Heartland: Shut Up Anthony
Rarely is movie dialogue an accurate representation of real-life conversation. More often than not, dialogue is streamlined and elevated above the mundane and repetitive nature of normal speech patterns for the sake of A. helping move the story along at a decent clip, and B. allowing for higher senses of drama and thrill via clever or quippy monologues and one-liners. But every so often, a movie arrives that seems to fully embrace or even pay tribute to some aspect of the discomforts of real human interaction. Napoleon Dynamite focused on social awkwardness to create some unique and memorable laughs. Manchester by the Sea used the technique to tragic effect to emphasize the difficulty of grieving and resolving inner turmoil socially. Add to this social awkwardness subgenre Shut Up Anthony, which employs stuttering, backtracking, rephrasing, and passive-aggressive jabs to evoke both laughter and sadness in tandem. This humbly brilliant debut from writer-director Kyle Eaton seeks to point out the folly of conversation, both in and out of close relationships.
Featuring star Robert A. D’Esposito’s hilariously believable discomfort as Anthony navigating the social plane, Shut Up Anthony tells the story of a man who can't stop putting his foot in his mouth. When the ever-awkward Anthony finds himself suddenly without his job and potentially without his girlfriend, seemingly as a result of his inability to understand other people, he decides to take some time alone and head out to his parents’ vacation home in the woods, which they rent out to tourists and campers throughout the year. Thinking it's free for the week, he's shocked to find an estranged family friend, Tim (Jon Titterington), staying there, who is similarly seeking solitude. Here, it's revealed that the two men's families were once close, and they jointly own the vacation home. Neither of the two are technically allowed to be there unannounced, and both have their secrets they want preserved. Thus, neither will rat the other out, for the sake of self-preservation.
From here, the social discomfort becomes a hilarious game of conversational chess between the two, navigating what can and can't be said to one another as the audience begins to unravel what happened in their past that drove them apart. This chess game quickly devolves into a pissing contest as the two get further under one another's skin, eventually descending into playground name-calling and tantrum-throwing in the most amusing way. It sounds like the moronic humor of your typical mainstream comedy flick, but the authenticity of the dialogue and eccentricity of the characters keeps it refreshingly bizarre and surprising, almost like The Office in how its characters subvert each other's pride and confidence in increasingly more juvenile ways.
Of course, all of this poop-flinging throughout the story is serving a greater purpose: to gradually cut to the core of what is truly going on between these two. Unfortunately, as the comedic façade is lowered, it becomes apparent that the emotional center of the conflict is simply not quite interesting enough to pay off the buildup to that point. Granted, it is emotionally successful and satisfying in how our characters drop their acts and come clean to one another. But it's simply not an original enough or deep enough resolution to really deliver on what all the passive-aggressive comedy seemed to be building toward; it's a conflict we've seen plenty of before.
That said, Eaton’s grounded style of dialogue and the impressively realistic delivery from the cast make Shut Up Anthony plenty worth a watch, if only to see a satire of the social games we play with one another in order to keep up appearances. For that, it's brilliant work, and that's all it really needs to be. Don't go looking for anything particularly heady or philosophical in the end, but listen to the uncomfortable stammers and the “WHY would you say that?” cringe material, and walk out with maybe a better appreciation (and maybe an answer) for why we say those things we say.
A trailer for Shut Up Anthony can be found here.