Reviewing the Scene-By-Scene breakdown, I was reminded of several narrative elements and dynamics that helped to make this one of the best movies of 2013:
* Prologue-Epilogue: Mason's pair of stories, one at the beginning, the other at the end, serve as a nifty set of bookends. Note how the first one has a 'negative' tinge to it, the epilogue a 'positive' feel, which matches the trajectory of the story's arc. BTW, the epilogue serves as a great callback to the prologue.
* Smart decision to bring in an outsider (Nate). He functions as our eyes and experience, coming into this new environment. Natural opportunity for those who work in the facility to explain the rules, dynamics, etc. Exposition through character interaction.
* Note the use of ticking clocks: (1) Grace discovers she is pregnant. Ticking Clock: What's she going to do about it? When is she going to tell Mason? (2) Marcus has got one week until his 18th birthday at which point he can leave the facility. Ticking Clock: How will that impact Marcus? Why is he acting out when he's so close to freedom? (3) Jayden's father is going to pick her up soon. Ticking Clock: How will Jayden manage herself while she is in the facility?
One of the values of a ticking clock is the tension set into motion by them plays underneath all subsequent scenes, a subtextual dynamic roiling beneath the surface of the dialogue and action in any given scene. We, the reader, know those open-ended questions posed by the ticking clock will eventually have to be answered, which also feeds our curiosity to see what happens.
* How about two of the most moving moments in the script: Marcus' rap and Jayden octopus story. Both go completely against the old movie adage: Show it, don't say it. Yet they work wonderfully in the script, even better in the movie. I actually asked Destin Daniel Cretton precisely about why he made those choices, along with the prologue and epilogue, so in essence, four times using stories to convey exposition rather than showing it. Here was his response:
Destin: I’m actually a huge believer in show don’t tell, but in this case those stories were directly inspired by interviews that I conducted with other supervisors and counselors who worked in places like this and who have worked in places like this much longer than I did. On a number of occasions, in those interviews I was just blown away by how incredible they were at telling stories. They were magicians and storytellers.
The stories that they were telling, one of them that I recorded was almost verbatim me just typing it straight into the script and that was the opening story of the movie. I did manipulate some things and added some crude jokes, of course, but for the most part it was the voice of a guy who had worked at a place like this for 16 years telling a similar story.
Anybody who works in a very intense environment uses storytelling as an outlet and a way to cope and also as a way to make sense of things. Sometimes there’s a little bit of fiction woven into it like the last story that he tells. He was implying certain things and there’s a little bit of his own hope for Marcus woven into his story.
If I had shown that story, then it becomes the reality of the director as opposed to the viewer deciding how they want to interpret what this story is coming from this character and how much of it they want to believe, how much of it they want to say that’s a Mason embellishment. That was part of the fun.
The power of story-TELLING. I will be reprising my 2013 interview with Destin each day this week to go along with this series.
Lots of other cool stuff in Short Term 12. What did you notice?