Movie Review: Walking and Talking, Scheming and Searching in the affable Netflix comedy “Tramps”.
“Tramps” is the kind of talky, low-stakes independent comedy that used to get made a lot in the early 1990’s and has since fallen out of style in our current Content-dominated era. It’s a movie powered by one fairly simple conceit — confusion over the wrong intercepted briefcase, and the complications that come with getting it back — but is more concerned with its characters swapping stories, getting to know one another, and killing time.
The movie combines the walk-and-talk blueprint and confessional soul of Richard Linklater’s great “Before” trilogy with the freewheeling lowlife vulgarity of something like Doug Liman’s underrated 90’s caper “Go,” while also giving its lead performers ample opportunities to display their charm and comic chops. I doubt it will be the most compelling or action-packed film you see in 2017, but it’s a confident and involving example of its genre, and another small-screen win for America’s most ubiquitous home-streaming service.
The director of “Tramps” is Adam Leon, who made a splash a few years back with his rollicking, Cannes-approved comedy, “Gimme the Loot”. That film was an unreasonably charming day-in-the-life ramble about two endearing Brooklyn-based graffiti artists, who decide to get back at a rival crew by tagging the Home Run Apple of the New York Mets.
Like “Tramps,” “Gimme the Loot” often suggested a sunnier, less paranoid daytime variation on something like Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours”. Both films are flywheel farces that ping-pong through New York’s diverse boroughs, stopping along the way to shoot the shit with some bugged-out street prophets, Bodega crackpots and pre-Giuliani holdovers. “Tramps” is a looser, less formally exciting film than “Gimme the Loot”, but Leon’s sophomore feature still follows the same essential template as his breakout debut: two charming, youthful leads get themselves mixed up in some bad business and spend the remainder of an eventful New York day trying to get themselves out of it. Shake, stir, and serve.
Leon got his start working as a production assistant on some of Woody Allen’s films before working his way up the food chain of ambitious young East Coast cineastes that also includes Lena Dunham and Alex Ross Perry. Unlike these two aforementioned artists, Leon seems to have no interest in the city’s privileged upper crust, and he doesn’t do cruelty or passive-aggressive disdain. On the contrary, Leon’s sympathies lie with the city’s many below-the-radar stragglers: the graffiti artists, the fry cooks, the subway commuters, the liquor store clerks, etc. His touch is light, too. Leon’s films have an almost effervescent quality about them that reflects the chaotic, shambolic nature of the city better than any episode of “Girls” ever could.
“Tramps” is fairly featherweight stuff when all’s said and done, but it also possesses a dogged integrity that totally won me over. It’s the perfect movie for the age of Netflix: it runs a breezy 83 minutes, and there are times when it even feels shorter than that. And its two lead performers truly are loveable. Their unaffected chemistry and lack of star power makes “Tramps” feel like we’re watching two utterly normal city kids scrambling around the grittier neighborhoods of New York, doing their damndest to make a wrong thing right. Those among you who value plot over characterization may tire of the intentionally meandering pace of Leon’s second picture, but for those of us who yearn for a certain kind of intimate, micro-scale indie chamber piece that doesn’t really get made anymore, the young director’s follow-up to “Gimme the Loot” will surely hit your sweet spot.
“Tramps” is the story of Danny (Callum Turner) and Elle (Grace Van Patten), two very different kids from very different parts of the city. Danny is an aspiring chef who lives in a cramped walk-up with his Polish aunt and is currently doing a favor for his brother, who’s locked up when the movie begins. Elle is a smart, intuitive young woman who pays her bills by stripping and is indebted to a perpetually aggravated low-level heavy (Mike Birbiglia, amusingly cast against type) who is promising a way out of her current life.
The task that brings Danny and Elle together is fairly standard, as far as these kinds of movies go. Intercept a suitcase, exchange for cash, and report back. Of course, if this hare-brained scheme actually went according to plan, we wouldn’t have much of a movie, and I wouldn’t be writing this review.
Danny, big, dumb lug that he is, gets the suitcases mixed up, leading to a case of mistaken identity and a breathless chase along an above-ground subway station. And so, Danny and Elle find themselves bound together by rather unfortunate circumstance, and Leon follows them as they trudge through a muggy summer’s day in search of the bounty they were tasked to seize. Along the way, they happen to fall in love, though there’s certainly nothing tempestuous about their courtship. Leon is a noticeably laid-back filmmaker who’s uninterested in melodrama, and opts for sweetness and lyricism over the pessimistic New Yawk bile of, say, the Safdie Brothers (who are immensely talented in their own right).
Both the lead performances benefit from us not knowing a great deal about the actors. I first saw Callum Turner in Jeremy Saulnier’s unrelenting “Green Room,” where he played the sweet, quiet drummer of a hardcore punk band who found himself squaring off against a gang of murderous neo-Nazis. He’s funnier and more relaxed in this film than he was in Saulnier’s new grindhouse masterpiece, and the young actor’s loping gait and deadpan, comical baritone almost reminded me of the kinds of performances John Lurie used to give in the early movies of Jim Jarmusch (not surprisingly, Jarmusch is a big influence in “Tramps,” as is fellow New York filmmaker Spike Lee).
Van Patten, meanwhile, has popped up in arresting character turns in HBO dramas such as “The Sopranos” and “Boardwalk Empire” and she’s set to play Adam Sandler’s grown-up daughter in the upcoming Noah Baumbach comedy “The Meyerowitz Stories” (also a Netflix item). There is an easygoing lack of pretense in Van Patten’s performance that, questions of talent aside, cannot be duplicated or imitated. Based on what I’ve seen of her work, I feel like she’s still coming to define her range, but she has a quality that few other actors possess: she is completely and effortlessly herself, and I suspect she’ll continue to work in the independent film sphere on the basis of this gift alone.
“Tramps” is the kind of movie that’s so intentionally slight that it can seem as though it’s not about much. And admittedly, the movie doesn’t particularly linger with you in the way that something like “After Hours” or Spike Lee’s underrated urban picaresque “Crooklyn” (one of the film’s more pronounced influences) does. Instead, the film is a kind of loving, two-handed doodle: a screwy romantic ode to the mutts of one of America’s great cities. As far as small-scale entertainments go, “Tramps” is thin, inspired and utterly bewitching all at the same time. I dug it immensely, and am looking forward to whatever Mr. Leon is cooking up next. Grade: B.
