ANCHORS AWEIGH
(The Toronto International Film Festival (or TIFF) ran September 10-20 and HtN had boots on the ground covering all the best indie films they have to offer. Check out Clara Cuccaro’s Anchors Aweigh movie review from the fest! Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
There are some films that show you not everyone should make art. Matt Barats’s new comedy Anchors Aweigh is not one of them, but the director’s onscreen persona, a loose version of himself also named Matt, should be stopped at all costs. Barats performance as a schmucky “soft boy” millennial living in New York is a masterclass in low-stakes entitlement and delusion. In this deceptively smart satire, he has the art to prove it, even if he doesn’t know it himself.
Anchors Aweigh begins after Matt’s marriage proposal is rejected by his hot “dimepiece” 25-year-old girlfriend, Megan (Serena Profaci). Despite being a late 30something dude with no job, Matt seems genuinely shocked that his much wealthier girlfriend would leave him high and dry. In an effort to clear his mind, he leaves their shared apartment that she pays for and he finds a “vessel” aka a sailboat on Craigslist near the airport. Now living in a random harbor with a lot of time on his hands, he decides to do what any self-absorbed artist would do, rewatch his old home movies. He plans to restitch these vérité videos of him and his friends watching “Two Girls, One Cup” with his high school project about Family Guy into “a loose series of vignettes” and hopefully get back the girl, or at least, preserve his fragile ego.
Throughout Anchors Aweigh, Matt talks to the camera through a series of voiceovers that are reminiscent of Ross McElwee, Robb Moss, and John Wilson, but unlike these documentarians, who are known for including their personal life in their work, Matt is a genuine dolt. He’s a caricature of vapid and self-important guy living in Williamsburg or Bushwick, but Barats, the director, is in on the joke. His onscreen persona uses vulnerability as an unintentional form of control, wielding it to extract sympathy from the audience, only to ruin it with his lack of self-awareness. He spends a lot of time ruminating over his long-lost 25 year-old love, often claiming that Megan is the love of his life or something along those lines, only to totally forget about her after he sees another hot dimepiece on the opposite subway platform.
Stylistically, Barats is fully aware of his own absurdity. He sets the tone for the film with an epigraph featuring lyrics from “Pyramid Song,” only to undercut the solemnity with a flat, deadpan delivery: “Yup, that’s Radiohead.” He relies on this ridiculous comedic timing throughout, like when he abruptly reveals that Megan’s family owns Nabisco. He applies that same subversion to talking-head interviews like when he lets random New Yorkers wax poetically about love, only to cut back to himself staring blankly at the camera like a drooling dog.
“Damn, I’ve been an idiot for so long!” is about right. Luckily, Barats is far smarter than his onscreen persona. He actually does find a way to repurpose his old home movies. He turns his personal archive into an intelligent if not somewhat unpolished satire that mocks millennial men of a certain vintage—the kind that ghosts you but still sleeps with a mattress on the floor and tells bad jokes.
