By Kamaria Porter

Miranda July manages with one scene to completely lose all the goodwill I invested in her low key and whimsical film "The Future."  Up until that point I was with the premise of this couple, Sophie and Jason, feeling the pressure to live more exciting lives as they commit to caring for an injured cat.  With one month until the cat comes to live with them, they decide to shirk their boring day jobs and seize their last days of freedom before the cat's demands dictate their time. Jason gives up his soul-sucking telemarketing gig to promote environmental causes. Sophie (played by July) stops frittering her dance talent away on bouncy toddlers and intends to choreograph a new dance per day.  

However, in a scene I will not spoil, the story, the characters and even the film's playful use of time, which I enjoyed, completely betrayed me.  As this narrative continued the film devolves from a pleasing look at two people wanting to break out of ordinary existence into a romp of needless suffering and pathetic navel-gazing.  

My dislike of the film increased as July suspends one character in an almost effective state of pain, while the other indulges in odd childish behavior.  This disjointed narrative only made me stew in one character's bad behavior without the balance or release of the other to condemn the action.  

The one thing that does work about "The Future," and it pains me to say it, is the cat. With July's voice, this sickly, sad-sack cat waiting to be adopted, loved and cherished by these two misfits, was a welcome presence.  The cat speaks of the deep longing for change that Jason and Sophie say they want, but fail to execute.  

I deeply disliked this film and say skip "The Future" and put your present to better use by seeing "Beginners" (from July's husband, Mike Mills) -- a film that plays with time and lovingly shows characters breaking out of their everyday to live fully.

By Alex Wilgus

Miranda July’s "The Future" is her second journey into the oddities of the human soul since 2005’s "Me And You And Everyone We Know."  She writes, directs and stars in a tale of a dead-in-the-water couple who pledge to reinvigorate their dull lives in their last 30 days before they adopt a cat.  The cat itself actually narrates several key montages, a prelude to the film’s pending abandonment of logic. With "The Future," July turns from her previous film’s themes of voyeurism and unreality to time and apocalypse.  

The best thing about "The Future" is its mood.  To her credit, July’s direction loses all the rough edges of her previous feature and the atmosphere she creates lends extra weight to what I thought to be an otherwise thin script.  It’s a great deal more fluid than 'Me and You,' less a menagerie of neuroses and more a focused plod toward oblivion.  

July’s characters exist in an art film alternate reality; every character acts halfway catatonic and the dialogue seems laced in semi-irony.  It’s a weird cerebral space between real and dream logic where everyone speaks their lines as if enraptured by the profundity of the narrative happening around them. Bergman, Fellini, Lynch, Hartley, Jarmusch and a slew of French directors have all bravely traded sense for sensation in their films and in the process create a narrative that’s more felt than understood.  

Unfortunately, this film feels a little too self-centered to be really cathartic. All the surroundings of an urban thirty-something become characters: the comfortable oversized t-shirt, the laptop and webcam, the couch, the trinkets on the table and the soon-to-be-adopted cat all play a role in July’s existential crisis.  Though the film’s tone hints at grand, even eschatological themes embedded in humming everydayness, I never felt convinced that she wasn’t just navel-gazing and making mountains out of molehills.  

When dealing with films that stray so far from conventional narrative, it becomes hard to pin down salient reasons why I enjoyed, say, Charlie Kaufman’s "Synechdoche, NY" and not "The Future." But then again, when a film so completely forsakes logic in search of more ethereal truths, all this humble critic has left is his impressions, so here they are: the main characters are unlikable dunces; the conflict is self-centered to an uncomfortable degree; metaphorical imagery is offered then abandoned as a joke then revisited again, annoyingly keeping the film’s anti-logic one step ahead of the audience; the characters’ problems just feel like passing insecurities rather than real maladies of existence.

"The Future" ends up being more elusive than profound.