Flasz On Film

Meet Tim. Tim Smith. To describe Tim would be to call him by the title of the film—unremarkable. He hasn’t amounted to much in life. He doesn’t have a career or even a hobby. On any objective life metric Tim falls way short. Except two: sincerity and optimism.

Tim, however, is not real. He’s a figment. An invention. A narrative construct engineered for the purposes of a mockumentary written, produced, directed and starring Xavier Coy. And upon first glance it would seem that the intention of the filmmaker, who does in fact play Tim, is to have a bit of a giggle at Tim’s expense. Maybe to put the viewer in a state of comedy-adjacent vicarious pity where we are encouraged to slap our knee and snort like little piggies while looking at how inane Tim’s antics are. It’s very much like watching a Christopher Guest movie about someone who might have once auditioned to join Spinal Tap but failed. Imagine Bill from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure reincarnated as an Aussie—a slacker whose poor outlook on life is directly proportional to his fundamental kindness and Forrest-Gumpian naiveté—whose everyday operations are documented with the caustic wit reminiscent of young Taika Waititi. If you can do that, you’ll get a good enough bearing on the kind of vibes Unremarkable exudes.

Until it doesn’t.

Because there’s much more to what starts as a comedic trifle about an incurable optimist who thinks he’s on the precipice of making it big every time he concocts a braindead idea together with his mate Christo (Michael Arvithis), a yin to Tim’s yang. As we follow these two dimwits and think that all this movie is ever going to amount to is an aesthetically formal fake documentary in the tradition of This is Spinal Tap and What We Do in the Shadows, something truly remarkable happens. The subject of the fake doc takes over the narrative and punctures the double membrane of the movie within a movie. What starts as a comedy about a guy (Danny his name is, played by David Woodland) convincing his fake slacker friend Tim to become a subject of a fake doc, Tim (both the subject and the director of the movie that frames this entire operation) flips the script. After occasionally nipping out for appointments mid-interview or asking Danny and the camera man to stay in the car while he runs some errands, we find out that Tim was diagnosed with a brain tumour and was given just a few months to live. Talk about a curveball!

From then on, it almost seems inappropriate to continue with that faux documentary, but Danny and his crew persist because they think it’s even more important to capture what happens next. Tim decides that in his final weeks of life he wants to leave a mark on this world and hence the movie he stars in—and the movie in which this movie is contained—transmogrify from a cute little indie comedy full of funny-haha moments of levity and innocent-looking quips into a full-blown anthem of life affirmation.

I’ll be perfectly honest here: what Unremarkable turns into and how gracefully it traverses this twilight zone between comedy and supple drama is nothing short of sensational. Without losing the edge of its wit—having endeared itself to you with this kindness-stuffed-with-sincerity kind of gullible-guy-stumbles-as-we-laugh comedy—Tim turns to face the camera, looks you dead in the eye and tells you that it’s OK. That he gets it. That life is hard. And it truly is, as embodied in a truly cathartic scene where Tim attempts to reach out to his estranged father seeking to find answers and inner peace only to find stinging rejection, which he takes exactly like he took all of his life’s failures thus far—on the chin.

Without fanfare or swelling violins, this little comedic project turns into a profound study of the human experience, an apotheosis of fundamental sincerity and a celebration of kindness. In fact, it happens so quickly that even the movie itself behaves for a brief minute as though it needed a moment to compose itself before contextualizing the depth of meaning it is about to grapple with when it turns out that Tim is no longer a comedic tool but an everyday hero brimming with seemingly unbridled optimism. Without a doubt, Xavier Coy—who drives this movie with a combination of stone-cold determination and featherlight glee—knows he’s struck gold here. He must be aware of just how important this seemingly invisible little movie might be to anyone who might be in the market for a pat on the back.

In times of relentless strife and when the vagaries of everyday life can become a burden that is simply too heavy to carry, I think we all need to hang out with Tim for a little while. Down a beer behind the shed. Do some backyard MMA. Just shoot the breeze. I bet you money that his optimism—untouched by a life-ending diagnosis—would rub off on anyone who could use a helping of some happy thoughts. Which is why I think that Unremarkable ought to be viewed not as a spiritual descendant of Christopher Guest mockumentary stints, but rather as a heartwarming piece of life-affirming cinema like The Peanut Butter Falcon that also happens to be supremely funny.

Somewhere between Bruno from Stroszek and Moondog from The Beach Bum, and with some of that Aussie spice, lives Unremarkable: a little indie movie put together with scotch tape and good intentions that you probably don’t know it exists. But it does. And contrary to its title, it is pretty sensational.