Tape (2001)

Three old high school friends meet in a Michigan motel room to dissect painful memories from their past.

Director:

Richard Linklater

Writers:

Stephen Belber (screenplay), Stephen Belber (play)

Stars:

Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard, Uma Thurman

1 win & 1 nomination.

Cast

Complete credited cast:
Ethan Hawke	...	Vin
Robert Sean Leonard	...	Jon
Uma Thurman	...	Amy

Storyline

Twenty-eight year olds Jon and Vince, friends from high school, meet in Vince's seedy motel room in Lansing, Michigan. Jon had invited Vince to town from his current residence of Oakland to help celebrate the fact of his latest movie, independently shot, having a screening at the local film festival the following day, the first public screening of one of his movies. While Jon seems to have grown up in having this career path and a nice room in an upscale hotel provided by the festival, Vince, who, in preparing for the evening has already had a few beer by the time Jon arrives, hasn't, he who deals drugs for a living with no change on the horizon, and his girlfriend, who was supposed to accompany him to Lansing, having broken up with him, indirectly because of his immaturity. This divergence quickly becomes an issue of contention between the two. But as Vince's behavior is seemingly more and more substance affected, he having broken out the weed and coke, his intention with Jon may be ...

---

Plot Keywords:

single set production | single location | high school | motel | filmmaker | 

---

Taglines:

Some things can't be erased

---

Genres:

Drama

---

Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated R for language and drug content

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

12 July 2002 (Denmark)

Also Known As:

Amargo Reencontro

Filming Locations:

New York City, New York, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$100,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend USA:

$28,424, 4 November 2001, Limited Release

Gross USA:

$490,475, 16 December 2001

Company Credits

Production Co:

Detour Filmproduction, IFC Productions, InDigEnt (Independent Digital Entertainment)

Technical Specs

Runtime:

86 min

Sound Mix:

Dolby SR

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

Ethan Hawke is connected to all the actors and the director. Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard were co-stars in Dead Poets Society (1989), Hawke and Uma Thurman were previously in Gattaca (1997) and they were married at the time, on top of all that, Hawke later worked with director Richard Linklater on his 12 year project, Boyhood (2014) and worked with him on the "Before" Trilogy

---

Goofs

Vince closes and hides the blue box containing all his cocaine paraphernalia when Amy knocks on the door. However when she then calls the police, in his mad rush to exit, he once again closes and puts the blue box in his bag.

---

Quotes

Vin: She thinks I have violet tendencies.
Jon: Oh, boy.
Vin: Jon, I never touched her.
Jon: I never said you did.
Vin: well, she thinks I have, uh, "unresolved issues, which occasionally manifest themselves in potentially violet ways."
Jon: [... ] Women these days have no reason to hang around potentially violet guys. It's not an attractive quality anymore. Too many guys out there with "resolved" violet tendencies.
Vin: Oh, so I'm out of fashion?

---

Crazy Credits

The end credits move across the screen in the motions of tape inside a playing cassette.

---

Connections

Featured in WatchMojo: Top 10 Overlooked Gems from Well-Know Directors (2015)

---

Soundtracks

I'm Sorry
Performed by Brenda Lee
Written by Ronnie Self and Dub Allbritten
Published by Universal Champion Music
Courtesy of MCA Records
Under license from Universal Music Enterprises
[Played during end credits]

User Reviews

Linlater's ramble gathers force and wins you over.

The concept, cinematically, of TAPE is the conceit that you are going to keep three actors in a room talking for an hour and a half and that we are going to stay interested. At the top we have a giddy and uncomfortable Ethan Hawke who is awaiting the arrival of his friend Robert Sean Leonard. The interaction between these two seems forced at the beginning...almost as if the two actors know they are stuck in a room for awhile and they better make it interesting. But soon enough, one comes to realize that the uncomfortability is due more to the estranged and uneveness of the two's relationship more than anything else.

TAPE unfurls in an imrov-like environment (I was actually surprised this was a play in that I did think the actors imrovising)where theres overlapping, interruptions, belches and tangents...it leads you to believe you are on a banal ride of actor's without direction and slowly steers you towards and unexpected conclusion. Luckily, true to Linklater, this conclusion isn't of the gunshot variety( always the easy out when faced with the harder possibility of character epiphany of any sort)but rather of the more painful type of self-reflection and realization.

Hawke bumbles, preens and flounders all over the screen as Leonard expertly evades scrutiny...but the real revelation here is Thurman. For the first time since Beautiful Girls she is just -playing-a person. Doing so, she shines right through in her most powerful role to date. She arrives completely in her own skin and then, without much of any prestidigitation, uses that same humble demeanor to lance through the boys complete murk and bulls**t. For that reason alone this film merits viewing.

It's other virtue is in it's rambling force in which it arrives at an honest dissection of our own hipocrisy.