Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I;
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.
— Christina Rossetti
Something, Anything, Paul Harrill’s debut feature, opens with that quote from Christina Rossetti’s poem “Who Has Seen the Wind?”, and it’s a perfect opener for this quiet film where the big events of life – the major shifts – are like the wind: invisible but undeniably there. I should probably say “so-called quiet film” because … there’s nothing “quiet” about what the very quiet lead character experiences.
I tripped over Something, Anything yesterday on Mubi, watched it, and found myself deeply moved, almost surprisingly so. I somehow missed it in 2015.
Not much out of the ordinary happens in Something, Anything, and yet in the process of the film a whole life is changed. The big events that go down happen on the inside, showing a woman’s deep shift in perspective after she suffers a miscarriage. She is not the same person she was before the miscarriage and no one in her life understands what is going on. Her husband, also grieving the loss of their child, has no idea why his wife is SO changed. There’s very little dialogue suggesting “what is going on with her”. She doesn’t explain herself. People ask her what is going on, and she can’t put it into words. Whatever it is is beyond words.
Peggy (or “Margaret” – after the miscarriage, she asks to be called by her full name) is played by Ashley Shelton in a super controlled performance. I didn’t realize how controlled until the final scene, which knocked me flat. She doesn’t cry, she doesn’t emote, she doesn’t fall apart. Peggy is not that kind of person. Very late in the film, there’s a moment where she is overcome by sudden tears, and it’s shocking. That’s when I fully realized just how good Shelton is, how much she doesn’t betray her character. Peggy speaks softly, and seems not to know what to say half the time.
In the opening scene, her boyfriend (Bryce Johnson) proposes marriage to her at a dinner party. All she says is “Yes” – and she has to be prompted to respond. The smile on her face looks almost panicked. Deer in the headlights. She is maybe embarrassed at being the center of attention, and she’s smiling, but something is maybe a little bit “off” here. Peggy was clearly raised in a certain kind of Southern milieu. In high school she was a competitive cheerleader (she drops this tidbit halfway through the film, and at first it may seem like it doesn’t “fit” – she seems so retiring and shy – but if you think about it for two seconds it is perfectly plausible.) She always has a smile on her face, even if the smile doesn’t reach her eyes.
Peggy is a very shy woman, and she’s not expressive (except in her journal), but after the miscarriage everything has shifted inside of her. She’s AWAKE now, and she can’t stop the process once it starts. That’s what happens in the film. And what that “awakening” looks like is unexpected.
I was so impressed by Linds Edwards, who plays Tim, a guy she went to high school with, someone she knew casually (he was the brother of a friend of hers). He sends her a kindly postcard after hearing about her miscarriage. This contact is out of the blue. She hasn’t seen or heard about him in years. He’s the only one who displays any kind of care for what she is going through. She then learns that – unbelievably (to her, anyway) – Tim has become a Trappist monk. She becomes curious about this life choice. What does it mean? Her female friends are openly frustrated with her, and the problems in her marriage resulting from the miscarriage. The film is very smart on how HARD women are on each other, particularly in the personal/domestic realm, where another woman’s choices somehow reflect on your own (even though they DON’T. Not everyone is the same, bitches.) Her behavior is WAY too unconventional for her friends. But this guy Tim from her past reaches out out of the blue, and expresses condolences, wishing her peace and happiness. This changes her. And again, once she is changed, she can’t change back, even if the change is not visible to the naked eye.
The movie leaves space for the random, the small moments in life with huge significance. This can be dancing to a bar band in a little dive bar surrounded by people she doesn’t know, or it could be getting a quick glimpse of an ESL class going on in the local public library. She’s noticing things. She’s alive. (The film is strong in resisting the implication that her husband is the one who “kept her down” or silenced her. Something, Anything is not about that.)
Scanning the bios of the cast and crew, it looks like it’s a mostly Tennessee-based group. The film takes place in Knoxville. Harrill is the co-chair of the University of Tennessee’s Cinema Studies program, and before Something, Anything he directed a number of shorts. This is an extremely confident feature debut, showing his sensitivity and understanding (coming from curiosity, perhaps) of a woman’s point of view. Imaginative empathy is a real thing. Some of the best art comes from this kind of curiosity: “What would it be like to be this person so different from me? What would happen next?” The whole “write what you know” thing is so limited. Harrill is a man, and Peggy is a woman, but you can feel how personal Something, Anything is. Harrill doesn’t impose too much. He lets things unfold. He doesn’t craft a self-conscious narrative that makes too many demands on its main character. He’s interested in the subtle shifts of her outlook, and how a woman wakes up – not in the stereotypical “I don’t need a man, I’m gonna be an empowered girlboss now!!” way (often the normal stand-in for female liberation). Peggy wakes up to herself, yes, but she wakes up to something else, something more profound, a yearning for “something else”. She tries to explain to a completely baffled and mildly judgmental friend at a baby shower. Whatever that “something else” is that she is looking for she doesn’t even know. It’s “something, anything”.
Maybe what she’s looking for is to be alert to the mystery of the world, to the mystery of other people, of nature, of herself, to taking every day as it comes, to gratitude, to maybe even real love. Grace, really, is what we are talking about. She wants there to be room in her life for grace.
