Black Bear: Aubrey Plaza plays with our heads in the woods, and uses her deadpan to best effect in intriguingly weird film

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-plus

Intriguingly weird, and only loosely tethered to its own reality, Lawrence Michael Levine’s Black Bear is two movies in one - both on the theme of creativity-squeezed-from-pain, and both offering Aubrey Plaza the acting turn of her career.

In the first, we meet Allison (Plaza), a former actress turned writer-director, who is attempting to break her writer’s block in the woods, renting a lakeside cottage from a bickering young couple, unemployed musician Gabe and his pregnant wife Blair (Christopher Abbott and Sarah Gadon) with whom she’s to share the place for the weekend.

A contemplative Aubrey Plaza ponders playing with people’s heads (and getting played) in Black Bear.

Absorbing the vibe of a couple at war might be fodder for the movie script Allison is trying to write. Except somebody already wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Still, the famously deadpan Plaza uses her facial unreadability (a trait that is even mentioned in some of the movie’s meta dialogue) to create a sense of mystery around her intent in both stories. She’s outwardly calm, where most people would be clearly uncomfortable, in the presence of an escalating domestic skirmish. It begins with Gabe berating pregnant Blair for carrying out the garbage, and later for drinking wine. It escalates with full-out TMI artillery barrages about each other’s personalities and politics.

There are head-games, jealousy, sexual tension and betrayal, themes which recur in another context later.

Set at the same cottage, the latter half of the movie plays out with the same three actors, but switches the game. A movie called Black Bear is being shot by a mostly-stoned young crew, and Gabe is now a director, sadistically playing mind games with his wife (Plaza), the star of the movie, by pretending he’s sleeping with the second lead actress (Gadon).

The purpose: To agitate Allison enough to squeeze major drama and anguish out of her for the movie’s final scene.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

Which story is “real?” Black Bear doesn’t offer easy answers or even much of a through-line. The answers all lie in Plaza’s impenetrable thoughts. The whole thing could be stuff percolating in her writer’s brain. 

Even the bear (yes, there is one) could be a fantasy.

What’s not ambiguous is Levine and cinematographer Robert Leitzell’s focus on the movie’s star. The film opens with a terrifically framed shot of a swim-suited Allison (from behind) sitting at a dock in the movie’s wooded location in Long Lake, N.Y., contemplating a foggy horizon. It returns to this shot, repeatedly. 

The main actors all handle their roles enthusiastically. In both scenarios, Gabe is unlikeable - opinionated and angry in one segment, and a manipulative bully in another. Gadon eases into both her stories, introduced as a “nice girl” going along to get along, and gradually showing sharpness in those pearly whites.

But they’re all reacting to Plaza, who despite her dour resting mode, does get to impressively pull out the emotional stops by the end.

Click HERE for Bonnie Laufer’s interview with Sarah Gadon.

Black Bear. Written and directed by Lawrence Michael Levine. Starring Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott and Sarah Gadon. Available in select theatres and on VOD, Friday, Dec 4.