Directed by: Zach Weintraub
Distributed by: TBA
Written by Eric Zhu
70/100
In a better world, we’d have many more independent films like Zach Weintraub’s “Assets & Liabilities.” This is a film that’s formalist but not over-directed, funny and anxious, but not solipsistic. It’s set in a specific time and place (a present-day gentrified Tacoma), with people and places that feel real rather than written.
“Assets & Liabilities” lies squarely within the lineage of the bourgeois guilt film, one that, like Radu Jude’s recent “Kontinental ‘25,” takes the genre to the realm of farce. Both films actually start with an eviction. In “Assets,” Zach, a former skateboarder turned suburban tech dad played by Weintraub himself, hops on a call to inquire about selling a piece of property, the sale of which would evict his current tenants. Though Zach is superficially torn between his personal finances and the well-being of his tenants, his general disillusionment is revealed through the framing of the call: a close-up of a computer screen as Zach begins to play an online game.
Zach is unhappy with his sterile, corporate life. Working from home over Slack and wiping his daughter’s excrement into the toilet, his cognitive dissonance is filtered through extreme fisheye lenses and disembodied close-ups. The approach resembles Martel’s “The Headless Woman” injected with the relaxer sensibility of Joel Potrykus. What Zach longs for is a return to his skater roots. When his wife and daughter leave for a short vacation, he takes the opportunity to spend his days jerking off to kinky porn and going to the skate park. There, he befriends a younger skater who, in a sick twist of fate, is the tenant he’s about to evict.
“Assets’” sardonic tone is encapsulated in a scene where Zach and his new friend place a curse on the evil landlord. Zach is left giving himself half-hearted punishments, all of which are enacted in the film’s denouement, a stoner, horror-inflected humiliation ritual that unleashes manifestations of Zach’s repression onto his humdrum suburban life. As impressive as the film’s tonal modulation and the movement through Zach’s townhouse (occasionally through baby monitors!) is, its Weintraub’s self-effacing physical performance that completes the film’s ruthless treatment of its protagonist. Zach’s excuses are depicted as nothing less than pitiful, and Weintraub almost relishes in his character’s pathetic spiral.
One of “Assets’” telling virtues is its market-unfriendly runtime. At a lean 62 minutes, it lies in that difficult lane of the mid-length feature. This isn’t a film that stretches itself to make a grand statement, nor one that feels like it’s performing to an imagined audience. It astutely pinpoints a contemporary condition and executes.
“Assets and Liabilities” Trailer
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