I WISH YOU WOULD (Ryland Walker Knight, 2021) (Patreon)

Ryland's latest film reminds me of an unexpected combination of two independent artists with very different approaches to the outside world. On the one hand, there is a certain John Magary vibe to I WISH YOU WOULD. (First Blake, now Ry -- what is it with my friends stylizing their titles with all-caps?) If you saw The Mend (and if you're reading this, I suspect you did), you know what I'm talking about. There's an itchy, agitated visual style at work here, but it never takes over from the essential verisimilitude of scenes and locales. This is fitting, because protagonist Stanley (Cuyler Ballenger) is clearly struggling to get on an even keel, to meet the "normal" world with all the normalcy he can muster. Alas, it's not much.

On the other hand, there's Ryland's visualization of Stanley's moments of meditation. These bursts of abstraction reminded me of the late Paul Clipson, an artist whose sensitivity to qualities of light, and the fleeting luminosity of everyday things, allowed him to produce numerous operettas of intense hyper-realism, displaying nature, architecture, and random passers-by as occasions for overwhelming sensation and wonder. 

If I have any real hesitation about I WISH I WOULD, it's that these distinct modes are not wedded as well as they perhaps could be. (For what it's worth, I felt similarly about the score, which was overly prominent in sections where it might have been better to lay back.) Part of my reservation with Ryland's use of the abstract mode is that it implicitly participates in a common trope with regards to modernism in general, that its deviations from realism reflect the disturbances of a troubled mind. But even allowing for this, I got the sense that Ry is good at two different things and wanted to do them both, which is certainly understandable. I have no doubt that in future efforts, he'll find a way to integrate them more completely.

Also, man, I miss Oakland.