"Black Bear" keeps reinventing itself and cementing Aubrey Plaza's range of talent

Black Bear (2020)

One of the biggest thrills about a film is when it never telegraphs where it’s going. Case in point: writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine’s chamber piece “Black Bear” keeps reinventing, redefining, and deconstructing itself. It’s a three-hander. It's a glorified actors' workshop. It’s a behind-the-scenes black comedy of errors. It’s even a mind-bending psychodrama. Harrowing and darkly funny in equal measure, “Black Bear” is an enigma of an experience, and it also stands as an impressive performance showcase for Aubrey Plaza, who just keeps cementing the range of her talent. 

Plaza gives her most potent and emotionally brittle performance as Allison, an actress-turned-director who retreats to a cabin in rural New York to write. The owners are a Brooklyn couple, hipster Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and his feminist wife Blair (Sarah Gadon), who’s two months pregnant. They’re welcoming toward Allison, until dinner gets awkward, particularly when wine gets involved. Blair wants more than one glass of wine, despite carrying a little human and Gabe urging her not to, and she continues to throw her husband under the bus in conversation over his musical aspirations. As the couple continues to bicker and not be on the same page about anything, Blair then turns her attention to Allison, pointing out that she is hard to read (much like Plaza’s deadpan persona) and that her films seem solipsistic. The evening doesn’t end very well as long as the wine keeps flowing, and that is only the first half of the film. Oh, and there might be an actual bear in there somewhere. 

If Lynn Shelton's “Your Sister’s Sister” were to keep eating its own tail, “Black Bear” is one of those people-in-a-cabin pressure cookers about gender roles and the erosion of relationships. The first half is deliciously uncomfortable and volcanic if less outsized than “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?” Once the film plunges into its second half, titled “Part Two: The Bear by the Boat House, it becomes metatextual about the creative process and a psychologically abusive relationship. The scenarios are different: the same cabin is now a location for an indie film, Allison is now married to Gabe, and Gabe is a director directing Allison as his leading lady. Allison is hard to work with, and as part of Gabe’s process, he asks Blair (now another actress on set) to help gaslight Allison and bring out her most emotional work. Emotions keep running high, turning intensely raw and blowing up in everyone’s faces, including the entire film crew (a boom operator holding for “room tone” happens to be one of the most breathlessly fraught sequences). Though psychological abuse for great art is the subject, this half of the film is also the loosest and funniest, as the script supervisor remains high for the entire shoot and the A.D. has to keep running to the bathroom.

Elliptical by design, “Black Bear” connects its two halves by its three characters, visual motifs (Allison sitting on a dock in a red one-piece bathing suit), and the blurring of art and life. Viewers who need to know how the magician always saw and then un-saws a woman in half will be stumped in frustration when the pieces don't cohere in a conventional sense. Answers don’t come easily, but Lawrence Michael Levine (2015's "Wild Canaries") doesn’t seem to be after answers. Our perception is meant to be challenged, and the skill of the core three performances are key, particularly Plaza, who is actually quite a revelation here in the second half. Watching “Black Bear” is like watching a pot of water simmer and then boil over without being able to stop it, and yet it’s more controlled and captivating than that.

Grade: B +

Momentum Pictures is releasing “Black Bear” (104 min.) in select theaters and on video on demand on December 4, 2020.