Sample organizational chart.

-- E. R. O'Neill

One very sad yuppie hipster commuting today. (Seen at an SF train station.)

Medicine for Melancholy Leave Some Stones Unturned.

Medicine for Melancholy is a no-budget indie film from 2008.  Its two bike-riding, semi-employed protagonists could be a send-up of San Francisco (the film's setting)--were they not black and intended to be part of a serious commentary on race in the city.  Can a black man and a black woman make it in this very white, very gentrified city?  Need they, in fact, be a couple--for some reasons of racial unity or pride?  Or is that idea indeed retrograde?  

To the credit of writer-director Barry Jenkins, that commentary doesn't descend into a civic lesson.  

If anything, it stays at the level of a kind of irritation:  one character wants to worry about it, the other doesn't.  When the two visit an African-American history museum, I feared a long discussion of slavery reparatiosn that never came.  Though this is interesting enough, and it's quite central to the movie, it's not the best part of the film.  (Also, there's a sci-fi quality of black characters in San Francisco who don't know that there's a tunnel to the East Bay.)

The best part of Medicine for Melancholy is superficial--quite literally.  It's been said before that movies at some level are the skins of things.  The camera peels the surface off of faces and places; the microphone captures echoes bouncing off of things.  Movies show us the way people smile and move and laugh and talk, the way places look when we move through them, all the glittering, glinting, glowing, glowering surfaces and shadows of things.

Medicine for Melancholy does this superbly.  Whatever their lack of rich complexity as actors, Wyatt Cenac and and Tracey Heggins are superb surfaces--and more.  Their cheekbones and smiles are seductive, and their clothes hug their bodies nicely.  They are charming, too:  their ability to seduce, to toss barbs, to withdraw, to pout--these are all quite pleasant.

At this level, the film is a superbly-realized TV commercial or sitcom.  People sit and move and banter.  Fine.  

Acoustically, the movie is no slouch either:  it sports a kick-ass soundtrack.  In fact, perhaps the best sequence in the film is when the two protagonists party at what is supposed to be an indie music club but sounds a bit more like a throwback to '70's Britrock.  Whatever energy the film lacks as a languorous visual essay, it makes up for when the music starts.  

But frankly, I wished these people were a little cleverer, a little more passionate, a little more interesting.  They argue a bit, but they never tear it up.  They're too aimless really to mess their own pretty surfaces.  I kept wishing Joseph Mankiewicz had written these two people and made them wickedly funny more often--Cenac gets in his own riffs--and more passionate, too.

When it comes to being a movie (not a commercial or a sitcom), Medicine for Melancholy is somewhat lacking.  Yes, it's a day-in-the-life.  Yes, it's a tour-of-the-city.  Yes, I have a love-hate relationship with San Francisco, its buildings and hills, its past and its money.  

But a movie needs more.  It needs some significant change from the beginning to the end.  It needs a deeper undertow--something risked, something lacking, something found, a soul-touching experience.  

Ultimately, I left the theater little changed--whereas with a more powerful adventure, something sticks in your craw and won't let you go.

Like a one-night-stand, Medicine for Melancholy lets go a little too easily.  To its credit, perhaps that is the point.

--E. R. O'Neill