Mickey and the Bear is about a high school teenage girl who just turned eighteen, but she takes care of her father, a veteran with a drug and alcohol problem. The film asks two questions: will she stay or go and how bad can he get? If I read my summary of this film, I would run the other way, but I saw the preview and was immediately invested in how their lives would turn out and saw it in the theaters. I paid full price tickets, not matinee discount, and it was totally worth it.
If you can see Mickey and the Bear in theaters, please do so. It is the kind of film that deserves to be viewed on its intended canvas, the big screen, and demands your complete, undivided attention. It is not often that a movie has a solid story, acting and composition without slowly sliding into trite platitudes or glib slickness, but this movie stays gritty without becoming hardened, sensitive without becoming treacly. More importantly, it did not feel like poverty porn when people turn to art to explore a character from a different socioeconomic group, but ends up feeling a little slimy or like cosplay. While you can glean important lessons from this film, it isn’t the point. It is about the particular, fully realized human characters’ experience and reactions. There is never a prose dump to explain the backstory. There are clues, but they are so quick that you could miss them, and only later if you are paying attention does the real significance of a casual comment make retroactive sense.
I knew that Mickey and the Bear was going to be great when the opening shot of a character shows the young protagonist sleeping. Every human being on Earth, usually as a child, has pretended to be asleep, and it is very difficult to be convincing. Anyone who lives with an animal knows that it is impossible. It is the most relatable moment that is almost impossible to construct. Combined with the terse script and imperceptible acting, the movie feels like a documentary, but the very carefully constructed composition of each shot and rigorous directing choices regarding focus, perspective, comparing and contrasting locations and visually exploring certain themes reveals a brilliant balance between restraint and deliberately controlled chaos. Unlike the comparable Little Woods, it never slips into the realm of allegory.
Someone once said that all art depicts one of the following: Eden, Heaven, Hell or The Fall. Just when Mickey and the Bear seems to be going in a predictable direction for its teen protagonist by showing her in areas of decaying human habitation versus vistas of natural wonder and harmony, the film finds a way to have the two realms confront each other and shake us and its characters out of their brief reverie. In one scene, if you are paying close attention to each shot, a friend’s room is actually a garage, and when Mickey and her dad watch television, there is literally no place for her. Another title for this movie could be No Country for Children. Every connection can easily be repulsed by hitting the right trigger of trauma. It has a very Jean Paul Sartre No Exit personal hell quality that I did not see coming until it hit then never went away without being sensationalistic. Even though this movie belongs in a different genre from It Chapter One (not Chapter Two, never see it), there is a scene during a town event that is supposed to be cheerful, but feels grotesque in its respite of good cheer.
Even the use of music in Mickey and the Bear was brilliant. There is no soundtrack. Most music heard in the film was diegetic, i.e. heard by the characters in the setting. Music plays such an important role in young people’s lives so it was more significant how the characters played music than the actual music although the characters’ music tastes did reflect important aspects of their character with the exception of one scene. This scene could have seemed playful, but it is the only moment that I remembered hearing incidental music or underscoring. At the moment, it did seem significant, but I did not realize that it was foreboding.
Annabelle Attanasio, debut director, experienced actor whose work I am unfamiliar with and daughter of Paul Attanasio, who wrote such greats as Quiz Show, a personal favorite, proves that even if nepotism got her some advantages, her evident talent as shown in Mickey and the Bear will prove that she not only deserves the opportunity, but shows a potential to be one of the great American directors of our time, not just called such by people who like her daddy—I’m looking at you Sofia Coppola. It is an amazing little film that packs a big emotional gut punch. Her visual style reminds me of Kogonada’s Columbus, which is a huge compliment except not obviously beautiful. There is one scene of decorum in which she respectfully refrains from showing everything when Mickey, once again, comes to her father’s rescue, and we only see the action through a crack in the bathroom door.
Honestly if you can watch Mickey and the Bear without wanting to coach the characters on the screen throughout every single moment of the movie, you are better than me. I wish that it was playing in a theater with predominantly black patrons. DTMF played on an eternal loop in my mind. I know that actors flesh out roles by bringing details to the character that the filmmaker never considered, but damn. Everyone in the cast felt like they were their characters. I was psychologically profiling the father like it mattered, but was still taken aback even though I nailed his character’s interaction style perfectly. One of the best scenes in the film that later presaged a twist in the film occurs between him and a medical professional at a local dive bar. Later on when we that medical professional at a booth at the town event, it kind of tells everything that we need to know about that character, which we could not see in her opening scene. A potential love interest for the protagonist could have his own movie that is how textured and nuanced his story is. Of course, the teen protagonist carries the movie just as deftly as she carries her father over his most spectacular self sabotaging moments. What I liked most about her character is how I could finally see the flaws in The Glass Castle, a movie that I loved, because it just found the perfect balance between an adolescent who knows better, but is still a kid and a young adult in the most unexpected, unpredictable ways and yet completely normal ways. This film is more organic.
I loved Mickey and the Bear because it is a profoundly bleak, but quotidian movie. It is parentification in its most extreme form without leaning on the checklist abuse tropes. If it sounds triggering, I would run the other way, but because it never becomes cliché or predictable, it is extremely relatable and engrossing. A great film, but especially for a first time director.
