Though I wouldn’t consider myself a follower of their work, I recommend reading the Duplass Brothers’ Like Brothers if you wanna get insight into how indie film productions go about getting movies out there without compromising their original vision. The book is foremost about their brotherhood, which can either be seen as really fucking sweet or feel like it exists on a plane of intimacy I cannot imagine with any living person on this world. For me, it was seeing how Mark and Jay like to think things through with their characters – the predicaments they find themselves in, the internalized motives that push them to questionable decision-making, and messy hearts at their core.
Jay, the older brother who finds himself in roles as the literary-handsome snob of a husband, gets back in his director’s chair for the first time in ten years with The Baltimorons. Though the Duplass brothers grew up in New Orleans and first got started in the Austin area, the brittle Maryland winter feels exactly like the kind of setting a lowkey Duplass film can go for: allowing the story to center the unique, yet very familiar, characters to shine. The film is certainly Jay’s return to form.
The script for The Baltimorons is a collaboration between Duplass and Michael Strassner, of Internet comedy fame and the film’s shenanigan-tour guide. The foundation of the film’s creation doesn’t seem surprising: Strassner reins the cameras closely to focus on his character Cliff, a recently sober comedian who accidentally breaks his tooth at his girlfriend’s family’s house on Christmas Eve. He scurries over to the only operating dental clinic in town, owned by an older, divorced Didi (Liz Larsen). Their first encounter is stuffy: he’s an apologetic doof, she’s a bit of a grump who feels a type of way when her ex-husband gets hitched to a younger woman on her favorite holiday, taking her oldest daughter away from spending the night together.
The best way to describe The Baltimorons is that it feels rooted in something real. The hijink-energy that pushes the characters into new scenarios is down-to-earth while being cinematically serendipitous. The improv comedy tactics are later introduced in the story, but it’s easy to tell that the characters are running off the “Yes, and?” high: just go with the flow and see where the night takes them. Even in the presence of some cringe-inducing scenes (one largely being the part where the title of the movie is derived from) and a “Will they or won’t they?” that spoils some of the magic, there’s no denying the chemistry between Cliff and Didi trying to figure each other out. Duplass may have helped with costuming a kind of script for Strassner to work with, but it’s also nice to see the Duplass touch come in (my favorite: when the camera zooms into Cliff and Didi as they exchange a bad-ideas plan).
The film features Larsen’s premiere as her first leading role after thirty years in the acting scene. It’s a shocking thing to say, but Larsen plays off Strassner’s kookiness with the right kind of mature skepticism and care that if there were a time and place to shine, it’s right here in The Baltimorons. It’s one of the films that is easy to digest since we can see this particular world through the different hang-outs and hang-ups without feeling too bored. It’s what the platform of filmmaking is about. It doesn’t surprise me that The Baltimorons was a hit at Sundance, twenty years after The Puffy Chair premiered.
The Baltimorons
2025
dir. Jay Duplass
100 min.
Now playing @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, West Newton Cinema, Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport, and AMC Boston Common and South Bay
