Christopher Abbott stars in James White as a twentysomething New Yorker, partying hard and barely keeping it together.
After watching Alfred Hitchcock's Under Capricorn, philosopher and critic Roland Barthes wrote in his mourning diary that Ingrid Bergman reminded him of his mother. Henriette Barthes had died the year before, but watching Bergman's "complexion, her lovely, simple hands," there was something about the actor's performance that touched the grieving author and vividly recalled his maman.
In James White – the emotionally taut and expertly crafted directorial debut of producer Josh Mond – we meet another grieving son with a journal. The film, a Sundance darling and quiet storm at the Toronto International Film Festival this past September, stars Christopher Abbott (Girls) in the lead role of James, a New Yorker in his late-20s partying hard and barely keeping it together. Unlike Barthes, James hasn't yet lost his mother, Gail (Cynthia Nixon), but they have been living with her cancer for a couple of years, dealing with the anticipation of grief – both of their lives in a fickle limbo at the mercy of her white blood cell count.
James keeps a diary to collect his otherwise bottled up emotions, but Mond doesn't grant us access to his interior landscape. Rather, the leading man's brooding introspection is coupled with a self-destructive bent that makes him an entirely chaotic and absorbing character to follow. We watch as James explodes in fist fights (alongside his best friend, Nick, played by Scott "Kid Cudi" Mescudi) and collapses in drunken stupors – spinning out at the edge of his imminent loss.
In an interview during TIFF, Abbott delivers an apt character sketch of James and his motivations. "When you play an unlikeable character, you try to work on the reasons why. Everything comes out of love for him," the actor says. "He's a little bit stunted emotionally, but he's trying. That's the basis of why he acts the way he does – everything he does, he does hard."
Abbott's performance grounds the frenzied and MDMA-fuelled aspects of James's character with skill and humility that seem beyond his years. When we first meet James, he's been partying for two days straight. Unshaven, with a cocktail of pills and booze still coursing through him, he hops in a taxi to catch the tail end of his dad's shiva. The camera frames his face in a tight close-up, and we hear the same music that he listens to through his small, white ear buds.
With his director of photography, Matyas Erdely, Mond decided early on to commit to these tight shots throughout the film. "It's what I believe it feels like for James in New York. Everything is so immediate and so anxious," Mond says. "That's why I liked going from this intensity that James is always with, to the wide angle where there is a relief. There is a relief, but it's also sad, and then you're chasing to get back to the close-up."
Whether captured in a wide or tight angle, the onscreen intimacy between Nixon and Abbott as mother and son is something to behold. The atmosphere that Mond created on set – a single New York apartment in the dead of winter, over just 18 days of shooting – went a long way to helping the pair achieve this closeness. "He's in control of his set, he's in control of his material, but he's not a guy who talks a lot," Nixon says. "There's a sense that you're around the oracle – you better be a little quiet because if you talk too much the oracle isn't going to speak, and then where are you?"
The film strikes a raw and personal chord, not so much because of Mond's prophetic strain but because of his ability to translate personal loss into a tight and stripped-down screenplay. James White is not bound by the limits of autobiography, but Mond did draw on his own experience. "I lost my mom four and half years ago, and I grew up in New York," he says. "A lot of James White comes from a personal space, but for me that's what movies are, exploring things that we don't understand about ourselves."
Nixon says the film was a form of catharsis for her, too, as when her own mother was sick, she experienced the same frustrations with the health-care system that James does. But mostly, she found moments of kinship between the character she was playing and her mom, whose jewellery she wears in the film. "They were both Upper West Side, bohemian, free-spirited women, and maybe that's it – but maybe that's enough," Nixon says.
The Sex and the City vet also recalls meeting Mond two or three times before she was offered the role, aware that they were each sniffing the other one out. "I could see the arrogance in him personally, and I could see the arrogance in his screenplay. And I wanted to be sure that it was met by humility. It was," she says. "I think when you're a young person who has high hopes for yourself and you're trying to create an artistic life, you kind of need both of those things. If you only have arrogance, you're not going to get anywhere because you won't learn. And if you only have humility, you're not going to strive."
As I watched Nixon onscreen, short-cropped hair, dangling silver earrings, thin scarf wrapped around her neck, her character small and pale under the weight of cancer, I had a moment of recognition not unlike the one Barthes experienced when watching Bergman. In the curve of Gail's nose, in the cling of her nightgown, I felt an experience of – what else can I call it? – the uncanny. I saw my mom, lost to cancer, too. With a film as careful and tender as this, catharsis, it would seem, can catch you unawares.