SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: Introducing her fifth feature, Touchy Feely, which is showing as part of this year’s dramatic competition, Lynn Shelton made a point of identifying herself as one of the fifty percent. Which is to say as one of the eight female directors, out of sixteen, competing in her category. That’s a record for Sundance, and Touchy Feely’s noonday world premiere filled the 1250 seats of the Eccles theatre with people who, like me, were hoping to share an experience worthy of the occasion.
It’s true that if you look at skin for long enough, and crazy close up, it starts to freak you out.
Shelton’s previous films—especially the alpha bromance Humpday, which launched her career at Sundance in 2009—suggested the better part of her interests lay with the other fifty percent. Dudes and dudeness were the focus of My Effortless Brilliance and Humpday, both largely improvised, the latter a high-concept comedy about straight best friends who dare each other to take part in a gay porn competition. Touchy Feely is by her account Shelton’s most personal film, and though like her previous efforts it is set in her native Seattle, it is also her first film since her debut, We Go Way Back, to have a completed script.
Rosemarie DeWitt, who appeared in Shelton’s recent Your Sister’s Sister, here stars as Abby, a massage therapist with a serviceable, bicycle mechanic boyfriend named Jesse (Scoot McNairy), a painfully introverted dentist brother named Paul (Josh Pais), and regular appointments for Reiki, the Japanese art of energy channeling practiced by her friend Bronwyn (Allison Janney). After agreeing to move in with Jesse, Abby—cool, capable, and a little superior—begins to unravel. Having essentially entered the business of touching people, the skin of her clients and then her boyfriend becomes a source of revulsion.
At the same time Paul, who runs a failing dentistry practice with his wan daughter (Ellen Page), discovers that he is possessed of a healing touch. Seattleites with aching jaws swarm his office, eager for relief, and Paul obliges, first shyly, then with shy pride. The story has Shelton’s heightened conceptual flair, and the performances are engaging, but from the beginning Touchy Feely lacks the dramatic energy it needs to get all that quirk off the ground. Subdued to the point of drabness, the film harkens back to the soulful coming-of-age story We Go Way Back in its most doleful moments. This is Seattle at its soggiest.
Shelton works hard to connect us to Abby’s sudden aversion, and it’s true that if you look at skin for long enough, and crazy close up, it starts to freak you out. But the buzz of offhanded emotional conviction that charges through her other films is muted for too long at too many stretches of Touch Feely. Pais and Page have a limp dynamic as repressed dad and depressed but dutiful daughter. Paul’s renaissance makes for some fun scenes—his submission to Reiki among them—but their conflict is resolved without ever feeling quite real.
Abby’s crisis comes into better focus only moments before its release, via an ecstasy trip and an encounter with an old boyfriend (Ron Livingston). In those scenes, as always, DeWitt is radiant and difficult, channeling in moments of longing and memory the emotion that might have propelled a better film. One with Shelton’s warm touch and feel both.
