Drake Doremus is Looking for Love in All the Taboo Places
The Scoop features personal essays on movie-centric topics.
By Natalie Pohorski
I went to the Sundance Film Festival for the first time in winter 2011. I was 22 years old, finishing film school, and two months out of a broken engagement. It was one of the most intense weeks of my young adult life.
Personal struggles aside, Sundance is a pressure cooker for the empath. I watched documentaries about everything from 9/11 to child soldiers and medically induced suicide, and dramatic features about grappling with religion, surviving a sex cult, and other heavy topics. (A midnight showing of Hobo With a Shotgun was a welcomed reprieve, which should tell you something.) By the end of the festival, I was wearing thin emotionally.
Then Like Crazy won the Grand Jury Prize, so they scheduled a special screening with Q&A. The previous screenings had sold out, so I couldn’t turn down the opportunity. When they brought the lights up after the screening, I was wiping tears on my sleeve. Friends exchanged knowing looks in my direction. The movie broke my heart.
This was my introduction to Drake Doremus. And a tour through his impressive filmography will show you why he is one of my favorite directors.
“The in-between bits. The gory bits of you and the gory bits of me.”
Like Crazy follows Anna and Jacob, two college students who fall in love and then are separated when her visa expires. It’s a movie about first love, and what I didn’t realize until I sat in that screening was that I hadn’t really gotten over my first love. I was fresh out of a very important and serious relationship, but that wasn’t what I was crying about.
The movie was so earnest and genuine in the telling. I raised my hand in the Q&A and asked “Where is she now?” It was actually based on his own long-distance relationship with a woman from London. What he did so well was highlight all the little moments we often forget when we look back on a relationship with either rose-colored or foggy lenses. Relationships in our twenties are really about figuring ourselves out in the midst of having so much love to give.
One of the most poignant moments in the film is when the couple gets back together and they find themselves trying to force intimacy by taking a shower together. It’s such an uncomfortable moment as it’s only then, in that confined and vulnerable space, that they realize how far apart they really are.
“It’s hard to know how to be truly free and whether that’s even a good thing.”
Breathe In was released in 2013 but I didn’t see it until recently. It’s about an exchange student who falls in love with the professor whose family she is staying with, and the consequences of that relationship. It’s meditative and intimate—the hallmarks of Doremus’ films.
Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones in Like Crazy.
While I haven’t been in this type of relationship, I’ve often grappled with the idea of freedom within and from relationships. And I’ve made selfish choices that came with collateral damage. I say this out of accountability for myself, but I don’t judge the characters in this film for their choices. He tells their stories in such a way that the truth of it stands above judgment.
Similarly to Like Crazy, he begins with a story outline and then improvises the rest of the script with the cast during rehearsals and then in filming. So it’s no wonder that he cast Felicity Jones again after building up that rapport.
“It’s like everyone’s... searching for these answers eight hundred million miles away and the truth is the answers are right in front of us.”
Equals was certainly a shift for Doremus. He stepped away from his indie roots, even his writing partner, and made a sci-fi movie. The movie has a more traditional filmmaking approach (along with a bigger budget), and it feels a little awkward and disjointed at times.
But what I love about it, aside from my complete infatuation with both of the leads, is that it asks the questions we are sometimes afraid to ask. Is love just a feeling? Can we remember feelings after they stop being feelings? Is love a choice? And beyond love: Is it better to feel or feel nothing?
As someone who lives with mental illness, I really resonated with the film’s approach to these questions. In my darkest days I find myself asking why I have to feel so deeply and think such heavy thoughts—wouldn’t the alternative just be easier?
Equals doesn’t give us the answer, but it does leave you with hope. (Trigger warning for depictions of suicide.)
“The saddest people are the ones that don’t know what they want.”
Newness snuck up on me when I discovered it just by scrolling through Netflix one day. From what I can tell online it was a somewhat rushed project, but the movie itself is a return to his bread and butter: small, intimate, messy romance.
It focuses on a couple attempting an open relationship in the middle of LA’s hookup culture. We navigate alongside these two, unclear which is really feeling the way they are saying. Who is in, who is out? Are they hooking up with someone else based on something missing or something they want? Are they just afraid of what real intimacy means?
Doremus films give us the opportunity to live relationships we’ve never experienced. It's as if we’ve been given secret permission to try things out, make mistakes. For anyone who has tried to comprehend what an open relationship may look like, it’s an interesting case study that I recommend checking out.
“Everything might not be okay, but that’s okay. You’re exactly where you need to be.”
When I heard about his next film, Endings, Beginnings, it was exceptionally exciting to me given the cast. Daphne, played by Shailene Woodley, is a bit of an enigma, but we learn more and more about her as the film goes on. She felt so familiar to me, going through a breakup in her thirties and doing a complete reset in life while seemingly giving up on finding long-term love.
She ends up meeting two very different men at the exact same time, and begins exploring relationships with each of them, seeing different sides of herself ok each and the different kinds of relationships she could end up in. The camerawork and editing match the chaotic storyline as we learn more about how she got to this place and sympathize with her journey to take back control of her life—by owning who she is and owning up to her choices.
A Gentle and Genuine Love
Will his next film center on a divorced woman in her mid-thirties finding contentment? Probably not. In fact, now that he’s found love and marriage, maybe his projects will look a little different. But I’m sure they will remain to me identifiable, gentle, and genuine. They will likely demonstrate a kind of love that’s not widely idolized or sought after.
And, above all, they will make me feel.
Natalie Pohorski is a content specialist at Cinema Sugar.