<i>Discovering Cinema: Learning to Talk &amp; Movies Dream in Color (2003–2004)</i> (review)

Lloyd’s first independent production after parting ways with Roach, commands particular attention. The scene begins as Harold drifts in a rowboat, sighing over a box of Acme dog biscuits (a totemic souvenir from his first meeting with The Girl, and The Girl’s dog) and sees his beloved’s reflection in the calm surface of the lake. Of course the audience knows that The Girl has walked onto the bridge and is leaning over the edge sighing with her Cracker Jack box clutched tight in her hand (her souvenir from the first meeting with The Boy). But neither character recognizes the presence of the other. Harold takes the reflection of her face as a projected mirror of his thoughts; lost in her own thoughts, The Girl walks away. The dramatic suspense of the missed moment tightens as The Girl exits the bridge and then stumbles, falling onto a raft that clumsily sails into his side. From melodramatic suspense to slapstick pratfall, the scene now shifts to shy sentimentality, even as the natural world turns coyly sensuous. On dry ground, “girl shy” Harold labors towards conversation. His stutter gets in his way as does a litter of piglets suckling at their mother’s teats. Moving The Girl away from any semblance of suckling, he leans against a sapling that oozes on his hand. He inadvertently wipes the sap on his pants. He nervously seeks a safer spot for chatting. Sitting down seems wise, so as she rests on a tree trunk, he collapses on a rock, which the audience sees is not a rock at all but rather a large turtle. Finally at ease, The Boy gazes into her eyes as the tortoise carries him slowly towards the murky depths. Lloyd never shouts about the sensuous. It rather leaks, bubbles, shimmers and sprays through and across the surface of things. Because he so loudly voices the platitudes of romance and the secure recognition of the couple—“LETS GET MARRIED” reads the final intertitle for Grandma’s Boy—it is sometimes hard to hear what is flooding everywhere beneath. The miracle ultimately revealed to us in this collection is a figure in which the sentimental and the sexual, the dramatic and the comic, the innocent victim and the sly trickster, the certainty of direction and the aimless quality of spray, seamlessly merge in what appears, at first glance, to be a rather simply dressed kind of fellow, the most average of Nebraskan guys.