Will you still be there?

Casey Affleck pooped on the dreams of those who willed themselves to believe that I'm Still Here, the documentary in which Joaquin Phoenix goes batshit insane and tries to be a rapper, was real. It's not. It never was. No f**king shit. If you believed that handlers for an actor, family members and loved ones, and even studio executives would allow a human being to go repeatedly to featured places in public like "The Letterman Show," and do the things that he was doing, you're soft brained.
Of course this wasn't real. Of course it didn't "just so happen" that Casey Affleck, a close friend of Phoenix, just happened to be documenting his life when he had a breakdown. Although people are blasting Affleck for (A) trying to pass of the hoax and (B) pulling it in the first place, they are most pissed at (C) his confession that he didn't think anybody was actually thinking this was real. You know what? I believe him. I'm not mad at that comment. How COULD you fall for this? Maybe in an age before Borat? Before Andy Kaufman? Before mockumentaries and rational thought? Smart people I really respect WILLED themselves to consider this possible, that someone would have this access, this permission to document another human being going insane. That's the crazy part.

Actually, here's the real crazy part: I want to see this more now. Why? Because I think that this is the type of boundary-breaking performance, the type of playing-with-media-who-plays-with-you originality that should be rewarded. How committed do you have to be? How willing do you have to be to look like an ass not on a closed set but on network television? It's remarkable. Phoenix's performance already deserves Oscar buzz because we've been watching it for a year. It's incredible.

Will this admission of what we should have already been smart enough to figure out kill the film? Yeah, maybe. It wasn't going to be a hit anyway. Will it enable the Academy to CLEARLY consider this a PERFORMANCE and thus reward it as such? Yes. Maybe that's why he did it. Maybe Affleck realized that people would not realize that this was Phoenix's dedicated masterwork and thus he'd miss out on that acclaim. Who knows? All I know is, I'm seeing it.

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