Giselle Bonilla’s debut feature The Musical, which premiered at Sundance this year, at times plays like a student film, though in the best possible way. On its surface, it has an exuberant, hand-made quality that fits the subject matter, which involves the chaotic production of a middle school play. It combines that outward simplicity with a queasy immorality, pulling us into its borderline-sociopathic protagonist’s world of spiraling grievances. It has elements of noir and coming-of-age comedy and let’s-put-on-a-show backstage musical. At times it reminded me of a cross between Election and A Different Man, with occasional stylistic nods to Apocalypse Now and Goodfellas and Dead Poets Society. It’ll probably drive some people crazy, but I enjoyed the hell out of it.
“I bet Eugene O’Neill never had to work at a middle school,” Doug Leibowitz (Will Brill) thinks to himself, as he contemplates the sorry state of his life as a drama teacher at Cedarhurst Middle School. An aspiring playwright who has never achieved anything in his career, Doug is currently nursing his wounds from a break-up with Abigail Morris (Gillian Jacobs), the kindly art teacher, with whom he’s supposed to collaborate on that season’s school play, a production of West Side Story. When he finds out that she’s now dating the handsome, somewhat smarmy Principal Brady (Rob Lowe), however, Doug decides to take revenge by switching the production to a crazy musical concoction of his own, about the attacks of September 11th.
Rehearsing with his impressionable students, swearing them to secrecy, and corrupting their minds with his embittered rants (“Sometimes you win, and sometimes you watch your enemies steal what could have been yours”), Doug knows that if he flames out publicly with the school play, he will ruin Principal Brady’s hopes of getting Cedarhurst added to the Southern California blue ribbon schools list.
Brill, an acclaimed stage actor, plays Doug as a sad-eyed snarl of a man, a cartoonish figure forever sinking, as if each blow to his pride were bringing his head down another inch lower. His superiority complex results in every seeming slight getting added to his list of offenses, while his lack of self-esteem (which of course often comes with a superiority complex) ensures that the decency of others further fuels his rage. Though Abigail dumped him, she still seems genuinely supportive of him; Principal Brady, despite being something of a bland glad-hander (“a boiled cabbage of a person,” Doug calls him), seems like a mostly okay guy. These things drive Doug mad. His paranoia, his self-loathing, his snobbery, his thwarted artistic ambitions, his inability to relate to people — it all gets swirled up into this cuckoo attempt to effectively destroy everything around him.
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Doug is horrible — horrible! — but we sort of can’t help but root for him. His hilariously confusing rants about “the machine” to a gaggle of wide-eyed child actors reveal what a stunted child he himself is. “At the end of the day, your dreams don’t matter,” he tells them. “Your friends will move away. Your parents will die. At the end of the day, the best that you can hope for will be that someone will remember you. That’s the machine.” He’s talking about life, of course, a thing he himself is clearly unequipped for. But who really is? Doug’s raw pettiness touches a nerve, and there’s something curiously cathartic about the way he decides to crash out.
The musical in question is totally nuts, a kind of conspiracist take on September 11th, complete with loopy songs. (“9/11, it’s a story about greed/ 9/11, jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams. 9/11, all brown guys are a threat/ Hashtaaag, neveeer forget.”) Cardboard airplanes crash into the Twin Towers. Osama Bin Laden moonwalks. Rudy Giuliani breakdances and rides a tank. It’s a pageant of poor taste. And yet there’s something moving about it, the spectacle of all these kids play-acting a previous generation’s trauma, as if they too will soon be swept up in it. By indulging his endless, self-destructive reserves of contempt, Doug chances upon a truth, not unlike what Oliver Stone did with JFK.
A final word about Lowe, an actor I spent much of my life not thinking about much. I was a kid during his 1980s heyday, and I can’t say that his Teflon vacancy ever did much for me. But somewhere along the way, he became really good at poking fun at himself, and he’s turned into, weirdly, an actor I now enjoy watching. He strikes just the right balance in The Musical, playing a character coded as someone we should probably hate — a soft-spoken and obsequious authority figure, outwardly confident but always worried about how [whispers] “the culture” will think about certain things — while also making it clear this is just another guy trying to do his job. In that sense, he makes a fine target for Brill’s underdog animosity. And for all its simple, primary-color narrative, The Musical captures something authentic about the all-consuming, world-destroying power of resentment.
