**/****
starring Kent Osborne, Jennifer Prediger, Josephine Decker, Joe Swanberg, Kev
screenplay by Joe Swanberg & Kent Osborne
directed by Joe Swanberg
by Alex Jackson Despite having recently celebrated his fortieth birthday, children's-show cartoonist Kent Osborne is no closer to leaving young adulthood behind. Never married and not a father, he finds himself too embarrassed to date anyone. Every single woman his age feels her biological clock ticking and asks, on the first date, whether he's ready to have children. With no greater purpose outside of his work, Osborne wastes his days smoking pot, frequenting Chatroulette, and trolling craigslist. You would think that Joe Swanberg's Uncle Kent was made as a reaction to Greenberg (particularly as that film stars Swanberg expatriate Greta Gerwig, of Hannah Takes the Stairs fame), but I can find nothing within the picture that would support this conclusion. Uncle Kent has a lot less bite than Greenberg; Osborne's callow self-absorption is considerably more benign. There are none of Greenberg's petulant tantrums or scenes that remotely correlate with his semi-predatory seduction of the family employee Gerwig plays. I sort of doubt that Uncle Kent is any more truthful than Greenberg, though it's certainly a lot less interesting. As in Hannah Takes the Stairs, these characters have a tendency to talk around things, coding every communication with irony and a gracious unwillingness to offend or concretely state any affirmation of feeling or value. They rarely let themselves get angry or sad, as they wouldn't want you to think that you're the cause. The most they'll show is frustration or discontent. This is probably why the film's sex and nudity fail to truly shock, much less titillate. Nudity is paradoxically used as a means for the characters (and, I think, the actors) to avoid exposing themselves. If somebody pulls his dick out in front of you or demonstrates how he masturbates, you'll mistakenly believe that he's being frank and be reluctant to probe deeper. This is all very novel (or at least it was three years ago; I admit to kind of avoiding these Mumblecore movies), and it successfully rationalizes Swanberg's lo-fi minimalism. But inert characters make for an inert filmgoing experience–and after Uncle Kent, I was still hungry to watch a real movie.
