The two central actors courageously tackle all that the film requires of them and liberates them to do. Often they sit right next to each other or directly face one another in a manner that implies that they’re two sides of the same persona in a way, connected on a spiritual level like Isabel and Tara, and in other ways this staging toys with our perception of whether they exist at all. Are they from the show? Or
are they the show? A later scene in a bar called the Double Lunch lets us know outright that the lines of reality and fiction are blurred. The dialogue between Owen and Maddy in this scene, which is set a decade after their high school years, and especially an artful monologue delivered by Maddy (whose name is no longer Maddy at that point in the narrative) inside an inflatable planetarium, gives Schoenbrun an opportunity to let viewers puzzle things out in a way that reminded me of David Lynch’s
Mulholland Drive, perhaps the best compliment that I can give this layered, slippery, and innovative film. And so the movie’s final act, which finds Owen working and near-fatally languishing in a local Fun Center twenty years later, felt too forced to me, making overly explicit what the film’s prior acts had worked so hard and so successfully to make implicit. (I think the right earlier ending might have been “there is still time” scrawled across the pavement of a suburban street in trans-toned sidewalk chalk.) Nevertheless,
I Saw the TV Glow is a stylish and ambitious achievement overall.
