![]() The action is sparked by a phone call: from the solitude of his hotel room, Johnny calls his sister Viv (Gaby Hoffmann), a writer and professor in Los Angeles, on the occasion of the first anniversary of their mother’s death. (The movie starts with the voices of these children on the soundtrack.) Johnny records the interviews himself, travelling with bulky, old-school audio equipment, and, at the end of the day, he holes up in his hotel room, listening to the recordings and then using the same machine as a vocal notepad, speaking into the microphone to record his jottings and musings for how to frame and introduce the interviews. The movie begins with him in Detroit, where he’s at work on a long-term project involving interviews with young people-kids, near-adolescents, teen-agers-about their lives and their expectations of the future. The protagonist, Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix), is a New York-based radio producer and on-air personality. What’s more, it brings not only its characters but its cast of actors into the cinematic maelstrom of inner life, and thus offers an extraordinary showcase for their artistry. The result is a film of an extraordinary amplitude it’s both poised and frenetic, contemplative and active, heartily sentimental and astringently contentious, intensively intimate and expansively world-embracing, exactingly composed and wildly spontaneous. “C’mon C’mon” is a tender and turbulent melodrama that amplifies its power with a documentary current. He makes the movie’s soundtrack-and emotional life-complex by making the drama complex in form. In his new film, “C’mon C’mon” (which opens Friday in theatres), Mike Mills comes up with an inventive and deeply affecting way to bring his characters’ teeming reflections and memories to the fore. Yet the artifice of voice-overs, too, risks falling into convention. Even many of the greatest films lapse into this unquestioned habit, fixating on the dialogue of outward action in lieu of the relentless flow of characters’ internal monologues. For the most part, the recording of sound has been used shockingly unimaginatively, to transform movies into something close to filmed plays. The crucial question of talking pictures has always been what to do with the soundtrack, and few filmmakers have done much with it.
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