Oh, to be in your early twenties when you have nothing but time. When one day blurs into the next and the next until the hangover wears off and you begin to wonder when the rest of your life is going to begin. Zach Schnitzer’s Loafers, playing at the Three Rivers Film Festival, is an ode to that meandering time in life when you’re surrounded by friends and full of energy, but have no idea how to direct that energy toward something meaningful. Loafers is loose, shaggy, and carefree, until the moment when it can’t be anymore.
When the audience first meets best friends and roommates Cameron (Dan Haller) and Isaac (Zach Schnitzer), they’re at a party, drinking the night away. It’s a few months after college and the two share an apartment in Chicago. Neither has their dream job, just something that pays the bills and buys the beer. When Isaac invites his childhood friend Cyrus (Olemich Tugas) to crash on their couch, cracks begin to form between the roommates. Couple Cyrus’ arrival with the post-college fog beginning to lift, and Cameron and Isaac are starting to toe the line of adulthood.
Moving Ahead Productions
The early 2000s saw the rise of the mumblecore genre of American filmmaking. It was scrappy, do-it-yourself-with-your-friends filmmaking that forced a level of creativity that often doesn’t exist when problems can be solved by throwing money at them. Six thousand dollars can’t really be thrown around too much, but what it can do is fuel the work of passionate people. Loafers is a throwback to the mumblecore days of indie filmmaking, complete with a brief cameo from one of the fathers of the genre, Joe Swanberg. While many of Swanberg’s films used improv, Loafers takes the more scripted approach, and that makes the film feel more cohesive. The scenes flow naturally and organically, but there’s also a sense that Loafers knows where it’s heading, even if its characters don’t.
Moving Ahead Productions
As much as Loafers may sound like a hangout flick where not much happens, hence the name, there’s a turn for the dramatic that comes toward the end of the second act. In a lot of low-budget movies about people just hanging around, there seems to be an expectation that something big has to happen. The decision usually comes across as melodramatic and unearned, but that’s not the case with Loafers. Yes, what happens to these friends is heavy, but it feels narratively purposeful. The tracks have been laid for this inevitable conclusion, but that doesn’t make its inescapable arrival any less weighty. In fact, the dramatic turn holds more heft because of how natural and real it seems.
While the title may give the impression that the filmmakers of Loafers approached it with a laissez-faire attitude, the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Loafers was made with love, and it shows so clearly. Loafers is proud of its scrappiness in the way that twenty-somethings are proud of their disorganized yet-beloved lines. There comes a time when one has to grow up, but that doesn’t mean losing the sense of ingenuity that was alive and so very well during the post-grad years. Loafers is a love letter to the beauty, indecision, and crippling, insecure confidence of growing up.
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