***/****
starring Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman
screenplay by Stephen Belber from his play
directed by Richard Linklater
by Walter Chaw Vincent (Ethan Hawke) is a volunteer fireman and sometime drug pusher who meets his best friend John (Robert Sean Leonard) at a seedy Michigan motor inn for a little beer, drugs, and conversation. Very quickly, what was a genial bout of male bonding devolves into hidden agendas, past hurts, and psychological manipulations, all geared towards resolving an event that may or may not have happened. When Amy (Uma Thurman), an old girlfriend of them both, shows up at the room, she functions as a catalyst to exploding the resentments that have bound them invisibly over the years.
The lesser of two experiments by Richard Linklater in the 2001 festival year, Tape is literally a one-room drama between first two, then three actors bound together by a traumatic circumstance along the lines of Beth B's "Two Small Bodies" or Ariel Dorfman's "Death and the Maiden". It is a sadomasochistic chamber piece often taut and suffused with real tension, even as we never entirely believe that what we're watching belongs on film rather than on the stage. (Indeed, Tape is a very faithful adaptation of a play by Stephen Belber.) Linklater's work with the digital-video format is surprisingly meticulous, highlighting the deliberateness of the director's seemingly free-flowing oeuvre, but its showiness (quick pans acting as an illustration of tension during a heated exchange, for example) mainly serves to distract from its theatre-bound roots. In addition to a trio of very fine performances, the strength of the film comes in the suggestion that events captured on the titular tape (a small voice-recorder cassette) make them somehow "truer." It's a formalist problem discussed with much greater effectiveness in Linklater's own Waking Life, and its appearance here–while welcome–isn't probed at a level that would warrant an extended discussion of it. Ultimately, Tape is rewarding as an actor's workshop and the kind of experiment that it is: off-the-cuff and expertly executed, though bound by its source and its format to minor rewards and pocket epiphanies.
