from Roger Ebert: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/free-time-movie-review-2024

Free Time (2024)

Brian Tallerico March 22, 2024

Colin Burgess is having a bit of a moment with the buzzy success of the micro-indie “Dad & Step-Dad” and this week’s release of the truly funny and clever “Free Time,” a movie that uses Burgess’ on-screen energy perfectly. Ryan Martin Brown’s film jumps into the oft-visited waters of the quarter-life crisis but it does so with its own comic voice, one that produces laughs in the very first scene and doesn’t really let up for this film’s tight 78-minute runtime. This is one of the better indie comedies in a long time, enjoyable from minute one until the final frame, and deceptively insightful about the structure of the modern world, one that encourages us to do more with our free time but doesn’t offer much guidance to what exactly we should be doing.

In the phenomenal opening scene, Drew (Burgess) goes to his superior at his job to express his dissatisfaction with being more of a data entry employee than a data analysis one. What starts as a conversation that feels like it will lead to a new position or maybe even a promotion ends with Drew quitting on the spot, aggravating his boss by leaving him without an employee. Drew takes his stuff and goes back to the apartment he shares with a clickbait-writing roommate, having no idea what he’s going to do next.

Drew’s efforts to figure out that last part is the driving narrative force of “Free Time.” He quickly realizes that his friends have lives that include jobs, leaving him little to do during the day—a bit where his roommate’s girlfriend yells at him for how often he’s watched the same movie on DVD (this time with commentary) is excellent. As he faces more people in his life who are stunned that he quit a good job in this economic climate, Drew starts to realize that he made a mistake. When the band he’s in shifts focus to country, leaving Drew’s keyboard playing behind, it’s another blow.

From art to fiction to motivational speakers, we’re constantly told to make the most of our free time, but what exactly are people like Drew supposed to do with all that freedom? How do you make your dreams come true when you don't really have interesting dreams? Some of the direction is a little too loose, and the non-stop piano score grows a little grating, but Brown’s script is wonderfully natural and organic, allowing Burgess to drift through the film in a way that’s consistently fascinating. Whether he’s completely blowing a potential hook-up (Jessie Pinnick, so great in “Princess Cyd”) or aggressively trying to get his job back, Burgess is perfect here, never leaning too hard into what could have been a really mannered performance. We all know guys like Drew. We may have even been guys like Drew.

“Free Time” is a funny character study for about an hour before it becomes something even more remarkable that I couldn’t possibly spoil. Suffice to say, this movie has some surprises up its sleeves, and they unfold in a way that really drives home the theme that free time can be more emotionally costly than we’ve been led to believe.

from NPR: https://www.npr.org/2024/01/05/1222869886/memory-review-jessica-chastain-peter-sarsgaard

Memory (2023)

By Justin Chang

The Mexican writer-director Michel Franco is something of a feel-bad filmmaker. His style can be chilly and severe. His characters are often comfortable bourgeois types who are in for some class-based comeuppance. His usual method is to set up the camera at a distance from his characters and watch them squirm in tense, unbroken long takes.

Sometimes all hell breaks loose, as in Franco's dystopian drama New Order, about a mass revolt in Mexico City. Sometimes the nightmare takes hold more quietly, like in Sundown, his recent slow-burn thriller about a vacation gone wrong.

I haven't always been a fan of Franco's work, not because I object to pessimistic worldviews in art, but because his shock tactics have sometimes felt cheap and derivative, borrowed from other filmmakers. But his new English-language movie, Memory, is something of a surprise. For starters, it's fascinating to see how well-known American actors like Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard adapt to his more detached style of filmmaking. And while his touch is as clinical and somber as ever, there's a sense of tenderness and even optimism here that feels new to his work.

Chastain plays Sylvia, a single mom who works at an adult daycare center. From the moment we meet her, at an AA meeting where people congratulate her on her many years of sobriety, it's clear that she's been through a lot. She's intensely protective of her teenage daughter, rarely letting her hang out with other kids, especially boys. Whenever she returns home to her Brooklyn apartment, she immediately locks the door behind her and sets the home security system. Even when Sylvia's doing nothing, we see the tension in her body, as if she were steeling herself against the next blow.

One night, while attending her high school reunion, Sylvia is approached by a man named Saul, played by Sarsgaard. He says nothing, but his silent attentiveness unnerves Sylvia, especially when he follows her home and spends the night camped outside her apartment. The next morning, Sylvia learns more about Saul that might help explain his disturbing behavior: He has early-onset dementia and suffers regular short-term memory loss.

Some of the backstory in Memory is confusing by design. Sylvia remembers being sexually abused by a 17-year-old student named Ben when she was 12, and she initially accuses Saul of having abused her too. We soon learn that he couldn't have, because they were at school at different times. It would seem that Sylvia's own memory, clouded by personal pain, isn't entirely reliable either.

Despite the awkwardness and tension of these early encounters, Sylvia and Saul are clearly drawn to each other. Seeing how well Saul responds to Sylvia's company, his family offers her a part-time job looking after him during the day. As their connection deepens, they realize how much they have in common. Both Sylvia and Saul feel like outcasts. Both, too, have issues with their families; Saul's brother, played by Josh Charles, treats him like a nuisance and a child. And while Sylvia is close to her younger sister, nicely played by Merritt Wever, she's been estranged for years from their mother, who refuses to believe her allegations of sexual abuse.

The movie poignantly suggests that Sylvia and Saul are two very different people who, by chance, have come into each other's lives at just the right moment. At the same time, the story does come uncomfortably close to romanticizing dementia, as if Saul's air of friendly, unthreatening bafflement somehow made him the perfect boyfriend.

But while I have some reservations about how the movie addresses trauma and illness, this is one case where Franco's restraint actually works: There's something admirably evenhanded about how he observes these characters trying to navigate uncharted waters in real time. Chastain and Sarsgaard are very moving here; it's touching to see how the battle-hardened Sylvia responds to Saul's gentle spirit, and how he warms to her patience and attention.

This isn't the first time Franco has focused on the act of caregiving; more than once I was reminded of his 2015 drama, Chronic, which starred Tim Roth as a palliative care worker. I didn't love that movie, either, but it had some of the same unsettling intimacy and emotional force as Memory. It's enough to make me want to revisit some of Franco's work, with newly appreciative eyes.