I’m Still Here. The title of the film seems to take its name from a song JP performs near the end of the film, but lacking a coherent transcript of lyrics, we are forced to find meaning in it some other way. It seems to me the very thing someone would say upon discovering they are the brunt of some joke that everyone is laughing about. It is at their expense that these people find humor. They are by no means laughing with him, they are laughing at him. This is not a film simply about a man trying to become a hip hop star, or a film about a man trying to trick the world in believing that. This is a film about how the world refuses to let him.
In February of 2009, Joaquin Phoenix appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman, bedraggled and spacey. At the time, many thought it was a publicity stunt, a hoax, that he was tricking us. Regardless, though, it became the subject of many a parody. Letterman said that he was “sorry [Phoenix] couldn’t make it tonight.” Paul Shaffer laughed out loud when Phoenix announced that he was going to be a hip hop star. We ridiculed him endlessly for his apparent dreams. Knowing now that it was indeed a hoax, doesn’t change the fact that we told him that he had the wrong dreams.
The alleged documentary follows Phoenix as he decides to give up acting, and become this hip hop star. He begins by discussing his frustration, artistically, with acting. He is always forced to say what others have written for him, to act as a director tells him. Never does he get to express himself fully in his work. And since hip hop has had such a profound effect on his life, he decides that if he could produce one album saying everything he wants, then he could be satisfied. At least there, he has the ability to say what he wants.
He announces his retirement from acting, and immediately hits the rumor mill. All of a sudden his bearded visage is everywhere. Edward James Olmos personally comes to his house to convince him that he should return to acting. In one of the best scenes in the film, Ben Stiller offers him a role in Greenberg. Stiller is awkward around the camera and Joaquin tells him that he needn’t act. “You’re playing the role of Ben Stiller now. Just relax, man, be yourself.”
This is quite possibly one of the many cruxes of the film. We debate endlessly how true it is, but the thing is it doesn’t matter. We are all always acting, putting on a persona. We act differently around our parents than our friends; we act differently around our boss than our coworkers. What is the real me, and who am I around when that comes out?
But these things have been said before. Shakespeare told us that “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” The reason this is a brilliant film is not because it says that. Rather the construct of the film invokes those themes naturally. Any truly great film can be felt in the gut before it can be described. As was once said about pornography, “I can’t tell you what [it] is, but I know it when I see it.”
That gut reaction for me was one scene in particular immediately following his Letterman appearance. Know that I went in to this movie having read Casey Affleck’s press release that the movie is a fake, is staged, and even though I knew not to take his word at face value, I expected to still laugh a whole lot at the shenanigans JP got into. He leaves Letterman in his limo, and starts to feel sick, or so it seems. He requests that the driver pull over for a moment, at which point, he darts out of the car and goes into Central Park. Affleck is upset, as we can hear him cursing in the background, and tries to follow him from a distance. One of his friends catches up and we see Phoenix sitting next to a tree sobbing. (People had already believed it was a hoax at this time, and he had heard some of that prior to this incident, making him already upset). Between his tears, we hear him lamenting his decision to quit acting. At least as an actor he could get a job, he could get Oscar nominations, and he could succeed, even if he hated it. Now though, the world would never take him seriously again. If he sells any copies of the record he is working on, it will be entirely because people want to laugh at him. If people attend his shows, they do so to laugh at him. They can’t take him seriously as any kind of artist anymore and as the scene changes admits to having “fucked my life. I have fucked it all up.”
As I watched this unfold, I couldn’t help but cry a little with him, in addition to feeling like the worst person in the world. I laughed at him. I ridiculed him, as did the world. We live in a time where we love to hate. We troll on the internet, our humor is largely derisive. It is a cruel, cruel world we create. The plight of JP is the plight of any of us who want to do something new, and attempt to be true to our own selves. The world doesn’t allow it. So what if it was all a joke, a hoax? That doesn’t make it any less true. So many more things were going on in this film, all of which were excellent, but the one that moved me was the fact that regardless of whether or not it is a hoax, we would never let him become a hip hop star. Yeah those who said it was a joke all along can sit there smugly announcing to the world their blithe I-told-you-so’s. But they are the people at whom the film is directed. If he had become a rapper we would never have seen him as that. It is the same thing that happened when Michael Jordan became a baseball player: you go to a White Sox game to see him because he was better at basketball.
Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix have created one of the truest, most honest and earnest films about the nature of celebrity and acting ever made. Perhaps it couldn’t have been made until this decade, one supersaturated with instant communication and globalization or where a lonely broken man’s appearance on the Late Show can get thousands of hits on youtube.com within the next 5 minutes. Maybe this film could only be made in a decade well known for its celebrity breakdowns, and how viciously and voyeuristically we watch them suffer. But it is by far one of the greatest films of the last decade, let alone this year.
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