Sunday Review: In Our Nature

Unparking

By Morris Dean

My wife tends to be skeptical of the DVDs that I borrow from the library "on speculation"—I'll borrow anything the library has if it doesn't seem to be about chainsaw murders, doesn't seem to be a sci-fi, horror, or teen-romance movie, isn't animated or CGI-heavy, and isn't a smaltzy movie based on another Nicholas Sparks novel. If it meets this test, why not give it a try?
    True enough, a fair portion of these "spec borrows" are disappointments, which I usually recognize after a very few minutes. Sometimes, of course, we both watch the whole thing, and only then ask each other, "Why did we watch that?"
    So, my wife is skeptical for good reason. Before I put the DVD in Friday night for In Our Nature (2102, Brian Savelson), she made me read the blurb on the container to her:

When Brooklynite Seth (Zach Gilford, Friday Night Lights) takes his girlfriend Andie (Jena Malone, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) to his family's weekend house in upstate New York for a romantic getaway, they are unexpectedly joined by Seth's estranged father, Gil (John Slattery, Mad Men), and his new girlfriend, Vicky (Gabrielle Union, 10 Things I Hate about You). The women negotiate emotional mindfields to persuade father and son to share the house for the first time since summer vacations of Seth's childhood. Unspoken grudges slowly surface during a weekend of vegan dinners, spilt maple syrup, and encounters with the great outdoors. While relationships old and new are tested, the group discovers that bonds of family come in unexpected forms...IN OUR NATURE is a candid, carefully observed portrait of our closest relationships.

    My wife hmphed skeptically.
    I retorted, not entirely facetiously—in fact, I was fairly hopeful: "But doesn't that sound wonderful!"
    She grudgingly agreed to start watching it with me, so I popped it into the Blu-ray player.

In Our Nature opens with Seth trying to extricate the Subaru station wagon he and Andie will travel in to upstate New York from a very tight parking spot—about six inches from the car in front and the same from the car in back, the camera recording the whole thing in one take, from the same fixed position. I didn't think to count how many back-and-forths it took Seth to get out, but it seemed a dozen or more, each one of course involving a minor collision with the car forward or aft. I expected the Subaru at some point to become wedged between the other cars, on the theory that his car's diagonal dimension (from front right corner to back left corner) would eat up the initial six inches fore and aft. But it didn't; Seth got them out, and off they went....
    It might have been about there that my wife started showing unmistakable signs of dissatisfaction. Or maybe it was after a few minutes of Seth and Andie's road conversation about the weekend, why he'd never even told her about there being a weekend house, even though (we learn later) they've been together for about two years, something about her mother's not going to get better....
    And if not there, then at some point soon thereafter—perhaps when they drive up the long driveway to the idyllic house and you shudder at the possibility that this will be a slasher movie after all—my wife did say she didn't want to watch it.
    "Oh, all right," I said, "let's watch something else; I can continue watching this later."
    "No," she said, "go ahead and watch it," and she put her head down into the Jesse Stone novel she had been reading.
    It always makes me feel a little anxious to continue watching alone—there might be recriminations later—but I said, "Okay," and continued watching, not sure at all that I wouldn't come to share her aversion at some point, hopefully sooner rather than later—that question, "Why did we watch that?," is painful....

...The movie never became offputting. Its action really was carefully observed portraiture of real relationships, both the old ones between father Gil and son Seth, Gil and Vicky, and Seth and Andie, and the new ones between Andie and Vicky, Seth and Vicky, and Andie and Gil.
    The action around eating—whether "vegan" wasn't the same as "vegetarian," whether butter wasn't really an animal product, the pint of ice cream Gil secretly takes outside one evening and shares with Seth, Seth's preparing a vegan meal and Andie's cutting herself so that she has to ask Gil to go to the kitchen and help Seth—is perfect.

    The great outdoors may be limited to a small pond on the property and Seth's boyhood tree house, but it seems great and scary to city-girl Vicky, who has to be coaxed into a kayak and into ascending to the tree house...and prevented from getting into a car and speeding off when a bear enters the house following the scent of vegan leftovers and spilled maple syrup. Perfect.
    Not perfect was the sound-recording, which often failed to record dialogue audibly. Plus, the DVD had no options for subtitles. My wife and I routinely turn on English or English SDH subtitles; we don't find them distracting and we value their ensuring that we "don't miss anything." I sorely missed subtitles in this movie.
    The estrangement between Seth and his father is deep, and the thawing it seems to undergo during the weekend is hopeful, if not assured—no more assured than that Seth and Andie will remain together, or Gil and Vicky. They may, or they may not, decide to maneuver themselves from the spots they're currently parked in, or to adjust their positions in them. But you care.
    Or you might not care, if you prefer to read a Jesse Stone novel.
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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean

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