(Untitled) Review
By David Kempler
Better Left Untitled
Dissonance is the star of Jonathan Parker's, "(Untitled)". That's not a typo. "(Untitled)" is the actual name. Adrian (Adam Goldberg) is an avant-garde composer and musician. In this beautiful-looking but otherwise uninspiring venture,
avant-garde means clanging on pots, avoiding melody at all costs, and posing. Aside from Adrian's fascination with dissonant sound, we also have Madeleine (Marley Shelton) as an art gallery manager, whose gallery specializes in "phony" art, for example, sticking a push-pin into a wall and declaring it
Louvre material.
Adrian first meets Madeleine when she is on a date with his brother, Josh (Eion Bailey). Josh is a "legitimate" artist who has romantic interest in Madeleine but she is not interested in Josh as an artist or as a lover. Instead she turns to Adrian for the lover part. The why is never clear, other than she is definitely attracted to weirdness whether it be in the art world or in her personal life. Since Adrian has the personality of a snarling, beaten dog, it is difficult to imagine why this devastatingly beautiful woman wants him. Yet, I've known weirder couples in real life, so I can let that slide. Ms. Shelton reminded me of Heather Graham if she were portraying the old Playboy-vision of the woman with hair-in-bun and glasses (yielding a tigress when the hair comes down and glasses come off).
Parker loves throwing inappropriately loud sound into Madeleine's walking. Whenever or wherever she walks, her heels are at quadruple volume. To punctuate this fascination of his, at one point she is walking barefoot in her apartment and that too, is quadrupled in volume. I'm sure there is meaning or a joke here but I didn't get it.
Everything about "(Untitled)" is disjointed: music, art, soundtrack, character personalities and relationships. Adam Goldberg poses for the entire time he is on screen. All his character displays is anger, distance and surprise. He has no self-awareness at all. It's okay to show things as being disjointed but in this case the whole production falls victim to the same condition, and that never works.
