DVD Glitch in the Grid

There are times, when Glitch in the Grid feels self-indulgent yet to have made the film in any other way would have been less than authentic. These three characters are, for the most part, playing themselves and it's this spiritual intimacy that provides the film much of its cinematic spark. The film's leading trio seems to struggle with how to maintain any sense of connection in a society that discourages connection, whether it be because of socio-economic stressors or institutional oppression.

Likely to be consider an experimental film by most who view it, Glitch in the Grid incorporates a wide variety of visuals, sounds, movements and music to communicate Leiser's intended sense of magical realism. The film at times plays out equally as documentary, mumblecore, Van Sant introspective and animated expose. The stop motion animation is really inventive along with the music which is the Leiser Brothers strength!

(The following contains spoilers) Full disclosure, I am a friend of the Leisers. That said, I think everyone who's unfairly reviewed this film/trolled this page should include a similar disclaimer at the beginning of their reviews, i.e., "Full Disclosure, I can't deal with the Jesus stuff, so I'm willing to trash this film as 'humorless' and 'self absorbed' when those adjectives really apply to me." Yes I'm referring to the screed disguised as film criticism published in the October 19th New York Times.

Thus, the following isn't so much a review as a dissection of the aforementioned "review," and the way that its snide self-aggrandizement embodies the charges it levels against "Glitch in the Grid." Mr. Brunick slams Eric and Jeff as "humorless disciples of high art and the higher power of Jesus' love," implying that a) the movie itself is devoid of humor, and b) that the Leiser brothers glorify their efforts to bring about spiritual transformation in their cousin's life. Had Mr. Brunick paid attention to the film, he would have noticed that the Leiser brothers are prone to undercut their own self representation, by way of self deprecating humor: note the scene in which Jeff earnestly asks Jay about his religious history, to which Jay replies by thoughtfully dissecting his past while scratching his pits for a good minute or so. Or note the very scene that introduces the two, which cuts between solemn musings about the commercialized studio system and fraternal squabbling about punctuality. Surely Brunick caught the deflation of rhetorical grandiosity that occurs there? Or one might note that this alleged spiritual vanity project does not end in conversion – it ends in stasis, indeterminacy, a plateau in a journey none of the three leads completely understand. Jay doesn't see the light so much as glimpse it in brief moments – and even then, he seems to find salvation in ministering to trees, not being ministered to by, well, ministers.

Perhaps the problem is that Brunick was expecting a film that the Leiser brothers never purported to deliver. Hence, his grumpy charge that the film includes "self-pitying references to the weak job market," even though "the evidence of real hardship is thin: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!" But is Glitch in the Grid intended to be a gritty look at the fallout of the recession – an Upton Sinclair-esque portrait of our time and its vicissitudes? Or does it have in mind something more playful? Brunick seems to expect a realist film that includes momentary stop motion interludes, when in fact this is a stop-motion psychomachia: a drama of the soul, in direct lineage with medieval morality plays in which Virtues and Vices were personified. Here, the stop motion figures do the work of dramatizing the internal psycho-spiritual struggles in which the leads are enmeshed. Depictions of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches don't sufficiently dramatize the hardship of the recession, but they aren't intended to: they're texture, secondary details that provide counterpoint to the fantastic journey inward, just as mundane objects and situations do in a thousand fantasy films and novels.

To be sure, the main characters don't evince an "arc" in any conventional sense of the word: Jay starts a new life in the forest, but seems only marginally happier, while Jeff's marriage doesn't feel like the culmination of a drastic personality change so much as a beautiful-but-ordinary event, one that doesn't necessarily make his character any "better" or "more virtuous." But this is both a result of its affiliations both with psychomachia and with mumblecore: psychomachia downplays fluctuations in character, because it's concerned with absolutes; mumblecore's intensely focused naturalism, meanwhile, interrogates the necessity of conventional character arcs (not to mention the "evidence of real hardship" that Brunick requires). Indeed, because of this hybrid generic inheritance, "Glitch in the Grid" is probably the first psychomachia in which the battle for the soul ends in a stalemate. There's a quiet depiction of an Easter play, and Jeff muses that Jesus "broke the grid of society," but he's talking to himself at that point, not to Jay: there's a world of difference between that internal monologue and the speechifying of The Ten Commandments (or, hell, all of Edward Zwick's movies).

"God would have planned it a little better," Brunick writes – but did he really want to see a miraculous plan of salvation unfold on screen? Even God is bored with that.