The story of two artists with nothing to do during the COVID lockdown.
I stopped being a gamer in high school, so I’m not too familiar with GTA’s gameplay, other than it’s an open world, you play the criminal, and hookers are like hearts in Zelda or pizza in a TMNT game. Don’t get mad at me; I’m just repeating what gamers have told me. I know it is sexist. It is not just sexist. It is violent and made with too much testosterone in mind. A video game made for adult men to fulfill their masculinity wet dreams. It’s low-brow entertainment.
So it comes as no surprise that they were self-aware and mentioned at some point in the movie, “In the Venn diagram between people who love both GTA and Shakespeare, the overlapping area is too small.” Inspired by two out-of-work actors with nothing to do during the COVID lockdown. Shot entirely on GTA footage, the documentary chronicles all the events surrounding the play. We witness the game, from Sam Crane and Pinny Grilli’s lightbulb moment to their celebration after the play was streamed.
To say the film is inspiring may be an understatement. We see the protagonists struggling with trolls killing their avatars, other gamers’ commitments, the game itself confronting them with police brutality, and the volatility of the outside world. But they kept going. It’s well documented on the Internet that they were successful in their artistic mission. But what is as impressive as pulling off the play is how they would shoot all the scenes from their character’s perspective. The footage of their avatars talking and confronting themselves through online conversation kept my attention. It is the actual game, not a movie about a video game like Wreck-It Ralph.
What makes GTA paradoxically beautiful.
Back to the GTA game itself, it is universal knowledge of all its brutality. If take a closer look, we see those glimpses of beauty. There are numerous influences from Michael Mann’s films. As well as clear inspirations from movies like The French Connection and Scarface. Like many of these films, the photography is beautiful when the characters are taking a break from crime. The city’s sunset is as gorgeous as in De Palma’s Scarface. Those sensitivities are carried on in the game.
We can call GTA “low-brow” as much as we want, but there is beauty in creating that work. And that’s the beauty, along with the chaos, that resonates with the documentary. Like the rest of the world, they were going through hardships. But in that horrid world, they made art. They took the nihilistic video game where everyone goes to kill and rob and created a collaborative Shakespearean play. Maybe we should learn from their experience and create something uplifting under our unfortunate circumstances.
