The Sweet East
“The Sweet East” is the sort of interesting and wrong creation that America deserves. It’s a schlocky flick, which can be captivating but has nothing to leave you with save for how screwed up everything is. This well made, purposefully hideous take on America as a rundown amusement park loses some of its charm whenever it’s just not as funny or clever or edgy as it thinks.
It feels like a trap to get poetic about the ideas in this film from Williams and writer Nick Pinkerton too. This is a garbage-picking movie made by cinephiles (William is an accomplished cinematographer, Pinkerton is a film critic) who prize ideological grossness. The Capitol Building gets introduced during a school trip at the start, where the camera floats past high schooler butts like it’s the beginning of a race in a “Fast & Furious” movie. It wants to be gross and disorienting; it wants to push buttons while also letting you know that it hasn’t washed its hands in weeks.
At least “The Sweet East” has something resembling a plot. We follow Lillian (Talia Ryder), an independent South Carolina high schooler who gets flung from one weird piece of America to another. First, there’s a shooting at a pizza restaurant that echoes the real-life absurdity of Pizzagate; Lillian gets separated from her classmates during the chaos and soon finds herself roped into some raucous Maryland punks’ pointless rebellion. When she breaks away from them, she finds some solace in the company of Simon Rex’s monotonous motormouth neo Nazi who’s obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe and decrying youth Rex’s character gives Williams ample opportunities for American flags to cameo in the background, like how Michael Bay uses them as product placement in his “Transformers” movies.
From there, it becomes something of a screed everyone tries to control Lillian in one way after the next, projecting onto her and objectifying her. But she’s smarter than that in a way the script isn’t precious about, but does make for a compellingly mysterious performance from Ryder. It’s a star-affirming performance, starting with the opening credits sequence where Ryder croons an incredibly catchy dream pop ballad to herself in the bathroom mirror.
Lillian travels across America and meets characters who should be funny, especially given the cast Williams has pulled together Ayo Edebiri, Jeremy O. Harris and Jacob Elordi all show up as caricatures who are drawn to Lillian and eventually make her a star (when she’s both a missing persons headline, Lillian’s also a budding tabloid figure, and that’s one of this story’s more amusing jokes). But each time we meet these new characters, their bizarre arcs lose individual momentum; Pinkerton’s script is talky to a fault, with its main point being that to engage with our modern country one must use gibberish, the dry jokes about these people being delusional, of lying to themselves while trying to lie to Lillian become easier and more obvious, in some instances Williams’ film is simply just being smug.
But hopefully the best scene in “The Sweet East” will get Williams more directorial work on his own: it’s a gonzo shoot-out with cartoon sounds which breaks its thin reality and has more than a few jarring perfectly executed laugh out loud beats.
It’s a great moment for provocateurs like Williams. But it’s not because of script features that make everyone in the audience roll their eyes as hard as they can, like Lillian’s fondness for using the word “retarded” (everyone keeps bringing it up to her) or any other way “The Sweet East” tries to co-opt non PC thinking for its edginess.
And this is coming from someone who has starred in indies by the Safdie brothers, Alex Ross Perry, Michael Almereyda and more which only makes his directorial debut all the more monumental. As the main storyteller behind the camera, Williams has strong convictions and a clear-eyed vision of grittiness: harsh soft lighting; different color filters on each scene, switching between handheld and locked-off shots with no warning, throwing a matte painting background into one shot just because; lots of hairs in the gate. The fuzzy fever dreams of “The Sweet East” are something of a bracing throwback for indie filmmaking, but they also suggest a brighter future for their creator than his country has.
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