The first piece of dialogue spoken in Mo McRae’s A LOT OF NOTHING (co-written by Sarah Kelly Kaplan) is a news report relaying the details of an “officer involved shooting.” The use of this phrase immediately holds a large degree of weight as this language is so often deployed by certain people when what they mean to say is that a police officer has shot someone. It is one of many microaggressions that the audience will witness through our main characters, James (Y’lan Noel) and Vanessa (Cleopatra Coleman), a black couple living in an affluent neighborhood. Someone else who lives in this neighborhood is Brian (Justin Hartley), who just so happens to be the police officer on the news who has shot and killed a child. Recognizing him immediately, Vanessa and James take opposing sides on the best way to respond to this situation. Vanessa identifies it as a targeted racial attack right off the bat, whereas James thinks that they owe Brian the benefit of the doubt until they know the full story.
Vanessa would argue, however, that the full story is known the moment a police officer makes the decision to shoot someone who is unarmed. This presents the audience with the movie’s first big question when James asks, “What does one do?” What could they do to make a difference in this moment? In the first hint of the comedic tone that A LOT OF NOTHING will eventually veer into, Vanessa and James decide they’re going to make a social media post, using the best Winston Churchill quote they can come up with to really stick it to the racists. As the couple hypes one another up over the drafting process of the post, the camera spins dizzily around them, as it has been for much of the single continuous shot that makes up the first 20 minutes of the film. This tactic effectively immerses the viewer fully in this world and this story, Noel and Coleman working together like a pair of theater actors as they expertly set the scene. The camera work throughout this sequence is so fun and so clean, utilizing big dynamic movements, and shots filmed through reflections rather than taking the most straightforward approach to filming two people talking.
The rest of A LOT OF NOTHING is shot in a more traditional way as we see Vanessa and Brian go about their day, including the numerous microaggressions that they both have to endure, building and building into something unbearable. The language that is used can seem subtle, and at times even nice on the surface, but at its core it’s really something much more sinister. It is easy for the audience to see how comments like these could break a person down when they are constant in this way.
With good reason, Vanessa is broken down enough to confront Brian when she sees him out in his driveway. Hartley’s performance is so frightening because he is not remorseful, he’s not panicked, he is completely casual and calm as he hurls racist insults at her. This interaction holds as much weight for him as if he were talking about the weather; this is just how he is every day. Reporting back to her husband, James initially blames her for approaching Brian in the first place in a classic act of victim blaming. The different ways that James and Vanessa respond to the same situation and the same acts of racism add an interesting layer of conflict to A LOT OF NOTHING that goes beyond the external. Everything changes in an instant however, when Vanessa brings a gun into the situation. Things get majorly out of hand incredibly fast and before we know it, Brian is duct taped to a beach chair in James and Vanessa’s garage.
The tonal shift that this decision heralds in is shocking, and for a moment brought up concern that the situation was becoming too unrealistic. However, thanks to a masterful turn from Noel and Coleman, it becomes clear that A LOT OF NOTHING has transformed into a full-blown comedy, changing everything about how the viewer is interacting with it. Suddenly, the situation is laugh out loud funny as James subtly freaks out hard while Vanessa acts like this is a totally reasonable thing to be doing. It is not necessarily a bad thing, because it does end up being so rewarding, but it did take a while to decipher the tone of the film. The comedy works incredibly well though, as the stakes are sky high, and the urgency is kicked up to a 10 when James’ brother (Shamier Anderson) and his pregnant fiancé (Lex Scott Davis) arrive for a previously planned dinner party. As they begin frantically setting out appetizers, and engaging in their own interpersonal conflict about diet, vaccinations, and childbearing, the audience almost forgets that they have a man tied up in their garage.
The tone changes yet again and we are thrown into a full-blown horror/thriller movie. A LOT OF NOTHING commits fully to every genre that it emulates, taking some really wide swings in the process. Because of this, it asks a lot of its characters and is largely successful due to the strength of the lead performances. The only way that this poses a problem for the story is that it becomes difficult to see Vanessa and James as any sort of real threat. They are so adept at the comedy of the film that it’s hard to imagine them actually causing their neighbor any harm, but it does keep the viewer engaged, wondering if there could be a vicious side to these characters that we don’t initially expect.
In the final act, the movie does start to lose steam and fall apart a bit. A LOT OF NOTHING throws several big twists into the mix, some of which work better than others. One twist in particular seems to come so far out of left field that it could almost have been left on the cutting room floor without impacting the story at all. The various complications also diminish some of the urgency of having a man tied up in your home. It is a difficult level of intensity to maintain for so much of the runtime and across so many genres and could have perhaps been served with a little tightening up. A LOT OF NOTHING is a movie that wants to say so many things, and while it doesn’t have the space to fully realize all of its ideas, the ones that do take off, soar. It will work really well as a conversation starter and is largely a really thrilling, fun watch that you will not want to miss out on.
Tags: A Lot of Nothing, Cleopatra Coleman, Film Festivals, Justin Hartley, Lex Scott Davis, Mo McRae, Sarah Kelly Kaplan, Shamier Anderson, SXSW, SXSW 2022, Y'Lan Noel
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