- Theo Green (left) and Jonah Parker in Breakfast With Curtis
This weekend I checked out the ultra-low-budget Breakfast With Curtis (which screens again Wednesday and Thursday at the Gene Siskel Film Center) because its poster features a pull quote from no less than Paul Thomas Anderson. Not that I consider Anderson’s taste to be infallible, but it piqued my interest to see him endorsing a “micro-indie.” The maker of Magnolia and There Will Be Blood is famous for his formal ambition, whereas so many recent underground films have felt like glorified home movies. What made this one stand out?
The plot charts the boy’s initiation into the tribe and the gradual reconciliation between the two homes, but the more important development is how the commune’s screwy reality comes to engulf the rest of the film. (At times, this feels like an adaptation of the young-adult novel Richard Brautigan never wrote.) For much of its first half, Breakfast With Curtis seems tied to the title character’s perspective, regarding the others with a mix of curiosity and benign confusion. But as it goes on, Colella digresses more and more from her setup, spending time with the adult characters without using Curtis as an audience surrogate. As such, the would-be caricatures in the commune seem increasingly like real people. One senses the disappointments that might come into view when and if the marijuana cloud should pass from their home.
