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“There’s a strange air in here.”

The Mend isn’t necessarily an easy watch. From its discombobulated, unfocused tone to its prickly characters, it practically demands you to become frustrated by its inconsistencies and unpleasing demeanor. Its meandering message doesn’t provide any favors either.  It’s an uncomfortable, unbalanced and unrelenting film. So why, then, is it so hard to outright dismiss?

Well, there’s a deranged magnetism radiating throughout writer/director John Magary’s offbeat feature debut, not unlike our cantankerous, dingy lead Mat (Josh Lucas). When guided by his chain-smoking, eradicated, homeless, constantly adrift, web-designing, uncoordinated presence, The Mend is less entertaining as it is beguiling in its unorthodox dissection of stress and purpose-seeking at middle-age. Though always walking a fine tightrope between likable dickhead and straight-up asshole, there’s a weird stamina to our messy, fiercely unrelenting protagonist, made all the better by Lucas’ wholeheartedly committed and sharply aggressive performance. If anything, the actor’s finally given the vehicle he needed to flaunt his allusively indiscernible staying power and, in that sense, it’s more than rewarding.

In the beginning, as Mat crashes his high-end brother Alan’s (Stephen Plunkett) house party, Magary attempts to compact something along the lines of Noah Baumbach’s snarkier early films. The characters are constantly talking to one another in conservations laced with seething insults or heady monologues and, through their rambles, we’re invited to laugh with or at these characters at any given moment.  Despite the similarly ponderous, intellectually liberated characters, however, the mood is carefully calibrated in a construction all its own, and never comes across as a strictly a mimic. Rather than being a dialogue-led existential character drama, The Mend is slimmed down and hard-cut to provide only a bare minimum of details about Mat and Alan’s personalities and their dysfunctional relationship, and while their characters are constantly talking, Magary only lets us discern details in pieces during select moments. Sewed together through tons of iris shots, soft jazz compositions, and unusual recurring motifs, there’s a constantly unsettling underbelly created in the director’s newly-formed style. A combination of grounded sincerity and surreal techniques creates a weirdly unshakeable dream-like feeling, aided by an unnerving sense of mania and compulsion found all so often throughout. Magary’s celebration of the maddening and discomfited makes these sensations all the more punctuated.

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These elements are at their most compelling when at their most calculated, which would be during the first 30-or-so minutes. When it’s firmly an emotionally overstimulated, in-the-moment party flick with artistic flourishes, it sways and sings.  Not long after, though, it becomes something along the lines of Home Alone by the way of Jules and Jim (not entirely, but almost). It’s about as odd as it sounds. Mat decides to settle into his Alan’s less-than-spacious Harlem apartment whenever his brother takes a prolonged vacation to propose to his girlfriend Farrah (Mickey Sumner). The trip doesn’t go as well as planned, and Alan and Mat’s dysfunctional relationship isn’t salvaged much when the former returns to find not only his brother but his sibling’s erratic partner Andrea (Lucy Owens) and her son Ronnie (Cory Nichols) cozily living under his roof and in his bed. This disgruntled behavior should invite some fertile dramatic heft, but The Mend‘s narrative quickly becomes cluttered.

More specifically, it’s strictly and quickly hindered by its inability to provide a firm point-of-view in its second half. Once Magary decides to concentrate on Alan as intently as he once did on Mat, the first-time director can’t mend, if you will, his different intentions together organically. The focus is intentionally blurred, but not productively so. He lets his characters verge into psychoanalytical and even hypnotic territory, but never does anything rich with the material he explores. The third act falters in particular due to this discrepancy, and it also lays to waste some fruitful commentary nearly earned. Mat’s journey is also soured, and too many loose ends regarding our one-time lead and his well-being take away from what could have been a more dynamic character examination — especially considering how gung-ho Lucas remains at every turn. Perhaps the filmmaker’s short-film-heavy past eludes him from exploring beyond his unconventionally assured opening act at this point in his career. Maybe he just bit off more material than he could chew. It’s hard to pin down necessarily, but if The Mend is going to go out of its way to not be entertaining, it needs to be more thematically beneficial.

And yet, despite growing more tedious as it continues and all its other apparent faults, Magary’s vision and voice remains too uncompromising to ignore. He clearly has a way with actors to make them create unflinchingly impacting moments, and provides an individually dynamic tension to keep your attention. A perplexing, almost unearthly atmosphere he sustains throughout implements these emotions even further. He also knows his way around a good dark joke or two to liven the mood at the right time, with one particularly memorable dead dog sight gags and one unexpected 9/11 gags serving as the highlights. If only he could have put combined these particles into something a little more augmented and disciplined. The movie’s not easy to compliment, but the potential inside is hard to disregard.

The Mend is bound to become divisive. Perhaps, though, it’s in its best interest to get such a tested response. Following suit with Mat, it’s an unapologetic piece of work in every way and it doesn’t hold itself back, even when it’s in its best interest to do just that. It’s a horns nest of a picture, but the stings Magary produces pierce mightily and earn your undivided attention. Shrill and unfiltered, it’s too unconditioned to be fulfilling but it’s also too refreshingly distinctive to write off. It’s just maniacally funny and theologically astute enough, though, to cobble into something worth watching.

6/10

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Will Ashton is a staff writer for Cut Print Film. He also writes for The Playlist, We Got This Covered and MovieBoozer. He co-hosts the podcast Cinemaholics. One day, he'll become Jack Burton. You wait and see.

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