James White opens on a despicable moment for its protagonist: James (Christopher Abbott) refers to girls giggling behind him as “cunts,” before starting a bar fight and hops to a gay club with his gay best friend, Nick (Ron Mescudi), where they enjoy the rest of their night. They’re untouchable, or so we believe. Only later, after the opening scene, do we learn that his father has just died.
Director Josh Mond’s style of filmmaking relies heavily on the actor’s body language; much of what Abbott and Cynthia Nixon, who plays his frail mother Gail, provide for us is internalized, rather than overtly expressed. Abbott embodies the patriarchal ghost of the father who abandoned James, as he adopts his impulsive and unhinged persona. His dead father -- while not really present in the film -- is alive in every mannerism and fraught gesture provided: when Abbott slaps an overly enthusiastic partier down, wrestles with his best friend in a drunken stupor or insists on finding his mother a decent bed she can sleep in with his attack-dog like shout.
Cynthia Nixon plays her character’s mental and physical deterioration with deep compassion and frailty; her forgetfulness is played with restraint and poise. Her genuine fear of dying -- a fear she is able to mask -- makes James deeply afraid. And while he appears to be in control while he’s with his mother, we see how little control he has over himself and his life. When he goes to interview for a job at the New York Post, James is a little late, turns in a writing sample on a soggy loose-leaf sheet, smells bad and speaks to his potential employer with a cocky self-assuredness. He cannot envision or work for his future because he’s settled into complacency; Abbott is excellent at portraying a person at odds in his own skin, determined yet bitter, hopeful for a better future yet fueled by a masochistic self-hatred.
The sparse details and the claustrophobic headshots of Abbott create a fractured and detached portrait of this New Yorker’s constant quest for coherence, where James’ ornery expressions and gestures become the map by which we understand his relationships. Jayne (his fling in Mexico) looms in the film as a spectral presence; Nick is a supportive force, but he likewise only exists as a person that James can funnel his own hurts and anxieties into. As Jayne disappears gradually throughout, Nick’s insistence on sticking with him tells us about the deep bond they share; their friendship, we understand, is held together by more than what the film can tell us, or wants to. Abbott’s James is rough and closed-in and messy, yet his journey is a panoramic, as sweeping as the city that looms on the other side of the camera.
Dying is sometimes a prolonged process for people who are sick, and James White does not offer us any spiritual reprieve from the messy details of hospice care. But it is less about his mother’s dying than what the process says about him as a character: James uses her dying to indulge in a fantasy of patriarchal control -- this allows him to think that he’s giving his mother the comfort of knowing that he’ll be okay. This power dynamic alters the way we view an otherwise sympathetic and heartfelt relationship. James White makes you feel the pain of growth, not simply of loss, in a visceral and intellectually engaged way; rather than spoon-feeding the viewer with any easy or quaint perspective, Mond is a determined to offer us a variety of details that we are forced to piece together.
James White chronicles the narrator’s path towards adulthood, the exorcism of childhood fantasy, an adjustment into the bleaker world of self-preservation and tough-love. His fantasy of Paris, of having kids, is not his, but Gail’s; to deflect any notion of personal growth, he must further delude himself into melancholy and woe. It’s a beautiful moment, but it’s also deceiving; we realize that this character needs to step out of his parents’ shadows in order to move forward in his life. “The thing about us,” Gail White tells her son, “is that we feel good things way up here, but we feel bad things way, way, way down there… and we’ve got to remember, there’s all this space in between. You’ve got to try and live in there too.” She’s telling her son to hold onto someone or something that isn’t his devotion to her, or his hatred of his father.
We skip many months ahead to the procession of her death, and we’re witness now to a pure moment of grief, of sadness. He walks out into the bustling Manhattan streets, moments after his mother’s death, and bitterly looks out upon the city, cigarette in hand. Uncertainty abounds in that final shot, and only the cathartic reprieve we may hope for is that there is something to be learned from those awful six final month -- that will eventually guide him home, to himself.
Just let him enjoy his cigarette first.
Grade: A-