Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Disfluency’ Review: Language and Memory Collide in Quiet Drama About Healing
Joan Didion’s oft-quoted dictum about how we tell ourselves stories in order to live presupposes that you can and will use the tools to tell yourself that very story. But what happens when language fails you? What happens when its breakages risk keeping you from even vocalizing what it is that could help you live? Writer-director Anna Baumgarten’s “Disfluency” tackles those questions by telling the story of a young woman struggling to find herself anew. Well-meaning and clearly trying to offer up a twist on what’s unfortunately a well-worn tale about the aftermath of sexual abuse, “Disfluency” is nevertheless bogged down by its desire to wrap that narrative within the linguistics jargon its title alludes to.
Disfluency, as the film’s very first scene informs us, is a break or irregularity in speech. “Speech is not perfect because we are not perfect,” a professor lecturing an unseen class informs. Those “ums” and “likes” and “totallys” are all examples of it. And with that definition we’re thrown into the world of Jane (Libe Barer) who flunked her final college class and has needed to move back home with her parents. As Jane reacquaints herself with her sister and her coterie of high school friends — including Amber (Chelsea Alden), who’s now a single mom of a young deaf boy — Baumgarten slowly reveals what it is that kept Jane from graduating, as well as how her own interest in “disfluency” may help her get her life back on track.
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For instance, Jane decides she’ll do an independent study on the linguistic tics she observes in her sister and her friends. It’s research she hopes will help her get the credits she needs to graduate. But as she spends time with these friends who seem stuck in an arrested adolescence, and as she gets to hang out more with Amber, whom they’ve all shunned, Jane realizes that her interest in linguistic breakages could be indicative of something else. The memories of what happened to her in college, which flash back every so often on screen, slowly come back to her — eventually prompting her to confess to Amber (in ASL, no less) that she may have been assaulted: though she cannot even bring herself to spell out the R-word she so desperately knows she should use.
Scenes when Baumgarten has Jane tackle her trauma head-on — when she shows us the messy ways she first dealt with it and the imperfect ways she’s dealing with it now — are its most effective and affecting. Treating Jane’s experience with care, she refuses to make her story — as a victim, as a survivor, as both or neither — into a neat tale. A scene with a police officer, who opts to take handwritten notes much to Jane’s chagrin, is the film at its most illuminating. Along the same lines as shows like “Unbelievable” and films like “Promising Young Woman,” “Disfluency” is interested in thorny questions rather than simple answers. Jane’s academic inclinations become the way Baumgarten packages them for her audience.
To get there, Baumgarten saddles Jane’s narrative with too many subplots that both cushion and dilute her plight. For example, Jane’s connection with Amber ends up feeling merely instrumental to her own journey — as do the many interactions with her sister, her parents and even her crush. And because she presents herself as an outsider eager to study the speech of those around her, Jane ends up sidelined in her own story — until the end, of course.
Barer is a gifted actress, and there are glimmers of the complexity she’s bringing to Jane, but in playing both a self-avowed observer and an introvert clearly struggling with what happened at school, she stumbles in making Jane a solid anchor around which “Disfluency” is constructed. She is the breakage in the title but that becomes a tired note to play over and over again. Similarly, the supporting cast — most of whom are called to be types and tropes borrowed wholesale from coming-of-age films — cannot quite key into the tricky tonal balance to which the film so clearly aspires. (Here a social media would-be-influencer, there a protective dad; here a wallflower of a neighbor, there a well-meaning boy.)
And so the film ends where it begins, with this idea that people are not perfect, which is why speech isn’t either. Such a message, boldly stated by Jane as a kind of academic epiphany, feels pat rather than profound — which makes it no less true. But for a film that tries hard to think through trauma and linguistics, and their interconnectedness in ways that often feel interesting and just as often quite shoehorned, such a conclusion feels unsatisfactory for how little insight it offers. If its ambitions never quite meet its execution, “Disfluency” is (clunky title aside) an amiable watch with its heart (and head) in the right place that still manages to charm, perhaps because it so exalts the very concept of imperfection.
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