Miranda July’s latest film The Future poses the complicated problem of “growing up.” Sophie, played by July herself, a dance instructor who dreams of doing something really special and posting it on YouTube and Jason, played by Hamish Linklater, a bored telephone computer technician, have committed to adopting a stray cat. Unfortunately, they are forced to wait thirty days before the injured Paw Paw can come home with them.
The two thirty-five year olds, who suddenly realize they are neither as beautiful, as successful or as rich as they had hoped, feel the weight of that “now or never” moment: in thirty days their lives will change forever. In order to prepare for the arrival of their new pet, their first true responsibility, Sophie and Jason quit their jobs, disconnect the Internet, open themselves up to the meanings of the world and try to really use what is left of their “freedom.” What happens next is fitting with July’s absurd and magical style: both characters become so attuned to their surroundings, to flickers, flashes and possible “signs,” that they lead themselves astray and away from one another. Sophie has a strange, unexplained affair with Marshall, a middle-aged suburbanite while Jason canvasses door to door for a not-for-profit plant-a-tree organization and befriends an old man.
Just as Sophie is about to confess her unfaithfulness, Jason holds up his hand and stops time. He knows what she’s going to say. He’s not ready to hear it. He hits pause on life. This isn’t the cheerful and cheeky Zack Morris “time-out” trick, this is much more dramatic, depressing and even mystical. In fact, The Future is a film about the pause. Jason likens contemporary society to that moment in the cartoons just after the wrecking ball hits the building, when everything is perfectly still for a second or two. Just before it collapses. In this way, the future is framed as both knowable and daunting. We know that collapse is imminent, and this very apocalyptic vision of humanity is at the core of the film. Sophie and Jason themselves are never actually seizing the day, so to speak. Even liberated of their jobs and the Internet, they are still living in the pause, waiting for a signal to do something, unable to commit to anything, paralyzed by the idea of the future, the inevitable end.
With The Future, Miranda July takes her questioning of the oddities of love and life to a deeper level than she did in her first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, a charming dramatic comedy with something of a Napoleon Dynamite vibe. This makes for a much more serious and subtle film (aside, of course, from the overly sentimental narrator, Paw Paw). July also succeeds where Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life failed, that is, at really confronting not only the beauty but also the despair, defeat and dissatisfaction of life head-on. The problem Sophie and Jason face is a very contemporary one. It’s not even a mid-life crisis because at the cruel age of thirty-five, the true cut-off point or absolute far end of "young" adulthood, neither of them have actually figured out who they want to be.
While the premise of this film might seem a little kooky and the lack of resolution may leave one perplexed, the slow and quiet Future is well worth seeing for those ready and willing to ask the question: is this actually it?
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