I'm Still Here (2010)
Directed by Casey Affleck
I'm Still Here is a portrayal of a tumultuous year in the life of actor Joaquin Phoenix. With remarkable access, the film follows the Oscar-nominee as he announces his retirement from a successful film career in the fall of 2008 and sets off to reinvent himself as a hip-hop musician. The film is a portrait of an artist at a crossroads and explores notions of courage and creative reinvention, as well as the ramifications of a life spent in the public eye.
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What critics compared I'm Still Here to
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Directed by Larry Charles
Themes Visuals
As a gag, though, it’s a grimier version of Borat, an interactive one in which the audience acts as the squirming dupe trying to judge how to respond to the questionable reality of the experience.
Anonymous sources were quoted in various publications that the project was all a con, and the resulting mockumentary hit the cinema world as something of a mix between Borat and This Is Spinal Tap.
Meanwhile, as a hybrid, I'm Still Here might be intent on doing to the entertainment tabloid industry what Sacha Baron Cohen (with his films Borat and Bruno ) and recent Sundance-winner The Red Chapel do respectively to America and North Korea.
Now, it seems as though director Casey Affleck and actor Phoenix intentionally sought to blur those lines, just not in the lampooning Borat sense.
It can now be seen as what it is – an ambitious but deeply-flawed addition to the mockumentary genre, well below the quality of standard-bearers such as Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap (1984), Larry Charles’ Borat (2006) or the films of Christopher Guest (Waiting for Guffman, 1996; Best in Show, 2000; A Mighty Wind, 2003; For Your Consideration, 2006).
The result is “I’m Still Here,” a film that either tells the story of a man trying to find something real after growing tired of his life as an actor or is something closer to “Borat” in the way it tries to push the boundaries of performance art.
My best hope is that it is a Joaquin Phoenix-esque I’m Still Here stunt she’s pulling on all of us, and she’ll show up on Colbert tonight or something and let us know she was just messing around.
(But why not Night At The Museum ?). You're also treated to the sight of him wearing a germ-protection mask on the side of his head, barfing more than anyone else has in a film since the kid in Stand By Me, asking a friend to trim his stray back hairs and getting rejected by P. Diddy.
Few actors can match his level of nuanced intensity (see The Master , You Were Never Really Here and I’m Still Here ).
It can also take him down rabbit holes of grotesquerie and self-abasement, as in I’m Still Here , the faux-documentary he made with Casey Affleck documenting his own fictional mental breakdown.
For starters, one can’t help but have flashbacks to the stilted and misguided publicity stunt that Phoenix pulled when creating a ‘rap-persona’ for the mockumentary I’m Still Here , where he went on David Letterman and muttered his way through an interview.