The Brooklyn Rail

To appreciate Failed State (2023), you must first understand what it is not. Failed State, co-directed by Christopher Jason Bell and Mitch Blummer, forsakes nicety embodied solidarity. What do I mean by this? Perhaps it is best explained by an example. In contrast to Bell and Blummer’s latest work, Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days (2023), a movie about a bathroom cleaner, is a shitless film.

Now this observation isn’t made out of willed puerility, but rather, vulgar curiosity on where the camera goes and why. What precisely is implied by a narrative fiction film about a toilet cleaner that refuses to show the real refuse? In Perfect Days, Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho) cleans bathrooms in Tokyo. He takes his labor seriously, and so an abundance of time and coverage is given to these singular acts—kneeling, spraying, scrubbing, wiping. At no point does the camera catch a glimpse of anything truly foul, either on the bowl’s meniscus or spilled on floor tiles. Seeking a poetic mode that can’t conceive of the abjectness of real alienation, Perfect Days trusts neither its characters nor its viewers to sit in the shit. It subsumes the nervy turbulence of the moved image to the false container of catharsis and authors a conclusion full of acted tears. Wenders suggests that the performance of melancholy is more than noble enough: it’s nice.

Failed State is not nice. From a certain clenched-eye perspective, its protagonist Dale (Dale Smith) is warm and amiable. Working as a courier (“I’m a messenger”) in New York City, he buses, ferries, subways, and walks across five boroughs through the most discombobulating days of 2020. His living affords him the luxury of survival, barely. His checking account and credit card debt are wildly out of balance. He’s behind on the rent. Grief over the death of his mother washes over him. Despite it all, he exhibits a seemingly superhuman interest in his fellow New Yorkers, engaging them in conversation at bus stops, in cemeteries, on ferries. If the people he encounters occasionally seem leery of of such frank inquiry, it’s clear that Dale’s commonsensical and confrontational socializing is directly at odds with the facedown/phones-out avoidance that has become de rigueur in public spaces, even before a pandemic heightened our communal wariness.

The formal wrinkle in describing the plot of Failed State is that Dale is actually Dale. The deliveries the film shows him making are actual deliveries to actual clients, mixed in with lightly devised moments, mixed in with more rigidly-constructed narrative beats. “In terms of days of shooting,” Blummer told Chris Cassingham in Split Tooth Media, “it was like 60-40 of going in with something specific or with other actors coming in to work a scene with him, and 40 percent was just Dale working that day, following him around with the camera.” Given this information, it’s tempting to try and discern the disparate elements and designate some as “real,” as if verifiable authenticity matters to the cinematic image. It doesn’t—a fact that Robert Bresson, Agnès Varda, and Abbas Kiarostami, all ancestors for how Bell and Blummer operate, insist on. It is the contingency of all elements in frame—staged, “real,” or in between—that forms a truth. This truth intersects with a viewer’s act of witnessing. What’s left at that intersection is an essence that indicates how we were, are, or could be.

Performance isn’t solidarity and the ability to identify with someone doesn’t hinge on having heard of them before. By having Dale play Dale, Bell and Blummer sidestep a whole tradition of actors playing “real” characters, which is to say, working class people or people on the fringes of society. People like Dale Smith. “He was very much a real life character,” Bell told Cassingham, with whom both filmmakers worked in a similar mode on the short film Trammel (2020): “one of those guys you don’t see movies made about.” And Failed State’s formal constraints challenge canned notions of what exactly constitutes a “non-actor.” Dale Smith isn’t a passive reactor, at will and risk of the camera making his own meaning. He acts, movingly. One scene asks that he give directions to a fellow subway rider, who happily and haplessly goes the wrong way; Dale’s reaction is punchline perfect, the kind of New York zing Neil Simon would lob drafts at. Another scene asks him to compose a greeting card message for a client’s mother. It elicits a stabbing and frank grief. It contains John Ford’s graveside elegies and Kelly Reichardt’s fugitive feeling. Rather than foreclosing the possibilities of representational cinema, Failed State mutates it into a force capable of addressing the material moment.

It would have been enough if Failed State were just an incisive portrait of a working person, if the film was just an elegant formal inquisition about how work is enacted on screens. Bell and Blummer have created such a cultural object, thankfully. Representation—who we see movies made about—only matters in so far as it problematizes the narrative that mass culture tells about who matters, exists, or gets to make art. Failed State drags the spectator’s focus to the life of a human not normally granted narrative scrutiny and realizes that life with unwavering specificity of feeling. We witness Dale’s body break down in increments but never without the possibility of a warm glance. And then the bottom falls out. These are the stakes—not just the end of merely making it but also the cessation of joy. That the film ends in a bleak place is mandatory, given precisely how failed Dale is by the state he exists in. It would have been enough for Bell and Blummer simply to chart a realistic narrative of where the working life in America ends. But Failed State continues its formal daring by breaking itself open at the close, fracturing representational reality for something like avant-garde grief. A film that has been defined by Dale’s loping motion suddenly cracks its metafictive layers. It comes to a figurative halt. How do you end a film about a worker at the mercy of a failed state? Narrative fails, glitches, and what’s left is the cold stare of a system so cruel as to be unfit for narrative resolution.

It’s the same kind of pure cinematic strategy that Bell and Blummer let in for Dale to perform and react to, just in reverse: narrative fiction gives way to avant-breakdown. The exact metaphor of Failed State (ie: what “really” happens) is uncertain, but whether Dale suffers an accident, a leg injury, or a stroke is immaterial to the inevitability of feeling, communicated by the filmmakers by a camera suddenly pointed skyward, dragging the eyes attached to its body over concrete streets. Locales take on irresolvable eeriness, as sirening colors assault the frame. And then the film ends on the image of a man in a wheelchair. He’s not alone—a nurse sits on a bench next to him, and we’re here, too. Even in the context of tragedy, catharsis is something to be shaken off as the house lights reappear. Failed State has no catharsis. The credits roll, and Dale sits, no longer able or willing to talk. This is what work looks like. And then: black.