SXSW Film Review: ‘Fort Tilden’
Two vapid twentysomethings go on an ill-fated odyssey through "deep Brooklyn" in this occasionally sharp, mostly tiresome effort.
“Fort Tilden,” Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers’ day-in-the-life chronicle of two vapid twentysomethings on an ill-fated odyssey through “deep Brooklyn,” contains several scenes that manage to skewer the infantile predilections of the Williamsburg jet set with truly ruthless, subtle precision. Unfortunately, it fails to find much humor in them, and its potent sense of place and underlying ideas never compensate for the tiresome millennial musings that constitute most of its runtime. Future festival play seems likely, though the film may well alienate more audiences than it seduces.
Although it has already drawn numerous pre-screening comparisons to a certain HBO program featuring wry Brooklyn hipsters of the same age and gender, “Fort Tilden” takes a far dimmer view of its subjects, and clearly derives its plot structure from Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” as 25-year-old roommates Allie (Clare McNulty) and Harper (Bridey Elliott) are perpetually waylaid while trying to make it to a date across town.
Dual inhabitants of a sort of Barbie Dream Loft, the hip-chained Allie and Harper are preparing to sever ties thanks to Allie’s imminent departure for Liberia with the Peace Corps, while Harper, a “mixed-medias” artist with no apparent talent for or interest in her craft, seems content to live off the largesse of her Indian businessman father. The pair run across two guys (Jeffrey Scaperotta, Griffin Newman) at a rooftop party, and agree to meet them for some drug-fueled R-and-R in the Rockaways the next day, even if it means Allie has to cancel an important appointment with her Peace Corps advisor.
The next morning, after endless delays, the girls finally set off on borrowed fixed-gear bikes into a loose string of episodic incidents. Amidst volleys of shit-talking and complaining — “I don’t believe her personality choice,” goes a representative putdown — the girls promptly get lost, go shopping at a discount warehouse, get stranded in “the ghetto,” lose their bikes, score some molly, buy a $200 barrel, and end up on a $100 unlicensed cab ride, all while texting prodigiously.
“Fort Tilden” makes no secret of these characters’ shallowness — indeed, Allie’s chances of surviving war-torn Liberia when she can hardly manage Bushwick form one of the better running jokes — but their repartee is far less witty than the film seems to think it is, and these two generate ever escalating levels of annoyance that never quite cohere into satire.
Once they reach the shore, however, things take a more interesting turn, as the girls’ simmering resentments finally explode, and the filmmakers finally bare their claws. (In particular, a one-off scene involving a group of abandoned kittens turns into a rather stark metaphor for the disastrous consequences of their seemingly harmless, heedless blundering through life.) Were the previous 70 minutes anywhere near as incisive, the pic might have managed to draw real blood, and it will be interesting to see if Bliss and Rogers can refine and strengthen the more Juvenalian aspects of their filmmaking the next time out.
Though the characters leave something to be desired, both leads have a great deal of chemistry — at their best, Allie and Harper manage to suggest a sort of sociopathic Romy and Michele — and the actresses embrace their more loathsome qualities with an admirable lack of vanity. (One scene even manages to challenge “Before Midnight” for the title of longest sustained unerotic topless scene.) Well photographed and edited, the film looks quite good for its budget, and manages to dig into all sorts of underexplored corners of the city.
“Fort Tilden” – Review by MovieManMenzel
There are so many scenes within Fort Tilden that are here to push the story along but they lack any real purpose. There is a literally a scene where Allie and Harper make it to the beach and see Russ and Sam with two other females. The two girls, Sage (Christine Spang) and Mia (Hallie Haas) are topless on the beach. There is no point to them being topless at all. The scene only becomes stranger when Allie and Harper take off their tops as well. As a guy, I will admit that all the ladies have very nice boobs but why the hell did any of them have to be topless for this scene? It makes no damn sense. SXSW Review: Why 'Fort Tilden,' A Satire of Privileged Young Brooklynites, Won the Grand Jury Prize
Of course, the ability to tolerate the limited world views of flighty 25-year-olds Harper (Bridey Elliot) and Allie (Clare McNulty) is a dare that the movie establishes early on, when the Williamsburg roommates text snarky comments to each other during a horrible acoustic rooftop show. "I should've peed before this," Harper writes, her words popping up onscreen in the first instance of a recurring device. Their cynicism comes hard and fast: After mocking the physical appearance of the twins performing onstage, they turn to ogling the guys at the show, who invite them to come along the next day for a trip to the Brooklyn beach of the title.
Before that misadventure kicks off, "Fort Tilden" elaborates on its leading ladies' selfish existence: Hoping to get lucky, the moody Harper rearranges their apartment's furniture ("I want the place to be sex-ready," she asserts) and makes a phone call to her millionaire businessman father, who offers to send her more money; Allie anticipates an upcoming trip to Libera to join the Peace Corps while dodging texts from her superior; she nabs a bike from the next door neighbor by taking advantage of his evident crush on her, rolling her eyes the whole time. The script never hesitates to remind us that we're watching monsters of privilege preying on everything around them.
And then they're off, wandering deeper and deeper into the bowels of Brooklyn, whining and sniping at everyone in their reach. With its one-note progression, Bill and Rogers' straightforward narrative is oddly conventional in spite of the ongoing attempts to make Harper and Allie into utterly contemptible beings. At its best, the movie works like an indie riff on "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion," turning the plight of its clueless leads into an amusing romp in tune with their perspective. But "Fort Tilden" struggles to express their neuroses with much ingenuity.
As they evade angry stroller-pushers, argue with a cab driver and worry about potentially creepy pedestrians, the dialogue is littered with reminders of their symbolic value (at one point, Harper recalls a perverted encounter "when I was canvassing for Obama"; when Allie complains about a photo posted online, Allie asserts, "you don't own the internet"; after annoying some pedestrians, one asserts, "the millennial generation is fucked"). The reference points are obvious to the the point of distraction (oh, look, Allie's reading "Infinite Jest," how *precious*), and the surrounding broad stereotypes they encounter (including Latino corner store workers and an Indian cab driver) suffer from the same ugly simplifications that Allie and Harper tend to make. Sometimes the movie portrays their dumbness with a clever sense of remove, but mostly it just operates on their wavelength.
Yet the filmmakers display such reckless confidence in their comedy that "Fort Tilden" can't help but nail its punchlines from time to time. Elliot, in an effectively snotty performance, plays off McNulty's pouty-eyed gaze with constantly bubbly results. The comedic high point arrives when the duo encounter a group of catty gay men — they deserve their own spin-off — who trade barbs with the women in the midst of a drug deal. The beach-set finale, in which one character makes an awkward pass at another while the drugs slowly kick in, effectively brings the various misconceived ingredients into a fully realized calibration of awkward humor.
After such a messy trajectory, it's a small comfort to find that "Fort Tilden" arrives at one especially shrewd image: Allie, topless on the beach, holding up her cell phone and getting an earful from her Peace Corps contact. The movie plays fast and loose with its ironic outlook, but in that fleeting image, it finally offers a lucid statement about the disconnect between the recklessness of youth and burgeoning adulthood.
"Sometimes, you have to live a little to know who you are," one of the women says, but in "Fort Tilden" they can't seem to get that process started. By its end, they're perpetually trapped in a cartoonish loop of sophomoric indecisiveness. It's a blunt observation, made with far subtler touches in recent portraits of young New Yorkers ranging from "Tiny Furniture" to "Appropriate Behavior," but no precedent in this topical subgenre goes as much out of its way to make its subjects so incredibly contemptible.
And that could very well explain why it won the grand jury prize at the SXSW Film Festival, which attracts a large crowd from the same demographic as Allie and Harper: The movie works so hard to make a statement about modern personalities that it bludgeons viewers into accepting it. Watching "Fort Tilden," one can feel trapped in the redundant cycle of their lives even while laughing at its crass extremes. In its closing scene, Allie refers to a cutesy indie rock melody as "tediously adorable," but by then there's no doubt who she's really talking about.
Criticwire Grade: B-
HOW WILL IT PLAY? With the SXSW grand jury prize undoubtedly luring some distribution interest, "Fort Tilden" is likely to receive a solid theatrical release, although its lack of stars and mixed word of mouth will limit its mainstream commercial potential.
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