Offbeat, dark and at times downright hysterical, Macon Blair’s I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore charts one neurotic woman’s quest to recover justice in an evermore unjust world. The inescapable buzz of grim news blaring through car radios, the bleak reports of protests and mass shootings, the million and one ways men can be thoughtless and utterly inconsiderate of each other: all provide the dreary backdrop to Ruth Kimke’s rather sad life. In the opening scene alone, our central character witnesses an elderly woman die after making a series of despicably vulgar, racist comments, a colossal pickup truck unapologetically guzzle gas and belch a stream of exhaust, and countless other ordinary people be heedless and rude. The cheerful strumming of Jason Newman’s ukuleles renders the scene all the more pitiful. When Ruth arrives home only to find that she’s been robbed, she loses what little faith in humanity she has left and sets out to find the perpetrators on her own.
Our misanthropic protagonist becomes more ruthlessly cynical as she notices the deterioration of graciousness and good manners all around her. So disgusted is she with humanity that she starts sobbing while reading a bedtime story to a five year old. “But everyone’s an asshole!” a hysterical, disillusioned Ruth counters when a friend tries to comfort her with platitudes.
Self-described as a constant portrayer of morose and dispirited types, Melanie Lynskey captures Ruth’s bitter outrage with moving effect. As LA Times film critic Justin Chang has said, Lynskey gives “endearing form to a woman for whom life has become an endless series of dissatisfactions.” But what makes her character relatable and likeable-I think-is her yearning to preserve rectitude in a broken world. In our harrowing era of division and bigotry, many of us can identify with Ruth, a weary woman who wonders what happened to basic courtesy among fellows.
Ruth, however, isn’t an entirely sympathetic character. Is her commitment to goodness noble? Of course. But watching the film, I couldn’t help but find her rants about the decline of human decency unproductively pessimistic. Yes, people are assholes: what’s sitting and complaining for 45 minutes going to do about it? When Ruth embarks on a mission to locate the people who robbed her, I understand her motives: she’s an upstanding citizen who’s tired of contemptible people doing wrong and getting away with it. But the pragmatist in me couldn’t help but wonder: if you find the perpetrators, what are you going to accomplish? You’ll get your grandma’s irreplaceable silver back? You’ll have the satisfaction of reestablishing some kind of moral order where lowlifes are brought to justice? Not to mention her exasperation with the detectives on her case seemed whiny and self-centered. Poor Ruth…the police aren’t paying full attention to your petty robbery case? Did you ever think they have more pressing things to get to like rapists and serial killers?
By the end of the film, the cost of Ruth doing the “right” thing is high. In her pursuit of justice, she becomes quite an asshole herself, smacking an old, innocent pawnshop owner in the face and stealing a wealthy couple’s sculpture from their front lawn, even though they didn’t loot her home, it was their estranged drug addict son. By the time I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore lurches into bloody mayhem, we’ve seen the appalling, atrocious things of which men are capable. In the end, Ruth is right: people are assholes. But the film’s terrifying descent seems to warn against channeling our rage like Ruth.