Movies You Might Have Missed: Neil Drumming's Big Words

Neil Drumming is one of the most consistently brilliant segment contributors on the outstanding This American Life podcast. His autobiographical stories, more often than not about family and friendship, tend to offer the perfect blend of humour and poignancy. In 2013, Drumming wrote and directed his first feature film, Big Words, a fictional work with all the qualities one would associate with his journalism.

Big Words, available on Netflix, takes place on the night of Barack Obama’s election as the first black President of the United States in November 2008. It concerns three estranged friends, once the members of a promising hip-hop group. Now, 15 years later, they are approaching middle age with a sense that life has been unkind.

There are shades of the work of Noah Baumbach here as Drumming seems to love his characters because of rather than in spite of their flaws. For the viewer in 2017, Obama’s election lends the film the air of a period piece with the protagonists’ personal disappointments juxtaposed with the historic global event bubbling away in the background. More significantly, the concept of change is something at the heart of both Obama’s election and the lives of these men.

There is an honesty to Drumming’s work that is difficult not to admire. The filmmaker has spoken on This American Life about the nature of his relationship with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. The pair became friends in Washington in the late 1990s and, while both have gone on to have excellent careers, it is Coates who has been feted by Obama and labelled his generation’s James Baldwin by no less an authority than Toni Morrison. Drumming has been open about the mixed feelings he has about the success of his friend and this sense that things haven’t quite gone to plan, reminiscent of Baumbach’s Greenberg, hangs over Big Words from first frame to last.

These characters are not stereotypes but rather nuanced human beings. The dialogue is sharp and knowing while the camerawork is simple and unobtrusive. Drumming seems aware that his great strength is characterisation and is sensible enough to simply let the actors do their thing without resorting to gimmicks. Big Words is a film about regret that takes place on a day associated primarily with hope. These men are so self-absorbed that they’re more concerned with their own petty grievances than the weight of history and that seems, like the picture as a whole, fundamentally human: tragic, hilarious and true.