“Casey. That’s a very feminine name,” says Sensei (Alessandro Nivola) – the instructor at a small karate dojo – to Casey (Jesse Eisenberg), a milquetoast, thirty-something accountant who has decided to take up martial arts after being brutally accosted on a nightly walk to buy dog food for his dachshund. Casey says he’s the kind of person who feels intimidated by other men, uncomfortable in their presence, struggling to connect with them on any sort of level. He attempts to drink bourbon straight out of the bottle and masturbate to porno magazines that he found in his co-worker’s desk, because hey, isn’t that what “real men” do?
Toxic masculinity is at the forefront of director Riley Stearns’ (“Faults”) sophomore feature, “The Art of Self-Defense.” Once it works its way into your soul, it spreads like a virus, and the remedy is difficult to find. The peddler, in this case, is the aforementioned Sensei, who suggests you should block out all emotions, only listen to metal, and even refuses to promote Anna (Imogen Poots) – far and away his most accomplished pupil – to black belt because of her gender. He’s the scourge-of-the-Earth-type individual who is likely trolling a film message board about “Captain Marvel” as we speak, crying and sounding off that even the most mediocre man can do better than a woman.
Interestingly enough, ‘Self-Defense’ does not start out this way. At first, it seems like a standard, whimsical, and dryly-funny indie comedy that would debut at Sundance about a timid individual who learns how to find their self-worth through the channeling of energy into another outlet. The type of movie that Eisenberg’s puppy-eyed demeanor and effortless ability to sell deadpan dialogue is perfectly-suited for. Stearns’ script is full of delicious wordplay that every character delivers with a straight face and a lack of self-awareness. One can argue that while it’s a strength, it does get a bit tiresome and repetitive… that is until the movie shifts gears into a full-on “Fight Club” riff. The exact details will go unmentioned, but the baseline similarities – including a set of “rules” and brutal bare-knuckle fighting – are uncanny.
It seems like Stearns is taking a small chapter out of Jody Hill’s playbook (and even just mentioning his name has instantly started a shouting match inside of Playlist HQ). This film gets as brutal and dark as one of Hill’s comedies, but the difference lies in the attitude and the pointed nature of ‘Self-Defense’s’ transgressions. Hill’s films are aggressive and relentless in the ennui of entitled male douchebags (for better or worse), whereas ‘Self-Defense’ – despite maybe not quite reaching another layer in its examination of fragile male ego – is putting it under a microscope, attempting to analyze how this phenomenon occurs.
Through all the uncomfortable testosterone and occasional grating of quirk, the cast sells all of it, specifically Nivola as the hyper-masculine instructor who is so overtly-comical that it doubles back around to achieve a sad truth. It’s always wonderful to see a hard-working character actor get a chance to chew into a role such as this. His sparring with Eisenberg is spot-on, and really ease the film naturally into its darker final stretch, as it starts as a mentor-mentee relationship that quickly sours into a “War of the Roses” scenario. Poots is really coming into her own as a performer, and while she’s good here, she isn’t given a whole lot to do except to be the mouthpiece for the obvious gender gap. She does get one jaw-on-the-floor moment in the “night class” scene, and we’ll leave it at that.
Also worth noting is that while it doesn’t explicitly say it, we can gather that the film is set somewhere in the early-to-mid-’90s through the use of landlines, 4:3 televisions, and video recording with a VHS camera. While that time doesn’t seem that long ago, it still very much predates this era of “woke” and self-awareness in regards to the harm of hyper-masculinity. This was still a time when it was more socially acceptable to acknowledge this type of abhorrent behavior with the saying, “Well, boys will be boys.” And that’s just what they are in “The Art of Self-Defense:” boys operating under the idea that they are men. The film’s buttoning moments suggest that there is hope for curing this epidemic, yet still suggest that progress has to continue to be made. While slight, yet accurate in his thesis, Stearns does what any good filmmaker should do to make that message stick: he makes us laugh. [B-]
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