THE DISH & THE SPOON (Music Box Selects)

The Dish & the Spoon (2011)
Music Box Selects / Vinegar Syndrome

by "Doc" Hunter Bush, MovieJawn podcast director, host of the HWGW Podcast

The Dish & the Spoon comes to Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome partner label Music Box Selects. Written and directed by Allison Bagnall, this film is an honest and chaotic look at a woman in the middle of great distress. Anchored by quietly dynamite performances from Greta Gerwig and Olly Alexander. Music Box Selects' release offers some slight additional materials, but the movie is the real prize here.

The Movie Itself: 4 stars

Rose (Greta Gerwig) is in, as they say, a bad state. When the film opens, she's crying and driving; never the best situation to be in. Turns out her husband has had an affair with a local dancer / yoga instructor and Rose found out and took off in a flurry of hurt and anger. She's obviously at a low point: she doesn't quite have enough money for all six donuts and all six beers from the convenience store, so she leaves one bottle on the counter amidst fistfuls of loose change, the clerk takes pity on her and lets her go. Her next stop, a lighthouse overlooking the sea (as they generally do), is where she finds her counterpart for this picture, the spoon to her dish: Olly Alexander as an unnamed boy.

The Dish & the Spoon is an almost hypnotic doomed-romance story with a decided New England flavor to it. As the emotionally lost Rose drinks away her feelings, occasionally attempting to incite violence against the other woman, she finds the Boy to be, maybe not so much a kindred spirit as a safe harbor. He, for his part, is affable and nearly as lost as she is, but for entirely different reasons.

Writer/director Allison Bagnall allows a certain improvisational looseness to the film that only enhances the barely contained chaos of this whirlwind not-quite romance. Amidst a nearly continuously storming Northeastern coastal town, Rose interrogates who she is and what she wants by playing dress-up--sometimes literally--with a gracious, quiet, increasingly lovestruck young man whose name we never learn.

Almost from minute one, I was left quietly reeling. Both Gerwig and Alexander deliver muted performances that are devastating in their raw vulnerability. Every emotion is on display without ever announcing themselves. The film is simultaneously a whirlwind of activity and emotions--the whole thing takes place over just a few days--and a slow burn romance that there's no clean and easy resolution to. The Dish and the Spoon is by no means a flashy film, but it's a subtly stunning one.

The Video: 3 stars

Being set in a seaside beach town in the cold, wet off-season, everything in the film has that northeastern United States cold, wet, washed out cast to it. Outside are bright grey skies over muted golden beaches, the skeletal black branches of nearly bare trees and carpets of brown fallen leaves. The interiors are warm, but occasionally dark, as Rose and the boy navigate her parents' summer house by kerosene lanterns as there is no electricity or heat in the off-season. 

The transfer is fabulous, but like the movie itself, not flashy. The exteriors are never washed out, the interiors, no matter how dramatically lit, are never too obscured to see what's happening. Facial expressions are always readable, no matter how subtle. The whole visual aesthetic projects intimacy in a way that reinforces the film's subject matter perfectly.

The Audio: 3 stars

As with everything thus far, the audio mix isn't showy, but it's well-balanced for how dynamic it is. There's roughly as much screaming as there is whispered dialogue in the beginning of the film and my three-channel soundbar handled it all very well without me having to adjust the volume levels at all. As Rose and the boy develop their little faux domestic routine, and begin to have fun, there is singing, piano music, and non-diegetic songs on the soundtrack that are all handled equally well.

The mixing also makes use of the environments of any given scene to add a real world dynamism to the events. When Rose drives to the other woman's home and stands out in the driveway, shouting, you can hear the distance and the space of the outdoors versus when she and the boy spend an evening asking each other about their lives. The first third of the film, it always seems to be storming outside, and when they're in the summer house, the whistling wind and the rhythm of the rain is occasionally present but never overwhelming. It ends up reinforcing the coziness of the scenes as much as it underlines their friendship as a calm in the eye of Rose's emotional storm.

The Supplements: 3 stars

The additional features aren't amazing, but they were very enlightening. The 2011 South By Southwest interview by Ann Thompson with Gerwig and Alexander underlines the looseness on-set and what they describe as the sense of play they felt in being able to build their characters. This is reinforced by the deleted scenes which aside from being largely aimless silliness--Rose and the boy spitting beer at each other, or spending an afternoon in the woods playing with branches and other natural detritus--it really highlights Allison Bagnall's non-restrictive approach.

Interestingly, Bagnall clearly had some of the movie locked in mentally before production began. The Location Scouting feature is composed of footage filmed during these scouting sessions contrasted with how they appear in the finished film and it's remarkably similar. I feel that her having some firm ideas for how she wanted the film to look, yet being able to allow for improvisation and creativity at the same time to be a really fascinating and admirable quality in a filmmaker.

• Deleted Scene and Outtakes (7:00) (HD)
• SXSW Interview from Ann Thompson, 2011 (20:06) (SD)
• Location Scouting featurette (4:08) (SD/HD)
• "The Whale" performed by Olly Alexander (2:25) (audio only)

There's also a slipcover that I believe is still available, featuring collage-style minimalist art designed by Beth Morris, featuring imagery from the film:

Final Thoughts: Highly Recommended

The Dish and the Spoon comes highly recommended if you're looking for a melancholy time. It's bittersweet, but both the bitter and the sweet are wonderfully realized and performed. This is an independent film in all the ways that I grew up loving: small (both in budget and scale), intimate, honest and never simple. Being a person is hard, complicated work, especially when you add emotions into the mix. With The Dish and the Spoon, Allison Bagnall (as well as Greta Gerwig and Olly Alexander) share something that makes it feel okay to acknowledge that things can be messy, and temporary, but still worthwhile.