In his Q&A following the premiere of his feature film Paper Covers Rock, director Joe Maggio noted that he set out to make a disposable film. That is, a film made with no money, the barest of bones, with no pressure and no expectations. Naturally, the absence of some factors liberates others; Paper Covers Rock is a simple, lovely expression whose quote-unquote disposability is hardly evidenced by the care that’s been put into its execution. The film treads a familiar path, but does so with nary a false step: it serves as a reminder that narrative predictability isn’t such a bad thing if it provides room for something more interesting than traditional plot.
In this case, it is a gateway to intimacy. Occupying nearly every frame of this film is Sam (Jeannine Kaspar), a twenty-something single mother whose winsome face we first glimpse, wrapped in plastic, when her daughter discovers her laying in bed with a ziploc bag over her head. The suicide attempt is not successful and, in short order, Sam is revived, committed, and then released to the care of her older sister Ed (Sayra Player). As sisters in films generally go, Sam and Ed are diametrically opposed; one being successful and shrill, the other mopey and in shambles; the former trying too hard to mold the latter into her own image and the latter withdrawing even further as a result. It’d be novel to see those roles reversed one day, but to the credit of Maggio and Player, it’s subtly hinted at that Ed is dealing with her own form of instability. By the time the sisters reach the end of the film, they’re two peas in a pod.
But the film isn’t really about sisterly relationships; nor is it about patient-psychiatrist dynamics, or potential post-suicide-attempt romance. This is a singular, insular portrait of an individual, and every interaction that Sam has with another person functions primarily to chart both her progress and the degree of her despondency. It draws a clear and accurate map of her depression, which may prove anathemic to viewers who have no tolerance for characters who can’t help themselves, or for films who don’t offer those characters sunnier windows of opportunity. Sam’s doctor asks her at one point if she truly didn’t want to wake up when she put that bag over her head. “I did, and I didn’t,” she responds, and that sort of non-committal, either-or response is what’s going to either draw audiences in or turn them away. The truth is that that’s how it works; whether or not it works on film might just depend on what one brings to it.
That isn’t to say that Paper Covers Rock has no forward trajectory or character arc - it does. Sam wants to regain custody of her daughter, and strives to do so. There you go. But there layers to that arc that aren’t quite so clear cut; likewise, there are as many steps back as there are forward, and the best way to delineate Sam’s progress or regress is not to watch what she does but what’s going on in her face as she does it. It’s often said that great films are great not because of what they’re about but how they’re about it; to break that idiom down further, a film like Paper Covers Rock is strong not because of how, but because of who. Kaspar’s performance, her very presence, affords the film its raison d’etre. There’s a scene, late in the film, where Sam regresses; she wants to lose herself, and so she goes to a bar and picks up the first guy she sees, and what Kaspar goes through when they go back to his apartment is some of the most complex and openly internal character work I’ve seen since Damien Lewis’ performance in Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane. What’s especially fascinating is that the scene serves a very traditional narrative purpose within the body of the film, building towards a climax and setting the grounds for denouement and resolution; but it simultaneously contradicts every dramatic expectation. It upsets us; it doesn’t take the easy way out. What Sam does in the scene doesn’t make sense, but it’s what she has to do because of who she is, and somehow, that gets her to where she needs to be. Again, that’s just how it works.
A final note: the film is open-ended, and its last shot could be read as hopeful if it weren’t colored so strongly by a recent event that it inadvertently mirrors. That would be the suicide of lauded artist Jeremy Blake, who wandered into the ocean this past summer after his girlfriend Theresa Duncan took her own life. It was a shocking, unsettling, puzzling tragedy, and a reminder that depression and mental illness can’t be wrapped up neatly in a box (or a bottle of pills) and ignored. Paper Covers Rock works towards the same purpose in a more subtle but no less meaningful way.
