Rating: 6/10

Writer: Jonathan Parker, Catherine DiNapoli
Director: Jonathan Parker
Cast: Adam Goldberg, Marley Shelton, Eion Bailey, Lucy Punch
Studio: The Samuel Goldwyn Company

(UNTITLED) starts well enough – we’re introduced fairly quickly to our main characters, Adrian Jacobs (Goldberg) and Madeleine Gray (Shelton). Adrian is a music composer, specializing in atonal compositions (heavy on the bucket kicks and soft crying, light on anything resembling melody). Madeleine owns a contemporary art gallery, showing vigorously experimental works in the front, selling loosely Rothko-influenced paintings for the masses in back.

The creator of those weak paintings that sell so well, a Thomas Kinkade for the millennium, is Josh Jacobs (Eion Bailey), Adrian’s brother. Josh brings Madeleine to one of Adrian’s performances and, though she laughs through the entire thing and Adrian scolds her for it, she still seems to get it. Which, of course, means that Adrian is attracted to her.

She seems to understand what he’s attempting to do with his music. She also has an all-black wardrobe that tends to make a bevy of interesting sounds he wants to record for his work (think the staccato step of high heels, the rubbery squeak of a pleather skirt). If anything, (UNTITLED) tunes into your ears and you cannot help but notice its truly interesting and engaging sound design and score.

The first half of the film is certainly amusing. Adrian, Madeleine, and Josh all live and work in circles that are often the butt of cultural jokes. Is a chain being thrown into a bucket music? Is a thumbtack stuck the wall art? For awhile, it seems that the film, and Adrian and Madeleine, are laughing at the absurdity of everyone else around them. It’s effective enough to almost make the audience forget that Madeleine and Adrian can be accused of the same exact level of absurdity. And that’s precisely the problem with (UNTITLED) – it doesn’t seem to know which side of the debate it falls on. Are Adrian and Madeleine making art and contributing to the furthering of real creative ideals? Or are they just two more blockheads talking out of their asses? The longer the film goes on, the farther we get from the original insights and chuckles of the film’s first half.

There are some interesting side characters of note in the film – Vinnie Jones as Ray Barko, one of Madeleine’s pet “real” artists is amusing, and Lucy Punch as “The Clarinet” in Adrian’s band seems to be the only person capable of keeping up true bemusement at everyone around her.  Zak Orth’s Porter Canby collects art because it makes him feel less dull. He’s wealthy enough (something to do with computers) to spend an exorbitant amount of fundage to buy up anything that may make him look more interesting and cultured. Of course, he has no idea what he is doing, and it’s obvious to everyone around him. A trip to Porter’s apartment is one of the highlights of the film.

And as Madeleine’s hot new artist, Monroe, Ptolemy Slocum is hilarious. Madeleine thinks he is “an important, emerging artist,” Adrian thinks he is “an important, emerging serial killer.” His works deals with everything and nothing. It’s not Barko’s taxidermy raccoons hanging from chandeliers, it’s a lightbulb flickering on and off in a room. It’s Monroe’s way of saying “hi” to the world, and it’s alternately hilarious and off-putting. (UNTITLED) needs more Monroe, less mumbling from Adrian and Madeleine about what is and is not art, what is and is not music. We’re smart enough to decide what’s real and what’s not, and Madeleine and Adrian should have been, too.