A Closer Look at “Glob Lessons”
While at the Cleveland International Film Festival (CIFF), I saw Glob Lessons and was taken aback by its honest, absurdist take on the road trip flick. The film’s two leads, Nicole Rodenburg and Colin Froeber, wore many hats while bringing this film to fruition. Rodenburg and Froeber are childhood friends who began writing the first draft of what would become Glob Lessons back in 2013. It was a long road of revisions, a Kickstarter campaign, and many trips back to their home state of North Dakota before the film finally hit the festival circuit.
Alan (Froeber) and Jesse (Rodenburg) are two employees of a children’s theatre troupe. They travel around the North Dakota area performing classics like A Christmas Carol and Robin Hood in elementary schools and libraries. At first, Alan and Jesse don’t interact when they’re not performing. Alan takes his job extremely seriously because he dreams of becoming an actor. He grows frustrated that Jesse doesn’t perform the scripts as written and thinks she doesn’t respect the job. It’s a seemingly fair assumption at first, but it’s her fun and freewheeling qualities that eventually help to break down Alan’s walls.
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I was able to speak with Rodenburg and Froeber at the festival, and the first topic that came up was the communal aspect of filmmaking. After a two-year hiatus caused by the pandemic, film festivals have only recently begun to return to in-person sessions. The online versions allow for increased accessibility and visibility for those who aren’t able to travel to festival locations, but they lack the excitement of seeing a movie with a crowd of people. That shared experience offers a palpable, essential energy to filmmaking. CIFF was not Rodenburg and Froeber’s first experience seeing their film with a crowd. They’ve been separately making their way through the festival circuit, including Annapolis and Tampa, and they were able to watch it with friends and family in North Dakota.
As Glob Lessons developed over the years, there was never a question that North Dakota would provide the setting. It had to be North Dakota. That was where they grew up, and it wasn’t until Rodenburg and Froeber left that they realized how profoundly the white-out blizzards, the Americana roadside attractions, and the wide open skies had affected them.
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Fargo is perhaps the most famous film that takes place in North Dakota, but it wasn’t primarily shot there. Most of Fargo was filmed in Minnesota, with the crew only shooting in North Dakota when they needed snow. Rodenburg and Froeber had an intense desire to have their home and the landscape they knew so well celebrated on screen. Glob Lessons has a distinct sense of self that might not exist without the sprawling, gorgeous North Dakota landscapes.
Glob Lessons is quirky, odd, and extremely heartfelt. Scenes contain multitudes of emotions in the same way life does. A moment can start as humorous, but then twist itself to become achingly vulnerable and emotional. When discussing the balance between emotional and humorous, Rodenburg said it was an easy line to walk because life inherently exists in both of those worlds simultaneously. “Our sense of humor is so much tied to our own humanity,” Rodenburg said. “We have to talk about absurdism.”
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As I was watching Glob Lessons, Everything Everywhere All At Once came to mind. Glob Lessons is much more grounded in reality than Everything Everywhere All At Once, but they both share a reverence for absurdity. The films recognize that life is bizarre and ridiculous, but it is essential.
Rodenburg says she listened to music that had “a lot of heart and autobiographical honesty” while writing the film. It’s easy to see that influence in the final work. Jesse and Alan are not carbon copies of Rodenburg and Froeber, but they were written earnestly, with the desire to portray a distinct feeling of isolation and vulnerability. Glob Lessons is a warm-hearted, quirky look at life in its totality.
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