Shutter Island

By an odd quirk of fate, “Shutter Island,” a big-budget spectacle from the most celebrated living director, reaches us on the same day as “The Ghost Writer,” made by a director who is nearly as famous for all the wrong reasons. Although they tell very different stories, they are strikingly similar films: adaptations of pop literature that turn on major third-act revelations, stories whose mysterious protagonists become trapped in situations that are not what they appear to be. After you’ve seen both of them we can talk about this in more detail, but I think we need to switch on the way-back machine and convince Scorsese and Roman Polanski to swap projects, roughly three years ago. Seriously. This is a flawed, baroque, vastly overcooked Scorsese film, which will intrigue some viewers and infuriate many others; it would be beautifully suited to Polanski’s coldhearted economy.

OK, so the barfing, sweaty DiCaprio in the clanking cellar of that ship is playing federal marshal Teddy Daniels, who’s on his way to the high-security loony bin on Shutter Island to investigate the escape of a violent inmate named Rachel Solando. As if penalizing himself for all those extended, almost geographical tracking shots over the years, Scorsese locks himself (and cinematographer Robert Richardson) into some of the tightest spots imaginable. As Teddy and his new partner, a subdued Seattle transplant named Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), soon establish, Rachel’s escape seems impossible, or even fictional. Somehow she got out of a locked cell, past a lunchroom full of male orderlies and out into the freezing, drenched wilderness of the island, with no shoes or foul-weather gear.

Everybody Teddy and Chuck interview sort of mumbles and rolls their eyes, and the hospital authorities are worse than no help at all. Pipe-smoking head shrink Dr. Cawley (unctuously played by Ben Kingsley) talks about his new talk-based therapies for severe mental illness and his reluctance to rely on lobotomies and/or Thorazine, but resists opening the hospital’s patient files. As a World War II veteran who speaks German and witnessed the liberation of Dachau, Teddy harbors severe doubts about Cawley’s urbane colleague, Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow). Teddy tells Chuck he’s done some research into the hospital’s history — and believes that Rachel isn’t the only patient who has disappeared.

As Lehane’s readers will already know, Teddy’s search for Rachel is only the tip of a very long tail connected to a surprisingly large mouse. Without giving much away, I can tell you that Scorsese has his own way of suggesting this. As the compressed and claustrophobic waking world of “Shutter Island” begins to shut down into film-noir conventions — fruitless searches, driving rainstorms, riddle-ridden conversations, troubling but fragmentary clues — Teddy’s inward night-world begins to explode. Like any noir hero worth his salt, Teddy has a dead wife (Michelle Williams) in his past and a dark secret in his heart. In a series of pyrotechnic and hallucinatory dream sequences that reunite Teddy and his lost love, Scorsese begins to knit the pieces of that past together.

Always a compulsive film buff, Scorsese has elaborated in interviews on some of the tricky period dramas he’s halfway channeling in “Shutter Island,” including classics like Jacques Tourneur’s “Out of the Past” (which he reportedly screened for DiCaprio) and Otto Preminger’s “Laura,” along with claustrophobic horror films like “The Haunting” and “The Innocents.” Those are all terrific movies, but I suspect that Martin Scorsese could not have made any of them. How is it possible that after all these years Scorsese does not understand that he is a sound-and-vision director — one of the greatest shot-makers and most daring montage artists in the medium’s history — but not much of a plot guy? How important is the story in “Taxi Driver” or “Raging Bull” or “Goodfellas”? Or in “Kundun” or “The Age of Innocence,” for that matter?

Maybe it’s admirable, on a personal level, for Scorsese to pursue something he’s not that good at. But that’s a little like saying that I should try writing romance novels. Hey, it’s just words on the screen, right? I do that already! He seems to have painted himself into a late-career pattern of making leaden, inflated genre pictures, all of them featuring DiCaprio in his unkempt, boiled-owl mode and all of them loaded with internal contradictions and at war with themselves.

“Shutter Island” would be a difficult and delicate movie to manage under the best of circumstances. Scorsese and screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis need to keep the audience engaged by the movie’s official mystery — Teddy’s investigation of the hospital and its secrets — while slowly revealing other, deeper mysteries that lie within the characters and story. But from the instant Teddy arrives on the island, plagued with nausea and jitters, and announces (as in the much-ridiculed trailer) that he and Chuck are “dooly appointed fedrul mahh-shals,” far too much of “Shutter Island” plays like lugubrious comedy.

By the time Ruffalo’s character explains the whole hospital-conspiracy plot, in an expository monologue delivered by flashlight in a half-ruined cemetery crypt (shortly before he disappears), I felt myself growing bored and frustrated with “Shutter Island” — and felt as if Scorsese was not far behind me. I just sat there hoping we’d get another dream sequence with Michelle Williams bursting into flames. Then missing murderess Rachel Solando is rediscovered, but is played first by Emily Mortimer, and then by Patricia Clarkson. Wait, what? Scorsese is pushing, I guess, for something that combines a ’40s horror-thriller with a contemporary psychological tragedy. What he ends up with is more like a Hardy Boys mystery directed by David Lynch. 

This movie is going to be vehemently attacked as brain-damaged garbage that exemplifies everything that’s wrong with today’s filmmaking and today’s audiences. It’s also going to be vigorously defended as a subversive action-movie masterpiece that offers a big middle finger to Hollywood convention, audience expectations, and anybody and everybody who would rather watch “The King’s Speech.” People on both sides will be partly right and partly wrong. Here’s where I come down: “Sucker Punch” doesn’t all work by a long shot, but it confirms my sense that Snyder belongs near the top of a very short list of directors who are trying to reinvent a personal, auteurist vision of cinema at the most commercial, mass-market, attention-disordered end of the spectrum.

First and most obviously, “Sucker Punch” is on one level exactly what it looks like: an unzipped geek-boy fantasy about a posse of scantily clad hookers engaged in video-game style throwdowns with a villainous array of robots, monsters and dragons. You could say that Snyder tries to walk a fine line between softcore exploitation and girl-power feminism, but it’s more like he takes a big fat grade-school eraser and smudges that line into meaninglessness. Anyway, there can be no doubt that he really, really digs directing fight sequences, and as in “Watchmen” and “300,” he commands a team that delivers the best effects in the business.

At their worst, these interludes offer adrenalized action cinema that’s well above average, and at their best — like an imaginary version of World War I trench warfare, featuring zombie German soldiers reanimated with clockwork and steam power, enormous dirigible warships and a Pokémon-style Japanese battlebot — they verge on demented visionary genius. But if the ass-kicking lingerie chicks are the overly sweet chocolate in the center, the pastry around them is something else again: a self-referential movie-movie whose axis of reality keeps shifting, after the manner of “Inception” and “Shutter Island” and “The Matrix” (and almost every David Lynch movie, and a whole bunch of influences more obscure than that). And buried inside that pastry, deep within the candy-chewy, garters-and-machine-guns center, is a nugget of dark and deadly poison.

You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned the movie’s actors or characters yet, which is because Snyder’s screenplay (co-written with Steve Shibuya) treats them as archetypal and almost interchangeable game-board pieces. (Unlike almost every movie made in Hollywood these days, “Sucker Punch” is not based on some preexisting “media property.” Of course, another way of putting it might be that it’s based on all of them.) His heroine is a young woman known only as Baby Doll (played by Emily Browning), who looks like a pigtailed stereotype out of jailbait pornography and barely speaks in the movie’s first half hour. We meet her in a super-stylized music-video flashback, set to a cover version of the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” that explains her predicament: Her evil stepfather has framed her for the murder of her little sister, and she’s been confined to a decaying mental hospital that looks like a mixture of Sam Fuller’s “Shock Corridor,” some smutty women’s-prison movie and an Edward Gorey cartoon. Everything about the place is weird and improbable, from the severe but stylish head shrink (Carla Gugino) to the suspiciously hot fellow inmates, whom we’ll get to know later under their porny non-names: Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) and her sister Rocket (Jena Malone), along with the raven-tressed Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung).

Except then the movie’s universe, or Baby Doll’s damaged psychology, skips a gear or two, and suddenly she and her peers are captives of another kind, high-priced dancers and courtesans in a decadent Gilded Age nightclub presided over by a sleazeball impresario named Blue (Oscar Isaac, a corrupt hospital orderly in reality No. 1). Gugino’s half-sympathetic doctor becomes the slinky, middle-aged Eastern European den mother, torn between sisterly loyalty and slavish obedience to Blue. Baby Doll is seen as a highly valuable new commodity, and in a few days she will be delivered to a mysterious customer known as the High Roller. (Without giving anything away about him: Cough-cough-Don Draper-cough.) Snyder is clearly a compulsive cinephile, and if you share that tendency you may spot similarities to all kinds of movies about showbiz and/or prostitution, from “Lola Montès” to “Moulin Rouge!” Unless I’m way off base, he’s also a fan of French director Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s “Innocence,” a creepy girls’-school allegory with some strikingly similar ingredients that was among the ignored delights of the last decade.

At any rate, in whorehouse reality Baby Doll discovers that her dancing has the power to hypnotize men, quite literally, and to transport her — and Sweet Pea, Rocket, Blondie and Amber, as necessary — into a video-game jukebox universe presided over by Scott Glenn, who does such a convincing impersonation of “Kung Fu”-meets-”Kill Bill” David Carradine that at first I wondered what digital tricks had been used to resuscitate him. It’s Glenn who delivers mock-military pep talks to the miniskirted fab five before every one of their fantasy missions: Disarm a bomb on a moving train, murder the baby dragon (aww!) and flee its mother, kill the robots and steal the secret German map, etc., accompanied by such bromides as “Never write a check with your mouth you can’t cash with your ass.”

I suppose it’s clear enough that the loony-bin level of “Sucker Punch” is meant to be reality, and every subsequent shift in context — up to and including the faux-medieval dragon-slaying and steampunk World War I cyborgs — is a metaphorical attempt to escape from that reality. That is, it’s accurate but inadequate; that’s both taking the movie too literally and missing its point. There’s no big puzzle to work out here, à la Christopher Nolan, and the more you pick at Snyder’s nested narratives, the more miscellaneous and nonsensical they become. (Mind you, many of Nolan’s fans also approach his movies in a wrongheaded spirit of biblical exegesis. But let’s punt the whole question of the uses of narrative instability in “Inception” and “Sucker Punch” to next year’s crop of grad students.)

It might be better to say that all levels of the story in “Sucker Punch” are self-evidently ludicrous, and that the point of the movie is the vertiginous thrill ride that takes us through them, pumped along by a dance-floor soundtrack produced by Marius De Vries and Tyler Bates (Björk, Queen and Mozart are all involved, along with covers of “White Rabbit,” “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Love Is the Drug”). If you want to understand Snyder’s central narrative gambit, it’s right there in the title. He gives us what we want (or what we think we want, or what he thinks we think we want): Absurdly fetishized women in teeny little skirts, gloriously repetitious fight sequences loaded with plot coupons, pseudo-feminist fantasies of escape and revenge. Then he yanks it all back and stabs us through the eyeball.

Managing all these nested levels of narrative is a marvelously nerdy accomplishment, no doubt — but this is the most tight-assed vision of the innermost human psyche I’ve ever seen. While Nolan’s images are visually impressive and powered by state-of-the-art digital effects and accomplished stunt work, they’re always ordered and organized with anal precision. They don’t look or feel anything like dreams. (Or, at least, not like my dreams.) They look instead like mediocre action films from the ’90s, or in the case of the supremely boring ski-patrol vs. Arctic fortress shootout found on Level Three, like the Alistair MacLean adaptation “Ice Station Zebra” from 1968. (With Rock Hudson! And Ernest Borgnine!) “Inception” may have been directed by Christopher Nolan, but Nolan’s dreams are apparently directed by Michael Bay.

OK, I know — you want me to back off the high-minded analysis and tell you whether “Inception” is a good destination for those summer moviegoing dollars eager to leap out of your wallet. Sure, I guess so. It’s a cool-looking action movie, carefully constructed and edited, that uses all kinds of nifty locations and a lot of portentous-sounding expositional yammering. It inhabits a Philip K. Dick-style universe of psychological warfare that suggests “The Matrix,” “Total Recall” and “Minority Report” — all of them, by the way, better movies — but it’s fairer to call “Inception” a maze movie or a labyrinth movie than a puzzle movie. Because, as the wisecracking fellow critic sitting next to me observed, every time the story gets puzzling the characters call a timeout and explain it.

So, yeah, if you approach “Inception” with lowered expectations it’s a pretty good time. Problem is, there are no lowered expectations around Christopher Nolan, whose adherents have proclaimed him as the heir to Kubrick and Hitchcock and declared “Inception” a masterpiece. I don’t want to get sidetracked here, but let me suggest that the comparisons aren’t entirely misguided. They’re just not helpful. Nolan has inherited some of Kubrick and Hitchcock’s worst tendencies, most notably their defensive, compulsive inclination to work everything out about their stories and characters to the last detail, as if human beings and the world were algebraic or geometrical phenomena requiring a solution.

But the mysterious power of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” cannot be explained by the ludicrous official story revealed in the final act — indeed, it nearly scotches the whole movie — and the attack of “The Birds” is never explained. As Kubrick’s career progressed he was increasingly drawn to stories that defied or challenged rational analysis, like “2001: A Space Odyssey” or “The Shining.” (I think I’d put “Full Metal Jacket” and “Eyes Wide Shut” in that category too, but let’s discuss some other time.) Nolan seems to have learned exactly the wrong lessons from these mentors. For all the complexity, craftsmanship and color of “Inception,” it’s yet another of his ultra-serious schematic constructions with no soul, no sex and almost no joy, all about some tormented dude struggling with his ill-managed Freudian demons. That same guy sitting next to me cracked that Nolan needs to stop seeing a therapist; there’s not nearly enough sublimation in his movies.

At least Nolan hasn’t cast frequent collaborator Christian Bale on this occasion (they’ll presumably be reunited on the next Batman movie), but he’s only traveled as far as go-to tormented dude Leonardo DiCaprio, last seen as the psychiatry-textbook protagonist of Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island.” DiCaprio’s only 35, but he’s become a vastly different actor in his post-pretty-boy phase, and always seems to play guys who have a dead wife, a sweat-gland malfunction and a really urgent need to find the toilet. In “Inception” that would be Cobb, a dream-state spy or “extractor” who earns big bucks by entering and manipulating people’s dreams to drag out their most closely held secrets.

Nolan throws us into the deep water right away, and in many ways the dazzling first quarter-hour of “Inception” is the best part. There are no opening credits. In the first couple of shots, Cobb washes up on a beach, possibly in Japan, and is dragged into a luxurious house for an audience with an aging yakuza gangster. No, wait — now Saito (Ken Watanabe), the gangster, is much younger. Cobb and his sharp-dressed partner, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who seems to have materialized out of nowhere, offer to train him to protect himself from dream raiders. No, wait — this is Saito’s dream, and Cobb and Arthur have set a trap for him. Unless he’s also setting a trap for them! But who’s the sultry foreign bombshell (Marion Cotillard) who aligns herself with Saito against Cobb, and doesn’t really seem to belong here?

 After that setting dissolves into a chaotic shootout, all these people (or most of them) wake up in a modest apartment somewhere in Asia or the Middle East — Iran? Pakistan? the West Bank? — where an angry mob is closing in outside. Saito isn’t pleased; he was auditioning Cobb and Arthur for a difficult espionage job, and they failed. No, wait — maybe they didn’t. How and when can the dreamer be absolutely sure he has woken up?

So the themes, ideas and characters of “Inception” are all introduced with brilliant economy, along with its moral and philosophical universe. And then Nolan proceeds to hammer them relentlessly into the ground with an increasingly clumsy, clunky plot and an allegedly profound mystery that just sort of fizzles out into what-if-this-world-isn’t-real sophomoric musing.

Cobb and Arthur are gray-market or black-market entrepreneurs, and Cobb has warrants hanging over his head that keep him from going home to his kids in the United States. (I’ll say no more about that.) His dead wife, Mal (Cotillard), only visits him in dreams — his own and other people’s, even though that’s not really supposed to happen — and doesn’t act all that friendly. Let’s just say that as obvious names for ominous female characters go, that one pretty nearly takes the cake. You didn’t want to call her Fatale, Chris? Or Eve L. DeMenta B. Yotch?

These guys are experts at extracting stuff from people’s minds, but Saito wants them to do something more difficult: “Inception,” where an idea will be planted in someone’s mind so deeply that he’ll believe he thought of it himself. (This is supposed to be so hard, someone explains, because the brain can always track ideas back to their source. Take that, Joseph Goebbels and Fox News! You only think it’s working!) The subject is a youthful energy tycoon named Fischer (Cillian Murphy), who must be persuaded to break up his dying father’s superpower-scale corporation because that’ll be a good thing for the planet. For once I am not being snarky; that is the stated reason.

So Cobb and Arthur have to round up the team of globetrotting rapscallions always demanded by a movie like this: College-girl genius Ariadne (Ellen Page) as the “architect” who designs the dream worlds; chemist Yusuf (Dileep Rao) to administer the designer sedatives; shape-shifter Eames (British actor Tom Hardy, always a delight) to act out key roles inside Fischer’s mind. It’s basically “Mission: Impossible II” minus Tom Cruise and John Woo, plus “Ocean’s Eleven” minus a sense of humor and Las Vegas, plus “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors,” with Marion Cotillard standing in for Freddy Krueger. Except that I just made it sound a whole lot more fun than it really is.

Nolan is completely uninterested in the plot superstructure involving Saito and Fischer, which never amounts to anything and holds no surprises. He is, of course, supremely invested in the details of the three (or four) levels of dream narrative into which our terrorist heroes drag Fischer. Drugging him in awkward and implausible fashion on a Sydney-to-Los Angeles flight, they first pull him into a noir-ish kidnapping drama in a gray, rain-swept city, before all going to sleep again and waking up in a corporate-espionage yarn set in a luxury hotel, where they snooze down another level to the aforementioned Arctic Circle shootout, which could be in one of the Roger Moore Bond movies or an abandoned Cold War drama with Sylvester Stallone. (“No man’s ever broken out of the Soviet Union’s super-secret Northern Fortress. But one man’s going to break IN.”)

All of this involves a bunch of big-ass guys shooting at each other with automatic weapons, which has to be the most arid and depressing depiction of the dream state I’ve ever encountered. There are no surreal images or nonsense dialogue, no illogical shifts of scene from the first-grade classroom to Mom’s kitchen to a whorehouse. It’s all meticulously, ass-clenchingly worked out: One person has to stay awake at each level to retrieve the others from the mind-melting waters of Lethe, and time passes more slowly as the dreamers go deeper. If there’s one thing that dream-state movies need more of, it’s math, and genderless geek-girl Ariadne is all over it: “That means 10 seconds before the van hits the water! That’s three minutes for Arthur in the hotel — and 16 minutes for us!” (I made up that particular line, but it’s representative.)

Sometimes Nolan’s technical expertise produces its own kind of beauty, as in a startling zero-gravity scene in the hotel corridors when the laws of physics apparently rebel on Level Two. But for the most part “Inception” is a handsome, clever and grindingly self-serious boy-movie, shorn of imagination, libido, spirituality or emotional depth. Nolan establishes a fascinating world, loaded with trapdoors, symbols and hidden secrets, and then squanders the opportunity on an overpriced “Twilight Zone” episode. He casts Cotillard, one of the foxiest actresses alive, as a smoldering temptress who embodies all the female, erotic energy absent from this universe, and then literally locks her in the basement. Mal yearns to escape and get her claws into these constipated, narcoleptic boys (and maybe into Page’s prim androgyne as well), and this movie would be a hell of a lot better if she did. But she’s a girl — no, she’s a woman — and even in dreams it’s too dangerous to let those run around loose. 

Director Derek Cianfrance has been working on the film on and off for 12 years, in between collecting unemployment, working odd jobs and making documentaries. Williams has been on board for six years and Gosling for four. To prepare for the roles, Cianfrance made the actors live together for several weeks in the movie couple’s prefab home, buying groceries at the supermarket, baking a birthday cake for Frankie (Faith Wladyka), their fictional daughter, putting up a Christmas tree and wrapping presents. Gosling worked shifts for a moving company, one of Dean’s jobs in the film. Williams gained a fair bit of weight to play her character, a nurse of about 30 in the movie’s present tense.

Sometimes this kind of intense, Method-based character construction — although hardly anyone goes into it this hard or this deep — can seem like phony-baloney actorly pretense. But in “Blue Valentine” the results are on the screen, in compassionate, nuanced performances that are utterly free of condescension or sentimentality. As we move back and forth between Dean and Cindy at the beginning of their relationship, six years earlier, and during the terrible two days that may end it, they never seem like heroes or villains. They are both sympathetic and both at fault, a pair of normal, damaged people who’ve been living together with not enough money and too many broken dreams and a pile of unanswered questions.

Cianfrance and cinematographer Andrij Parekh capture the domestic details of Dean and Cindy’s life — and their ill-fated excursion to the “Future Room,” at a couples-oriented theme motel — in gorgeous, color-saturated close-ups that make the ordinary seem remarkable. In that light, it’s not surprising that “Blue Valentine” has become one of the few movies to premiere at Sundance and then blow up huge at Cannes. (The last example that comes to mind is “An Inconvenient Truth.”) Although the film couldn’t possibly be more American in subject, setting and spirit, it has an intense, almost reverential aesthetic vision that recalls European art-house cinema.

A few days ago, Gosling and Williams greeted a small group of journalists for interviews at the rooftop lounge of their beachfront hotel. That sounds a little more glamorous than it was; the day was blustery and gray, so we huddled around a table in an indoor pavilion. Gosling, 29, is probably best known for his Oscar-nominated leading role in “Half Nelson.” Williams, who is also 29, got her Academy nomination for “Brokeback Mountain” and has also appeared in films ranging from Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” to Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” to Kelly Reichardt’s ultra-indie “Wendy and Lucy.” She is also known, of course, as the former fiancée of the late Heath Ledger, and the mother of his daughter.

As to the question hotly debated in various languages here this week — are Williams and Gosling a couple, or do they just play one on-screen? — I can’t offer much insight. (Official denials have flowed from P.R. offices over the last few days.) They were warm and relaxed with each other, joking around and finishing each other’s sentences. But then, they’ve been working on the same job site for some time.

Do you guys really pay attention to reviews? At Sundance, this movie got very mixed reviews — some good, some really bad. All of a sudden you get here and it’s a huge sensation.

Ryan Gosling: I mean, obviously good reviews can help. I’ve been a part of movies like “Half Nelson” where the critics liked it and then it got seen. You guys have a lot of power, and if you choose to champion something, people will listen. I’ve been on the receiving end of that in a good way and I’ve been on the receiving end of that in a negative way. You just take the hits when they come.

With this film, we knew it wasn’t something that was test-screened to be a precise, universal experience. It’s left open for your interpretation, and any time you do that you’re leaving it open for people to not like it. When we were in Sundance, we were reading bad reviews, and Derek was more excited about the bad ones than the good ones. He wanted to make a film that polarized people.

Both of you stuck with this project a long time. You could easily have moved on and forgotten about it.

R.G.: Twelve years for Derek, and I’ve been saying six years for you, is that true?

Michelle Williams: Yeah. [Counting to self.] Six or seven.

R.G.: For me, it’s four. Which I thought was a lot. We’ve had a lot of time to think about it and talk about it.

M.W.: I had to find a new way into it, when we finally came back to it. What I responded to most strongly when I was 22 or 23 wasn’t what I responded to later. I had to find something else to love, because I’d already mined that. I didn’t get to make the movie then, so I had to exercise that specific desire in another way. When I reapproached it at 28, I had to find a new way to fall in love with it.

What aspect of the movie did you like most at first?

M.W.: It was actually the future, meaning the time when the couple’s on the outs. That section compelled me the most. That really got my attention. When I came back to it, I just had to find a deeper sense. I couldn’t approach it with the same point of view, the same idea of how to play it. I had to find a new way to play that part, because I had already played it so much in my head. It had gotten boring. All the things that had compelled me about it, all the questions I had about it, I felt like I understood them. They had lost their mystery. So I had to find a new mystery.

Did the script change a lot during all those years of development?

M.W. Yeah. I mean, it changed while we were shooting. [To Gosling.] I was remembering that day that we showed up in Honesdale [Pa.], with nothing planned. It was crazy! We had no idea what we were going to do. We had 12 hours, an entire night, to shoot a walk-and-talk down a main street, with no plan.

R.G. A lot happened that didn’t make it into the movie. One of the scenes that made it is that scene when we play the ukulele and sing and dance. Those things, you can’t plan them. To Derek’s credit, he creates an environment for these things to happen. Weren’t we also throwing up at one point?

M.W.: That didn’t make it! Sticking fingers in each other’s mouths.

R.G.: Gagging each other and throwing up, making out in the rain. There was a lot of stuff. It’s also to Derek’s credit that one reason it lasted so long is his ability to change his mind. A lot of directors have one specific vision, and ultimately Derek had a vision for the film that was grander than the details. It was about the spirit of it, and he was able to change his mind about the details. It was supposed to be set in L.A., it was supposed to be by the ocean, it was supposed to be a million different ways. It’s a wildly different movie, and yet it’s the same. It’s the same scenes, with different lines and different locations.

Do you prefer to work by improvisation that way, rather than with a strict script?

R.G.: I think it depends on who you’re working with. There’s nothing worse than watching actors who are just improv-ing and it’s not going anywhere. We spent so long preparing — six years of thinking about your character, and the same with myself for four — and then when you get into any situation, you’re ready. That’s why it worked. I don’t think it works all the time.

How well did you know each other before you made the film?

R.G.: Derek designed it so that when we were getting to know each other in the beginning, we were getting to know each other in the film. Michelle and I really didn’t know each other well, and he would just throw us into this wildly intimate situation. And then, in the present, when they’re having problems, we spent two weeks, during the days …

M.W.: It was a month. Remember? There was always a planned hiatus for the transition from young to older, and how we were going to do that physically. After being there for a week, Derek decided to stretch it out. I decided I wanted to gain weight and Derek just made the space. We got to be in that house for about a month.

R.G.: Yeah, we did groceries, he put us on a budget. All the things that make couples want to wring each other’s necks. He made sure that we did that.

Ryan, you actually worked some shifts as a mover to prepare for this film?

R.G.: Yeah, exactly. I joined this moving crew and we moved the cinematographer out of his apartment. He was having a baby, and we moved him from the Lower East Side to a place in Brooklyn. He made them double-stack the boxes so it was super-heavy.

It was kind of beautiful, actually. That’s Andrij Parekh, who’s such a talented cinematographer. He co-directed that film “Cold Souls,” he shot “Half Nelson” and “Sugar.” He’s the best. When he moved to New York to be a cinematographer, he moved into that apartment. When he moved out, he was actually making a film of the move. It was a nice completion of the circle.

Were you good at being a mover? Is that your future?

It’s hard to tell, because that was an unfair situation. He double-stacked those boxes and put extra weight in them.

M.W.: Didn’t they say they’d give you a job?

R.G.: They did say they’d give me a job. I mean, we really did the job, and I hung in there. But in reality they would go and do two more jobs after the one that we did. So I’m not sure I was really put to the test.

Have you ever done this kind of intensive preparation for a role before?

R.G.: I thought I had, but I guess I hadn’t. It was total immersion, which I thought I was doing before. This was complete immersion for the entire period of the shoot. We baked a birthday cake, we wrapped presents, we had a birthday party.

M.W.: We had to have fights. We had to spend the whole day fighting and then take our daughter to an amusement park and pretend everything was OK.

R.G.: Michelle just never tired of it! She can just fight and fight.

In most movies about a breakup there’s an inciting incident that explains why it happens: Somebody hits somebody, or somebody cheats. But this movie has nothing like that. It’s more like it’s happening the whole time, in every moment that we see. It’s extraordinary, and much closer to real life, I think.

R.G.: Right. I think Derek didn’t want it to be something that you can pin on one event. For him it was a study of: Where does love go? It’s there and suddenly it’s not, and each person has their own idea of what happened. You can’t really pinpoint it as one specific event. It’s all of these subtleties that you can’t really talk about, and you have to watch and try to understand. He’s asking the audience more than he’s telling them. He’s asking them: Here are these situations, what do you think is going wrong? What’s the communication problem?

M.W.: And then it’s like a poison. Like, it infiltrates everything. The smallest exchange you just can’t get right. You don’t know why, and you didn’t set out to make it that way, but all the small things are wrong.

R.G.: You think everything means something else. You can’t take anything at face value. It’s all loaded.

You remarked earlier that this movie might not be a universal experience. But anybody who’s ever been in a relationship has had those moments.

R.G.: Well, there was one critic who described this film as “when emo-fascists attack.” Some people don’t recognize it as their experience of love. They feel like it’s too dramatic, they find it unrealistic. Personally, I feel like it represents as many of the shades of love as I’ve seen in my 29 years. Some people think it’s totally foreign to them. I want their relationships!

Maybe people should know that this film isn’t all misery. A lot of the story, after all, is about how they Dean and Cindy fell in love in the first place. Do you think it’s ultimately depressing or hopeful?

M.W.: I think it exists on both planes at the same time. Like it does in your mind, when you’re in a relationship. We always sort of thought, maybe the future in the movie is just a dream. Maybe it’s just a bad dream, maybe it’s a premonition or a warning sign.

R.G.: I think there’s tons of hope in the film. There’s lots of positivity, and lots of scenes of people being in love and wallowing in that. I feel like it has balance.

M.W.: I also feel like it’s two bad days. I almost forget that until I see the movie again. It was a long, arduous month of shooting, but what we’re showing is two really bad days in a marriage. Somebody didn’t get enough sleep and somebody drank too much. It’s two days! How many days like that are there in the scope of a long-term marriage?

Tell us about shooting in that horrible motel room, the one that Ryan’s character describes as a “robot’s vagina.”

M.W.:  Derek wanted us to shoot us walking into that place for the first time for real, so we did that take and then he called “cut.” And then we had a four-hour meeting about how we couldn’t shoot in there! [Laughter.] “You gotta get us out of here! This is never going to work!”

R.G.: I almost passed out. There was no real light or air, we were on the sixth floor of this hotel in King of Prussia, Pa., surrounded by all these theme rooms. We were right next to the Leather and Lace Room, which was constantly booked the whole time we were shooting. Different couples every night!

Your main co-star is Faith Wladyka, who plays your daughter. She was 5 years old when you shot the film, and she’s on-screen a lot. How difficult is it to work with a little kid?

R.G.: Well, Faith is a really special kid. Every minute she’s on the screen is perfect. I knew that every time we’d do a scene together she’d do something interesting: She’d be singing or dancing, telling a story, doing something funny. There’s never a bad “kid-line” delivery, because she’s never really saying lines. She and I went fishing, we built a doghouse together. We did a lot of things, so by the time we were shooting, it didn’t seem difficult.

Do you guys have an idea about what happens to Dean and Cindy after the movie ends? How does their story continue?

M.W.: Therapy! [Laughter.] Except I’d never get you in that room. No way.