At Tribeca: Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha

Hey, the Tribeca Film Festival starts this week and continues through May 4. Throughout the fest, the L's critics will be reviewing festival selections here on your blog about town, beginning with Cullen Gallagher's rave review of Melvin van Peebles's "unprecedented" Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha, starting right... now...

Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha (Melvin Van Peebles, 2008)
By Cullen Gallagher

How to introduce maverick factotum Melvin van Peebles with minimal slashes and addendums? One merely looks at the director/writer/producer/composer/star credits on his latest film, Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha (a top contender for the best title of all time, along with his landmark Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song). His wide surplus of talent (which is only hinted at in the credits of Confessionsofa) is hyperbolically parodied — but only somewhat — in the film, a zany picaresque narrated on-camera by the 75-year-old van Peebles. As a storyteller, van Peebles seemingly invites the entire audience upon his colossal knee to hear the story of grandpa’s life (though not necessarily his life) — from his childhood in Chicago to his first visit to New York City and around the world several times over — with all the juicy bits mom and dad wouldn’t want you to hear told with extra gusto.

It is to the great credit of van Peebles that his film conveys such intimacy, the sort typically achieved amongst family and friends, or — at least in terms of cinema — in home movies. Which, in fact, is what Confessionsofa essentially is. There’s a great affinity between it and something like Robbins Barstow’s Tarzan and the Rocky Gorge (a Home Movie Day gem), particularly in that both films try to — and succeed at — locating the extraordinary within the most ordinary of settings. In Barstow’s film, shot in 1936, a group of kids essentially make a Tarzan movie in their own Connecticut backyard, yet their inventiveness and enthusiasm combine to create a rare cinematic spectacle. What radiates from the film is a communal warmth between the actors and a sincere love for cinema.

The same could be said for Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha. More than just casting friends and family (including son Mario van Peebles), Melvin van Peebles attempts to take audiences almost a half-century into the past without leaving the present, and complicates the temporal realism of the film even further by playing himself at every age — from childhood to age 47 — with no variation in costume or manner. No one, in fact, ages at all in the film: much like the locations, people are stuck in a permanent “now” (which is emphasized by the use of DV technology, an aesthetic that immediately stamps its “date” on the footage). While it makes for some amusing moments (particularly when the grandfatherly van Peebles is playing an adolescent in a movie theater attempting to one-handedly unbuckle young girls’ bras), the immutability of the present is one of the film’s strongest comments on memory and storytelling.

At one point, van Peebles’ character comments that he wish he had a time machine in order to go back into the past and — as his mature self — accompany his younger self and give him guidance. Storytelling in Confessionsofa becomes a surrogate for the time machine, but it does more than allow the mature self to revisit the past: it actually lets him take the place of his younger self. Just as we often lose the image of who we were (without the un/kind reminders of photos and videos) and extend our current visage into the past, the 75-year-old van Peebles is at once haunted by an ever-repeating sense of nostalgia and the irrefutable concreteness of the present, and storytelling becomes a way to reconcile their temporal differences.

While at first the film’s amateur DV photography and iMovie-ish editing effects seem charmingly crude, there’s an extraordinary and admirable punk rock quality to them, as though van Peebles were giving the middle finger to every existing standard editing procedure. The editing is crucial to the film’s overarching iconoclasm and DIY-extreme aesthetic, and its technical limitations only seem to instigate even more innovations (the inserting of children sledding and a crowded-beach-shot-ala-Weegee into a sex montage is both breathtaking and scene-stealing). The inventiveness extends to the script, which effortlessly erupts into such surrealisms as a toilet paper roll that plays “The Star Spangled Banner” to an old woman’s euphemistic use of “Take me to the cemetery,” and even to an oversized gorilla that apparently enjoys being hit in the genital region.

All of which is to say, Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha is the wildest yarn spun in quite some time, and one of the rare movies of which it is an understatement to call both “new” and “exciting.” Melvin van Peebles has delivered an unprecedented film.