Review of I'm Still Here (2010) by Drew S — 02 Jan 2011

Joaquin Phoenix is aware that we probably don't care about what's going on here. So is Casey Affleck. This much is indicated repeatedly through the course of I'm Still Here. If they know we're not going to care, then honestly, why should we? There isn't anything here to get excited about at all - it's a fictional presentation of an overpriviliged white man trolling a bunch of people for a couple of years. Phoenix and Affleck take his antics, some staged and some not, and carve them into a surprisingly basic story of a man's search for personal satisfaction. The only real hook here is the constant blurring of reality and contrivance, done both through the element of performativity (you never know who's in on the joke) and through the way that celebrity in itself shapes perception of a person. In a way, it's sort of clever.

But then...who cares? Yup, returning to that again. It's an ugly movie about an ugly person in pursuit of a goal with predictably ugly results. Let's draw parallels to Exit Through the Gift Shop, which also came out this year and has a very similar fact-or-fiction "documentary" construction. In Exit Through the Gift Shop, you witness the birth and death of an art form, a scathing attack on creation and capitalism, and a stunningly subtle turnabout on its attitude toward the man spearheading all of this. In I'm Still Here, Phoenix is reprehensible all the way through. You don't care if it's an act or a not-act or whatever because it isn't funny and it isn't clever and it produces absolutely nothing worth thinking about or analyzing. On every level, it's self-indulgence, and the worst kind of self-indulgence: the kind that, despite having no appeal to anyone outside the project, is packaged and presented as if it would.

There seems to be a contingency who thinks that Phoenix is a lost, misunderstood, immensely complex figure, and I could get on board with them feeling that way. Perception is subjective - I happen to think now that this person is just a big idiot who released one vanity project that suddenly got him a new type of attention from some sectors. Now his image, the image he rails against in the first three minutes of the movie, has been successfully transformed. Is it a victory for him, or is it just a plot point, if the movie's really a hoax? Again, who cares? He's asking us to develop new thoughts on him based on his own, purportedly self-regulated presentation of himself, and given that invitation I thought he made a movie that sucked. Successful on his terms, definitely not on mine.