Hannah Takes the Stairs

Hannah (Greta Gerwig) is a twenty something starting an internship at a Chicago production office working under writing partners Matt and Paul. Her boyfriend Mike (Mark Duplass) quits his job. She contemplates breaking up and Mike decides to do it himself. She starts to fall for his co-workers which causes friction among the trio.

This is Joe Swanberg, mumblecore, and the indie circuit. Gerwig is starting out her partnership with Swanberg. She definitively has a star quality to her. She is very much the IT girl of the movie. On the other hand, Matt and Paul are not being played by IT guys. It would help to have Duplass play one of the guys. There is real tension happening between Hannah and Mike. It gets really uncomfortable and dark at times. The love triangle needs that kind of tension and darkness. Without it, the film goes limp. They struggle to get to that same level. It doesn't put Hannah in the best of light either. The movie falters to the finish.

Hannah Takes The Stairs has poor production values, a slow pace, boring locations, and no actors you have ever heard of, and that's what makes this film so special. This is clearly a film made by a group of friends and artists, exploring their lives and the art of film-making simultaneously. It's simplistic rawness allows for an honest, and at times voyeuristic tone that examines the simple difficulties of young people learning to make grown-up decisions. This film is certainly not for everyone, but if you can forgive the ultra-low budget blemishes it is very worthwhile. In many ways, Hannah Takes the Stairs is the future of film-making that Francis Ford Coppola predicted in Hearts of Darkness.

Hannah is so self-absorbed, she doesn't even realize she is. She laments that the world is full of self-absorbed people and that everyday gestures of friendliness are rooted in fear of the dark side of others. And yet she seems to give nothing worthwhile of herself and seems oblivious to the needs of others or the ramifications of her actions. She is drifting aimlessly, momentarily amused by the affections of men with whom she rapidly bores. Nonetheless, she is fascinating to watch. Excellent acting with brilliant unspoken subtext, which is critical, since Hannah is largely inarticulate. If you know any lost 20-somethings, you will recognize them in this. Many scenes go on too long, the dialog is bland and mundane. The men are cute and like to cuddle. The women confused and uninspiring.

Joe Swanberg's "Hannah Takes the Stairs" is a low-budget art-film done in a quasi-improvisational style. It centers around a group of self-absorbed twenty-somethings who spend most of their time sitting around discussing life and relationships as if such subjects had never been talked about before. The result is a sometimes insightful but more often tedious look into the mindset of today's younger generation.

Hannah (Greta Gerwig) is a neo-Bohemian playwright with poor instincts when it comes to men, who, upon dumping her ne'er-do-well musician boyfriend, immediately strikes up romances with two fellows at the obviously loosey-goosey TV production company where she works. The movie strives hard to be as extemporaneous as possible both in its performances and its direction, and while that does yield a few moments of truth and honesty along the way (the break-up scene is almost painfully convincing), too much of the movie is simply vapid and self-indulgent, with a trio of perfectly able-bodied young folk puling and mewling and whining about life to the point where we just don't care to listen to them anymore.

With no real plot or storyline to speak of, watching "Hannah Takes the Stairs" is a bit like staring at someone else's random doodlings for an hour-and-a-half and finding no real reason why we should care about them. And, oh yes, unless I missed it, no actual staircase appears in the movie, with or without Hannah going up or down it. I guess it must be metaphorical.

Looking at the comments on this film on this and other websites it is clear that this is a rather polarising affair – it is difficult to find a balanced review as people seem to love it or hate it. I'm not sure why because for me it is an OK piece of cinema vérité that has some strengths but ultimately doesn't work unless your requirements are for it to be "natural". Some have said that the film is unrealistic but I think this is unfair because to me Hannah does ring true – and if you doubt this then I would suggest you go onto Tumblr (the current "trendy" blog platform) and subscribe to any one of the countless blogs maintained by young professionals working their first jobs in the creative sectors. This comes over like a criticism and perhaps it is because for me the film is fairly bang on the money when it comes to Hannah – although I guess she is as representative of her generation as much as any one person can represent a group of millions (ie they can't).

The film follows her through a period of time and many conversations with her partners, colleagues and friends and nails her in how rather self-centred and selfish she is when it comes to her relationships. Some of this is clunkingly obvious to the point of being a bit irritating but mostly it feels natural. It seems this is mostly down to Gerwig, who is utterly convincing in who she is, a feat that is more impressive due to the lack of script (although I suppose she may be this person but I shall assume she is not). The problem is that, given how rather annoying Hannah is, the film seems happy to let the viewer wallow in her life without a lot of interest going on once her character has been established as much as it will be (which is early on). Without much happening we are left with only the characters to hold the viewer in the film – in particular Hannah. The problem is that this is not something that appeals and, even if it does, the lack of any sort of destination (thematically, emotionally, narratively – you name it) means that you get little back from the film.

Ultimately, for all its naturalism and the appeal this offers me, the film goes nowhere and just leaves me with people that I have no reason to have patience with and, although I gave the film the time it wanted, I find myself taking nothing away from it other than a sense of time wasted. As an experiment it is interesting and Gerwig is a big part of the film working at all but it amounts to very little and has the further downside of suggesting that this is somehow the standard for independent little dramas now. Ignore the hyped praise and ignore the scathing criticism – the truth is somewhere in the middle albeit it more towards the critical end of the spectrum.