Today’s featured movie at Friday’s Finest is brought to you by a director who is married to Emma Stone. If that doesn’t deserve a high-five (and on the flip side), I don’t know what does. Anyhows, besides keeping tabs on celebrity marriages, channel zapping is something I am innately good at. Just ask any male of the species – it’s practically in our DNA. And at the far end of my remote-controlled travels, I almost always land on the ‘Film & Arts’ channel – which often houses movies which are quintessentially ‘Friday’s Finest‘ material ie one or more of the following: foreign made, low budget, independent or art-house. That as Anita Ward might put it – Rings My Bell as a movie-goer and it’s where I found Brigsby Bear.
Brigsby Bear has one of the most original premises as far as plots goes:
It tells the story of a man abducted as a baby and raised in isolation in a bunker where he obsessed over a children’s television program centered around a character named Brigsby Bear; after being rescued by the authorities and realizing that the show had been made for him only by one of his captors, his fascination leads him to finish the storyline himself.
The only other movie I could compare this quirky and highly entertaining comedy to is one I featured here at Friday’s Finest back in 2020 called American Movie (1999). Well technically American Movie isn’t a movie, rather it’s a documentary about a movie that was made. But it too exhibits this curious and irresistible charm towards the ‘movie-making process’ that as a keen cinema-goer I found so engrossing to watch and unashamedly funny.
Watching them took me right back to when I first got my hands on Dad’s strictly “for work only” JVC video camera. My brother and I set out to make little short films packed with all the cinematic thrills we’d soaked up from the movies. One highlight? Our attempt to recreate Mr. Miyagi’s training scenes from The Karate Kid – a real hoot. Anyhow both aforementioned films center around grown men (mentally hovering somewhere around 15) on a mission to turn their wild imaginations into reality – by making a movie and getting it onto the big screen.
I found Brigsby Bear to be a smile-inducing, heartfelt, and wildly creative film – despite its undeniably disturbing premise. It follows James Pope, a former abductee who – let’s not beat around the bush – is a deeply traumatised individual. He’s unable to let go of something that, while built on deception (a TV show made exclusively for him: Brigsby Bear), feels more real and meaningful to him than actual reality.
What’s clever is that the film doesn’t dwell too heavily on the clinical severity of his condition. Instead, it subtly reveals its emotional weight through the reactions of those around him – family and friends who, at first, are desperate to snap him out of what they see as delusion. Their concern even escalates to the point of him being hospitalised.
What’s so brave and quietly brilliant about this movie is how, over time, it invites us to shift perspectives along with those characters. Gradually, we find ourselves drawn into James’s Brigsby Bear fantasy, becoming just as curious, invested, and eager to follow the ride wherever it leads. And by the end, it doesn’t feel like fantasy at all – it feels like something that matters.
Let me just say as I ease my way out of this review, the ensemble cast is fantastic. It includes Mark Hammil, Greg Kinnear and Claire Danes. Of course the highest accolade goes to Kyle Mooney who inhabits James Pope with a delicate balance of wide-eyed innocence and emotional depth, grounding the character in sincerity without tipping into melodrama. His performance is earnest enough to be moving, yet subtly oddball, allowing the film’s darkly funny tone to breathe.
I hope the scene below, where the police investigator (Greg Kinnear) interviews James (Kyle Mooney) after his abduction, serves as an effective example of the aforementioned.
References:
1. Brigsby Bear – IMDB
2. Brigsby Bear – Wikipedia
“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand
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