucker Audley, Mumblecore, relationships, Southern, summer, unemployment