Buffalo Bill's Defunct

northwest film forum

Defunct's David Donihue, Jennifer Estes, and Christopher Lloyd.

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• Matt Wilkens

Local director Matt Wilkens has made a fictional family album, complete with bittersweet memories, hilarious snapshots, yellowing pages, and moments that might have been better off forgotten; the remarkable part is that it's done without employing cliché or manipulation. You'll cringe at the uncomfortable moments, but that's expected. You're not cringing at the film, you're cringing with it—and on the other hand, the film is weirdly heartwarming, but not enough to embarrass you.

Revolving around a harebrained scheme, spearheaded by Grandpa Bill (the titular Buffalo), to tear down a dilapidated garage on the family land, the film explores the generational push/pull of family members who love one another, sure, but might not always speak the same language. To its credit, the movie doesn't take a heavy-handed approach to the dysfunctional family thing—in fact, the family is refreshingly functional. There are satisfying undercurrents of awkwardness and broken ties. You see it in the odd way that little Wiley smacks his dolls around and the way that Bill is clueless and inappropriate and asks his daughter if her boyfriend has any weird sexual habits. Is he starting to lose his grip, or is he just a weird old guy? In the end, he's so sweet it doesn't matter—but then again, he's her dad, not ours.

Wilkens has said he's interested in nonverbal communication, and while much is "said" by Bill with his sea-blue eyes, half-closed by age, his family does talk and talk and talk as well. But Wilkens often separates their dialogue from the action. Their speech is used as in voice-overs in tangentially related scenes where the actors almost never face the camera. The script in Defunct was largely improvised, and, because the largely local cast is easy and talented, these scenes paint an incredibly real-feeling family in the midst of some real-feeling changes. (NR)