The movies have given us man-children for decades, dating back to Carl Reiner’s “The Jerk,” leading all the way to a bumper crop of “dudes stuck in arrested development” productions through the 2000s and 2010s: “Cyrus,” “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” “Knocked Up,” “Adult Beginners,” “The Comedy,” “Step Brothers,” “Jeff Who Lives at Home.” Alex Heller’s feature debut, “The Year Between,” descends from this overdone tradition and leaves a new wrinkle on the formula: Bipolar disorder, a formidable condition characterized by extreme mood swings and thus a clear goldmine for slacker burnout comedy.
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Give Heller the benefit of the doubt. It’s possible the film, which she directed, wrote, and stars in, reflects her personal experiences with bipolar individuals, and that part of the exercise is arriving at catharsis in those experiences. But “The Year Between” relates so closely to its progenitors that the basic conceit – 20-something bungles life at every turn and winds up in circumstances ranging from wacky to cringeworthy – raises questions that shouldn’t be: Do the protagonists in these movies also live with mental illness? Does the film imply, whether intentionally or not, that the loser heroes of these movies grow up to not grow up at all because of mental illness and behavioral disorders? That’s a lot to put on man-children movies, tired though they may be in 2022. On the opposite end, holding “The Year Between”’s central hook against it puts a lot on Heller, too.
Heller plays Clemens, introduced in a scene that’s one part hilarious and one part nauseating: First she storms across her college campus and bears down on a group of students playing Quidditch, and if there’s any better example of a victimless crime, it’s hectoring collegiate young adults for clinging to their “Harry Potter” obsessions in the “frothing transphobe” phase of J.K. Rowling’s career. Second, she busts into her room and immediately begins bullying her helpless, timid roommate for the crime of nicking Clemens’ chapstick. (She did not nick the chapstick.) It’s an effectively scary “hello” that ends with Clemens’ mom, Sherri (J. Smith-Cameron), knocking down the door and dragging her home. She’s had enough. Clemens’ dad, Don (Steve Buscemi), has had enough. Her sister, Carlin (Emily Robinson), and brother, Neil (Wyatt Oleff), have had enough.
It may take less than 10 minutes of “The Year Between”’s 90-minute running time to elapse for the audience to side with Clemens’ family. Heller, in her performance and her writing, caricaturizes Clemens as grotesque, and inconsistently contends with her diagnosis; the effect is to lean on bipolar disorder as a crutch instead of a condition. When “The Year Between” goes too long without reminding viewers of Clemens’ mental health status, it hastily provides one. Remember how Clemens is heavily medicated? Remember how she’s prone to bouts of inert depression and fits of unchecked belligerence? The movie uses her illness as a lazy way of contextualizing Clemens’ disagreeable nature instead of thinking about where illness and nature collide; it’s less interested in bipolar disorder as part of Clemens’ humanity and more interested in the comic extremes the disorder lets the film get away with.
How “The Year Between” represents bipolar disorder comes down to structure. Clemens is diagnosed and put on a mood stabilizer regimen early on, in a swift montage that feels like an entire movie packed into just 2 minutes; it’s a climax reached in the first act. But there’s no resolution. There can’t be. There’s still a lot of movie left to get through. “The Year Between” treats Clemens as a punchline, which is admittedly in keeping with the blueprint Heller is working off of, but which also reads as the poorest taste considering the subject matter. That isn’t to say the movie isn’t funny, of course; Heller squeezes a lot out of a little bit of Buscemi every time he’s on screen. “You’re winners,” Don tells his quarreling children, playing faulty peacemaker as only dads can, “and always welcome here.” “Don’t say that Don,” Sherri quickly replies, “it isn’t true.”
There’s tempo to the exchange, a sense of timing that’s missing in so much of the rest of the movie’s humor. It’s not that Heller doesn’t have it. It’s that the movie inconsistently finds it. Clemens takes Carlin to a party thrown by her retail coworker, Beth (Kyanna Simone); they each toss back a pill as the camera zooms in on their mouths as if to document the drugs’ journeys from tongue to stomach, and at last zooms right back out from Carlin when she inevitably pukes it up. The agility of this particular beat offers the best example of Heller’s raunchy, rude comedic sensibility; it’s funny, and well-crafted, and again, sorely absent elsewhere in the movie. There’s a way to find the humor in life with mental illness. “The Year Between,” with exceptions, isn’t it. [C-]
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