NAPLES INTERNATIONAL FF REVIEW: Lanie Zipoy's THE SUBJECT brilliantly uses Jason Biggs as the face of white privilege

The Subject‘s director Lanie Zipoy, working from a script by Chisa Hutchinson, makes maybe the best use of Jason Biggs since his big breakthrough in the American Pie franchise. As the awkward teenager Jim in those films, he came across clueless yet well meaning, ignorant of certain basic social interactions, and yet a guy we all rooted for. It didn’t necessarily occur at the time that if Jim had not been a wealthy white kid, some of the things he did in those movies would have gotten him arrested and on a national sex offender registry. But it surely does after seeing him in The Subject, which just won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Film at the Naples International Film Festival, where his being an affable, oblivious, privileged trust-fund guy who doesn’t always understand other people makes him a downright danger. Especially since his chosen career is as a documentarian who films at-risk young black men in Harlem.

Biggs’ Phil Waterhouse knows how to talk to people in that Hollywood director sort of a way, de-escalating situations diplomatically when a subject becomes resentful of the his filming process, and even smoothing over random heated situations on the street. He thinks of himself as a really good dude; the kind who’ll donate $10,000 to the funeral of one of the kids’ mothers in his latest project. (That he has apparently become rich making documentaries is the film’s least believable plot point.) And he dates nonwhite women…so obviously, he just can’t be racist, right?

There’s a real danger for first-time feature directors making movies about movie making, that the story might essentially disappear up the filmmaker’s own metaphorical behind. But it’s a canny bit of misdirection here. The Subject is a movie that neatly divides in two, with the first part depicting Phil possibly getting himself into a Fatal Attraction situation with an assistant, all while an anonymous stalker with a camera follows him and his latest project. At the halfway mark, the stalker is revealed, and the second hour of the movie essentially becomes a two-person play heavily steeped in power dynamics. Phil has been tormenting himself with memories of the death of one of his previous subjects, and they find their embodiment in what may be a sheltered Cauacasian man’s greatest fear: a righteously angry black woman (Aunjanue Ellis).

Zipoy and Hutchinson are too smart to make it as simple a situation as, well, black and white. Had they gone that route, the movie might be considerably shorter. Both Phil and his pursuer are manipulative, tortured, and at different points, terrified. Phil is more in the wrong, and his inability to own it will frustrate anyone who has ever known or loved someone super-defensive. Ellis is a powerhouse who raises Biggs’ game by provoking him in all the right ways, but she never becomes a shrill stereotype. There’s a brief moment where the confrontation threatens to end in a horrible cliché, but thankfully the story backs away from that brink.

I’m trying not to spoil to much because it’s better to not know much more than Phil, a position the movie clearly wants you to be in. After an hour in his work life and personal space, we want to like the guy, but he really does say cringy things sometimes, and falls for flattery too easily. The build-up to his penance becomes ever-clearer, even without the anonymous phone calls that periodically serve as reminders. And while Orange Is the New Black certainly primed viewers for this version of Biggs, it’s hard not to think back to his earlier roles and wonder if we liked all the wrong things about those characters.