By Govindini Murty. In the midst of a movie season dominated by special-effects blockbusters, it’s nice to see smaller-scale indie films that celebrate the human within technology. Lee Kirk’s The Giant Mechanical Man, a selection of the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival currently available on VOD (video on demand), depicts two sensitive souls looking for meaning within the machinery of the modern city. Set in Detroit, the title also evokes the industrial heritage of the city, with elegant montages that resemble sequences from such classic ‘20s documentaries as Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta or Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a City.
The Giant Mechanical Man stars Jenna Fischer as Janice, a shy and insecure thirty-something struggling to find purpose in her life. She works as a temp but her lack of focus gets her fired – forcing her to move in with her picture-perfect, blonde, ambitious sister Jill (Malin Akerman) and her dentist husband. Tim (Chris Messina) is also a thirty-something loner adrift in the big city. He spends his days as a performance artist on the streets of Detroit playing a robot-like figure on stilts known as the Giant Mechanical Man.
The opening of the film features a striking, almost avant-garde sequence. Tim dons silver face paint, a silver suit, and stilts, puts on a silver bowler hat and – grabbing a silver umbrella – heads down the streets with a purposeful stride that is an ironic commentary on the businessmen around him going to work. Tim’s Giant Mechanical Man is an exaggerated, postmodern version of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the subject of the best-selling 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson about a businessman who struggles to find meaning in his career.
When a local news show asks Tim why he does his act, he explains:
“I thought that it might brighten people’s lives up. … I guess I feel like modern life can be alienating … you’re mindlessly walking through it like a robot and you can feel lost. … Maybe if you see a giant mechanical man wandering down the street towards you, it would help to put it into perspective, you know?”
Janice sees Tim performing on the street and feels a connection with him, recognizing in his mechanical motions her own sense of being just a cog in the machine of the city. Through serendipity, Janice and Tim then both get jobs at the Fillmore Zoo. The zoo serves as yet another metaphor for the entrapment of humans in modern city life, with Tim at one point even comically pretending to be one of the exhibits. Janice and Tim strike up a friendship that turns into romance, but Tim is unable to tell Janice that he is the mechanical man. All this is further complicated by her sister Jill’s efforts to set Janice up with a self-absorbed author of motivational books, played with gusto by Topher Grace.
Woven into the story is Janice and Tim’s love of silent movies. As in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, a love of silent movies in Mechanical Man is used to indicate an affinity for the poetic and the romantic. Janice watches Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid and Buster Keaton’s The General – perhaps drawn to both films because they feature wistful, sensitive characters who resemble herself.
The Giant Mechanical Man is a sweet, feel-good alternative to this summer’s action-heavy movie fare. Jenna Fischer and Chris Messina are both charming in their roles, and the quirky cast of supporting characters deftly play their parts. I especially appreciate the fact that Chris Messina’s Tim is a gentleman, standing up at one point to some misogynistic yuppie characters at a business party. I would have liked to have seen more stylistic experimentation in the film to highlight the theme of mechanization, but director Lee Kirk nonetheless shows in his debut feature a nice touch for genuine emotion and humanistic values.
The movie’s air of romance carried over into real life, as well, with star Jenna Fischer and director Lee Kirk falling in love during the shoot and getting married – a sweet, real world ending to a charming movie tale. The Giant Mechanical Man is currently available from Tribeca Films on video on demand through June 19th.
LFM Grade B+
Posted on May 25th, 2012 at 9:57am.
