There’s something special about being young, heartbroken and wasted in New York City, a place where a bona fide jerk has a grand canvas on which to paint his self-destructive portrait. John Magary’s inspired, unpredictable film The Mend is, in part, about this, but in a way that’s just tongue-in-cheek enough to keep it from going off the rails. When a random Manhattanite in a lover’s quarrel opens his windows and shouts, “Save me!” to a collection of disinterested people having brunch, it’s clear the film knows how far up its own ass it is. And for these characters, that’s perfect.
The film centres on two brothers in troubled romances. Stephen Plunkett is Alan, somewhat meek and sexually frustrated with his dancer girlfriend Farrah (Mickey Sumner). He’s going to propose, but if he opened his eyes he’d realise she’s just about to leave him. Mat (Josh Lucas) is what most people would call a dirtbag loser, a shambles of a man with no job or home, who leeches off women and, when they’ve had enough, his brother. After his current flame Andrea (Lucy Owen) throws him out of her apartment (with no shortage of profanity in front of her precocious son), Mat shows up at one of Alan and Farrah’s get-togethers.
The lengthy sequence – a mix of the party in Tootsie, Thomas Pynchon’s short story Entropy and the “touch my heart with your foot” bit from Annie Hall – is an accurate representation of the best and worst of every New York soiree. Magary was wise to make Farrah a dancer. As the hour grows later, more movement fills the frame, but all party guests stop to hear stories from the days of true debauchery from elder statesman Earl (Austin Pendleton), in a perfect bit of casting.
The night drags on, to the point where you wonder if The Mend is actually just going to be a filmed play. Then Alan and Farrah split for a vacation, leaving hungover Mat to make a mess of things and eventually invite Andrea and her kid over. Much like the life of these people, the flow of the film is irregular. Alan returns early, and alone, from his trip, and that’s when the trio dissolve into desultory decadence.
It’s a gamble that pays off. There are, as so many seminars will tell you, a set of half-understood “rules” for writing a screenplay. You need beats, you need arcs, you need clearly defined resolution. Of course, this is not really true (Psycho, to use the most obvious example, murdered this notion in 1960). Yet many a first-time film-maker thinks they are too good to follow any sort of rules, and blends genres by writing from a purely instinctual level. More often than not, the result is unpalatable. The Mend, somewhat miraculously, is here to buck the trend. Let’s just hope that not too many people decide to follow its lead.
