Everyday People

HBO Films

Much has been made in recent years of HBO's steady rejiggering of the television landscape with groundbreaking shows like The Sopranos, Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Less attention, however, has been paid to the ways in which HBO's film division has broadened the horizons of the movie industry, both with its theatrical releases of controversial or seemingly uncommercial works (Elephant, Maria Full of Grace) and its programming of first-rate original films on television.

For the past two years, the best American film around never made it to the local multiplex, or even the arthouse. Instead, it premiered on HBO, the best Hollywood studio on television. In 2003, it was the phenomenal, unexpected success of Angels in America, their six-hour, $60 million gamble on Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play; this past year, it was the less heralded, but no less accomplished, Everyday People. Jim McKay's jaw-dropping day in the life of the workers of an iconic Brooklyn restaurant owes a bit to P.T. Anderson (partially lifting the team-and-its-dissolution framework of Boogie Nights), a nod to Robert Altman (for its widescreen, multi-character portrait of New York City life), and a tip of the cap to Jean Renoir, but McKay is his own unique talent, a truly great filmmaker whose subject is the ordinary struggles of the common man and woman.

Perhaps it's just-a lingering notion of television as an inferior cultural container-but I find it strange that Everyday People, a film whose smarts and wit were every bit the equal of 2004 critics' darlings like Sideways, Before Sunset and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, generated so little enthusiasm among film critics. McKay's 2000 Our Song, a clear-eyed study of one summer in the lives of three New York City teenagers, similarly slipped under the radar, but by all rights, 2004 should have been the year that made McKay a household name.

Anchored by Russell Lee Fine's razor-sharp photography, and a superb cast of unfamiliar names-led by Jordan Gelber as the restaurant's doughy, big-hearted owner, Billoah Greene as a college-bound high-schooler with an absent father, and Steve Axelrod as a foul-mouthed ex-con dishwasher-Everyday People is a symphony of conflicting desires, confused souls and hostility-racial, sexual and otherwise. It is also the story of the American worker, harried, hassled and grounded by their work. As day turns to night in the film, and McKay's characters leave work and head back to their lives, it becomes an illustration of just how heavy the masks we all wear daily weigh on our souls. McKay is making a dark-horse bid to be one of the great American filmmakers of his generation, and a legitimate heir to the humanism of Renoir and Rossellini.

-Saul Austerlitz