By Richard Linklater, 2001.
Starring Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard, Uma Thurman, and NO ONE ELSE EVER.
Rating: 6/10, 9/10.
For a movie that takes place entirely inside one motel room, has only three characters who ever appear on screen, and is shot entirely on a hand-held digital camera, Tape is awfully difficult to decipher. In this case, that’s a good thing.
We start with Vince (Hawke) in the motel room. He’s manic, running around, shotgunning beers, doing push ups, crunching and throwing cans around. Enter Jonny (Leonard), a high school friend of Vince’s who has a film he’s made premiering at a local festival; that’s why Vince is at the motel, apparently, he’s traveled see the movie. They have an awkward, mysteriously tense conversation that Pinter would have been proud of; eventually the conversation turns to a girl they both knew—and dated?—in high school, Amy (Thurman, when she shows up). The tension rises, and eventually it comes out that Vince believes that Jonny raped Amy towards the end of high school. Jonny goes through a bunch of rationalizations but eventually admits that, yes, he raped her. Vince triumphantly pulls out a hidden tape recorder that’s been recording their conversation and announces that he’s invited Amy over and that she’ll be there soon.
The movie is a masterpiece of shifting sympathies. We start with Jonny, an intelligent fellow who seems to be doing something with his life, over Vince, a lazy pothead, for lack of a better thing to call him. Soon Vince’s ingenious manipulation of the conversation shifts our sympathies to him, as he convinces us that Jonny is a pretentious asshole and, eventually, a rapist. Jonny’s protests that he feels guilty for having raped her but sees no need to apologize don’t help his case much. When Amy arrives, we firmly sympathize with Vince. Amy throws a wrench into everything by insisting that she was, in fact, never raped; we’re soon in the odd situation of having Vince and, to an even greater extent Jonny, trying to convince her that it did happen and our sympathies are violently tossed left and right and up and down for the remainder of the movie. It’s incredible; there’s only so much more direction you’d think the writer could get from moving from a two person interaction to a three person interaction, but he gets miles and miles more distance that would seem possible just by adding Amy.
And how well does Tape work as a movie? The style is very realist; the camera is a handheld digital, unobtrusive, and the story plays entirely in real time. This, combined with the single set and the tiny cast, made me wonder: why did Linklater feel the need to make a movie of this play? Does the fact that it’s a movie now change anything, enhance anything?
I eventually decided that the answer to that question is yes. First, the very realist, almost home-movie style of the filming (especially when the camera quickly hand-pans—I don’t know what it’s technically called—from one character’s face to another rather than cutting) adds an uncomfortable and unavoidable sense of voyeurism. We’re coming very, very close into these people’s lives, witnessing something private that we were never meant to see. Second, the fact that it’s on film (or not, I suppose, since it’s digital) now adds to the intensity of our ever-shifting sympathies. Movies tend to automatically create sympathy with their audiences for whatever character is on screen, as long as high-angle or low-angle shots, dramatic lighting, or other tricks of photography and shot composition aren’t used—which they aren’t here. As we watch Amy or Vince or Jonny passionately argue for what they claim to believe, or what they claim happened, with the camera, plain and simple, resting on their faces, we are almost unable to disbelieve—until later, when someone else is speaking and we believe them.