THE PLAINS: The Gifts Of Time And Choice

In his commencement address to the Kenyon College class of 2005, author David Foster Wallace told his graduate audience that “there happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.” In cinema, the often mundane aspects of existence, as recorded by the camera, are usually depicted in what is called ‘slow cinema’. This style of film is named such because there isn’t really much ‘going on’ at least immediately. But in terms of how you think about it, how you see it, cinema that offers glimpses into the mundanities of life can also offer a way to think about the image, the concepts, the peripherals, and temporals, that get lost or buried in the distraction of a ‘riveting plot’. Such is David Easteal‘s remarkable debut feature The Plains, a movie that to me, essentially signifies exactly what Wallace talks about in his speech. It’s the film of a man whose monotonous routine becomes a channel for exploring the frailty and stagnation of human existence.

Coming to Terms with the Ritual

A man named Andrew (Andrew Rowkowski) travels home on a 50-minute commute every evening from his job at a law firm. Sometimes, he has in tow with him a younger colleague who works in another department. During this drive, a few things are constants – the bad traffic, Andrew calling his 95-year-old mom who lives in a nursing home and calling his wife. The duration of the time we spend on each ride is different but the conversations follow a generally linear trajectory. There is a ‘narrative’ to this movie, but it’s one marked not through a sense of things ‘moving along’ but by repetition, gradual occurrence, and compounded with the slow march of time, a growing sense of a lack of meaning. The Plains has raised structural comparisons to Jeanne Dielman (1972), where a mundane routine is repeated each day but with slight variations and a gradual but noticeable sense of impending rupture.

Its concerns too, are of a domestic nature. Andrew prods his younger colleague David (played by the director himself) on his romantic life, asking questions about whether he wants to settle down and why he his previous relationship ended. The both of them have conversations about kids (Andrew and his wife decided not to have any) and the ways they cope with family life at home and office politics in the workplace. Meanwhile, the radio often rattles on about world events, climate change, and political news. The juxtaposition of the spiritual and grounded, the world-encompassing and the troubles within the confines of a car, all create a sensation of feeling small and enormous as once. Small in that the conversations and decisions made in the car feel isolated and compartmentalized in the grand scheme of things. Enormous in the sense that they are of utmost importance in defining who these two characters – Andrew and David – are.

Deciding What Has Meaning

David Foster Wallace talks in his essay about being bored in a checkout aisle at a grocery store. He says that in that moment, in the complete malaise and boredom of being stuck there, “you get to decide how you’re going to try and see it.” He goes on to talk about “the freedom of learning how to be well-adjusted: you get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.”

This is the crux of The Plains… not just for the characters in the film, but for us the viewers. The frame is completely still for majority of the movie, peering through the middle of the driver and passenger seat. By extension, the windshield becomes the moving camera, the car its gimbal, the weather outside the aperture. The traffic we see all around during the film is a constant reminder that this is but one story in one car in a vast array of different situations and experiences. Yet, they all share the one experience of being stuck in this god-awful traffic.

Conclusion

We too, by extension, are stuck and when we consider movies like The Plains, we have the freedom, more freedom than with any other kind of film, to decide what we’re willing to take out of it when we watch it. Slow cinema is often a challenge for most people not because they don’t have the “intellectual” or “artistic” aptitude to appreciate it but a fear of having the time to choose what to see and think about. In an era where entertainment is more rapid and relentless than ever before and where attention-span is as minuscule as it has ever been and a leisure lifestyle where comfort comes from having things readily decided for us, rarely do films give the audience time to breath, to look around, to make a choice from one minute to the next in consciously examining the frame, its details, and the words of its characters. The Plains, in its supposed mundanity and ritual, gives us the gift of time to really take in the cinematic image and make our own inferences as to what it’s showing us.

The Plains is was released for streaming in the U.S. on MUBI on April 12, 2023

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