The great mystery of Canadian writer-director Jesse Zigelstein’s low-budget indie feature, “Negative Capability,” isn’t why he didn’t come up with a more enticing film title.
No, the real chin-scratcher is why so many interesting women in the film are attracted to its dull, self-obsessed protagonist. For every male moviegoer who identifies with the newly separated and aimless 40-year-old Joel, there will be a female counterpart who rolls her eyes.
The movie, which will have its world premiere this week at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, begins with Joel (Jonas Chernick, whose credits include “The Prague Orgy,” a Polish adaptation of Philip Roth’s novella) and best friend Schweitz (Gord Rand) moving a mattress into an empty apartment. Be advised that in “Negative Capability,” this constitutes an action scene.
The mattress will get plenty of use. But the dialogue is as important as the no-strings sex that Joel, an adjunct college English instructor, has with Nina (Sara Canning), a tenure-track professor at the same institution whose cutting wit tops his.
Joel is one of those people who revels in using the right word, the precise descriptive word of multiple syllables, though generally he’s not trying to show off. He has a large vocabulary, gleaned from a lifetime of reading, that fills his conversational flow. Joel has no idea how pretentious and, OK, elitist, he can sound. Or perhaps he just doesn’t care.
Alas, awkward conversation and shared custody of their dog are all that remain between Joel and his soon-to-be ex-wife Emily (Athena Karkanis). She has already moved on emotionally but remains in their house, which has a residual magnetic power for Joel. (Just so it’s clear that Joel isn’t an amoral heel: His hook-ups with Nina start after he moves out.)
Joel loves literature, but he is not what you would call a scintillating lecturer. Nonetheless, one of his students, Claire (Romi Shraiter), is sufficiently intrigued to seek out and read his lone, commercially unsuccessful novel. Joel’s writing abilities aren’t relevant; the point is that she admires him even though he considers himself an underachieving, if not failed, artist.
It’s worth noting that we wouldn’t know Joel is Jewish except for one holiday reference dropped into a conversation with his sister. He has no discernible Jewish identity, not even an attraction to Jewish authors. (One shoutout to the late Mordecai Richler would have been amusing, given the contrast between Duddy Kravitz’s ambition and Joel’s inertia.)
I suppose Joel is a particular Jewish type: well-educated, highly verbal, self-deprecating (which conceals his belief that he is somehow better than most people) and considerate on the surface but always in touch with his own wants and needs. In other words, he is someone we’ve encountered countless times in films, TV shows and novels.
So if we root for Joel to cut back on the vin rouge and get on track — a message that his mother (Mimi Kuzyk) delivers in a marvelous, too-brief cameo — it’s not because he is a uniquely gifted individual but because we have all known (or God help us, have been) a Joel.
Despite my general impatience with Joel and the lack of visual creativity in the filmmaking itself — the movie consists almost entirely of two people (one of whom is Joel) in a room talking — I was sufficiently engaged and invested in his potential for growth that I was pulling for him.
Zigelstein does write lively, plausible dialogue, and his actors create the sense that the short-term direction of their lives is at stake. Considering the cast got no help from the bargain-basement locations, sets and costumes, that’s a high compliment.
After all, it’s no small challenge to make us care about a character whose hard-won self-assessment is, “I simply never amounted to much. I’m nothing special.”