Over the course of a single night, two couples trade psychic and physical blows over shared and shattered illusions about the business of connection in America. In the fallout of boozed revelations and delirious inventions, an eternal yet somehow incoherent truth about storytelling emerges. If Crumb Catcher, the feature debut from writer-director Chris Skotchdopole, never quite attains the cruel poeticism of Edward Albee’s masterpiece, it’s not for lack of being open to the occasion.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was unleashed on New York audiences first in 1962 in a production directed by Alan Schneider, and then on a mass fantasy scale via Mike Nichols’s 1966 film adaptation. Albee’s play is evergreen — it provides its four actors an opportunity to speak the kind of brutally true lies theater is made of, and it allows its audience to submit to despair and transcendence in equal measure. But Virginia Woolf also reacts to a specific moment in American time: just as something like a post-postwar period began to peek its bug eyes over the horizon, the systems at play in George and Martha’s world vibrate with self-tension. It’s a mid-’60s American meltdown of structures whose integrity used to assure their opposite’s survival: the nuclear family unit and the lust of a love affair, the pursuit of knowledge and the commodification of the university, the lingering in delusion and the illusion of liberation.
Skotchdopole’s film plays with Woolf’s dramatic structure — here, too, is a four-hander that takes place mostly in a single enclosed domestic setting — but also gamely respects Albee’s sense of historical specificity. Rather than the crinoline cocktails of a just-punctured ’60s, Skotchdopole sets the long-night’s journey into day amid the sour absurdism of 21st century America’s bombed-out gig economy, where identities and innovations alike no longer stave off the suggestion of a country eating its own dream alive. When the camera first finds Shane (Rigo Garay) and Leah (Ella Rae Peck), they’re posed prom-like on their wedding night, responding to overly personal questions posed by a pushy photographer. Skotchdopole and cinematographer Adam Carboni never quite show much of the photographer’s face, a detail that lends an early aura of foreboding to the proceedings, both marital and narrative.
A slurry of destabilizing details emerge: Shane has written a memoir, which Leah’s PR company is handling. The two can’t seem to agree on their relationship’s actual origin story, and when Leah passes an envelope full of wedding present cash to Shane, its ugly charge is evident. Leah’s parents paid for the wedding, while Shane’s father, who leaves an inebriated-sounding voicemail for his son, wasn’t invited. Introduced to the viewer on their wedding night, the couple is near-immediately japing each other, first in small gestures and later like George and Martha, as they take a hasty honeymoon that sends them to a coworker’s kind of Vrbo hell house that’ll be stage for most of the dramatic dissolution.
Crumb Catcher’s layering in of its characters’ class distinctions, if unsubtle, establishes the film as unafraid to endorse unlikability as a viable reaction to living a certain American way. The piece completes its doomed quartet by sending the unctuous John (John Speredakos), an apocalyptically attentive waiter from the previous evening, and his wife (?) Rose (Lorraine Farris), whose part in the wedding night proceedings — unremembered by Shane — informs a tidy bit of blackmailing to keep the narrative moving forward. By the time the fraying wedding couple endures John’s extended product pitch for the title device in question, the film’s single set feels more like a boxing ring a la Haneke than a genre picture home invasion.
Crumb Catcher is a kind of funhouse reflection of another recent genre film, Mark Mylod’s The Menu (2022). That film also sought to subject its protagonist to an inescapable physical situation through surveying the way American economic systems keep certain people in place while letting others run rampant through luxury. But written in the language of prestige television, The Menu pushes its every narrative twist and performance gracenote toward a smooth cohesion. Taylor-Joy must be recognizably likable, someone to root for, just as Fiennes must be recognizably psychologizable. Ugly truths like working in the service industry must be made to seem remediable, just as “burn it all down” becomes something to say in a screenplay rather than something that involves the effort of bodies.
In Crumb Catcher, the pervading feeling is one of incomprehension. Why has John channeled a lifetime of alienation into the crumb catcher? How exactly do he and Rose plan to extort money from Shane and Leah? Why does the film veer toward a bleary car-chase at its end, complete with lens effect to impose a sense of inebriation on the viewer, as well as the characters? There’s a discombobulation at play in every development, which is quite similar to what it feels like when the instability of making a living threatens being alive. The righteous anger of having to subjugate time and identity in service of others is seldom neat and tidy. It’s a joy to witness a film that sees the wildness of its horrified subjects’ eyes as reasonable, if not desirable. “Likability,” a trait too often demanded of waitstaff, and of women and wives, and of the prose of writers telling ugly stories, can be a narrative trap as well. Best to make the whole affair a little uglier.
DIRECTOR: Chris Skotchdopole; CAST: Rigo Garay, Ella Rae Peck, Lorraine Farris, John Speredakos; DISTRIBUTOR: Doppelgänger Releasing; IN THEATERS: July 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 43 min.
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