People have asked me why I love films that take place entirely, or predominately, in a sole location, like Open Water, Adam Green's Frozen, and Buried.
#Stuck hits its stride when we indulge on the lyrical poetry of Guy and Holly, arguing or giggling over their wayward ramblings as they sit helplessly in the midst of a never ending traffic jam. While we get intriguing backstory to how these two met and came to agree to share in the desire of basic human gratification for one night, this distracts from the intimate conversation occurring in the car. Writer/director Stuart Acher ping-pongs back and forth frequently to show the one night stand between Guy and Holly in reverse, showing events play backwards in sequence from time-to-time. Guy responds by calling her amoral and, alas, we have the makings of a conversational film. The two do nothing but make passive-aggressive conversation with each other, with Holly pervasively texting a friend unknown to Guy, and saying how she hopes somebody is dead at the beginning of the traffic jam to justify the mass amount of congestion. With that, we have a film about two people whose interactions were about to conclude with sex and an overnight snuggle, forcibly being stuck together in a small space for an undisclosed amount of time. What the start of that jam looks like is only known by a select few.
The main arteries of Los Angeles are clogged with vehicles large and small, on a Sunday afternoon, and nobody is moving. Guy and Holly wind up getting stuck in a traffic jam so large that adjectives fail to describe its immensity. "Why couldn't you have left early like any decent one night stand," Guy tells her when they are driving home. Holly wakes up to realize she left her car at the bar the two were at the night before and must endure an awkward ride home with Guy, who she was planning to simply abandon while he was still sleeping. It concerns the likes of Guy and Holly (Joel David Moore and Madeline Zima, the only two real characters of the whole film), whom we first see sleeping next to one another following a one night stand.
I feel like I'm beginning early research on the opening to a paper for my college class entitled "Existentialism" with that kind of introduction, but my mind wandered quite frequently in such a way while watching #Stuck (which, I presume, should be read as "hashtag stuck"), a film that has a narrative that meanders and drifts in a similar way. One immediately wonders upon arriving to a halt in their vehicle behind numerous other cars (a) what is holding everybody up and (b) will they ever be able to exit this long road and arrive at their destination? Traffic jams are also inherently anomalous in the regard that while one complains about being stuck in traffic, they are also part of the very issue preventing the person behind them from advancing another car length, effectively shortening the population of the road by one. The characters in #Stuck are caught in a record-breaking traffic jam a traffic jam big enough to bring Michael Douglas's D-Fens past his breaking point and into immediate suicidal tendencies and stagnant enough to make the bourgeois French in Jean-Luc Godard's "Week End" mow right through the long array of cars before them.
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