Blue Jay (2016)

Alex Lehmann's Blue Jay arrives dressed in black and white, a decision its director framed as a stripping away of the unnecessary. Two former high school sweethearts, Jim and Amanda, collide in a supermarket in their tiny California hometown and spend an evening wandering through liquor stores, lakesides, and the empty house of Jim's late mother. Mark Duplass and Sarah Paulson improvise their way through the reunion with a naturalism that keeps the thing from curdling into nostalgia bait. It is a small film, and it knows it.

As a piece of cultural messaging, the film is nearly inert, and this is meant as a compliment to its honesty if not its timeliness. There is no diverse casting initiative at work here, no LGBTQ subplot, no climate anxiety, no class warfare, no body politics, no examination of race. Amanda's past abortion surfaces late and lands as personal devastation, the private wound that ended a teenage romance. The film grants her interiority and lets her carry the weight of a decision made decades ago, though it never organizes that grief into a thesis. She mentions anti-depressants and a numbness that has lasted for years, which reads as depression and loss, not as a platform. The whole enterprise is a conversation between two people in a room, and the room has no agenda.

This is an artifact from a vanishing tradition: the modest American indie romance, content to observe instead of instruct. It offers no sermon, no lesson, no corrective to the audience's behavior. For viewers conditioned to expect a moral at the end of every tunnel, the silence may feel like a void. For the rest of us, it is simply two fine actors crying in a kitchen, and that remains sufficient.