How do you review a movie that’s as well-intentioned as Keep the Change?
I suppose you start with a synopsis: David (Brandon Polansky), looking around 30 years old, has been sent to 6 mandatory weeks of group therapy following a nondescript incident with a police officer – something involving a joke about “pigs” gone wrong. We meet him as he sits in the back of a dark, sleek car, wearing dark, not-so-sleek sunglasses and telling a different joke, this time to his chauffer. After the punchline falls flat, he realizes he doesn’t know where it is he’s being taken. “Your mother wanted me to make sure you got to your meeting,” his driver tells him. David looks at him, incredulous, then mumbles to himself as he opens the car door: “Traitor.”
The “meeting” turns out to be for adults with varying degrees of autism, which immediately helps explain some of David’s quirks. Surrounded by people who are less high-functioning than himself, he treats his sentencing with animosity, only speaking during a partnered conversational exercise to make a dark joke about jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. That joke earns him yet another punishment: travel to the bridge with his classmate, Sarah (Samantha Elisofon), and write a report about their time there. Unable to wiggle out of the trip with bribery, David takes Sarah on the trip: and so begins our romantic comedy.
Every major character in Keep the Change is, to varying degrees, autistic, as are the actors. The world they inhabit is alien to most of us and yet still familiar – it’s our world, after all, just expressed differently. It is, inevitably for us, an acutely uncomfortable world to be in. Mental disability remains an infrequent zone of exploration for film, and I suspect much of that rarity is due to the profound unease that comes from not knowing how to properly react: am I allowed to laugh at this scene? At this one? Both mainstream and independent cinema have a very hard time selling genuine discomfort, for obvious reasons. But there’s a convincing argument, one that has been made by many, that unfamiliarity is the most fertile ground for understanding: often, we feel uneasy because we are on a precipice of some kind. And where Keep the Change succeeds in placing us on that edge, in several ways, it also succeeds in being laugh-out-loud funny.
The film is about autism, about the idea of normalcy and its subjectivity; in that vein, it’s also rather aggressively about class. The movie’s title comes from David’s oft-repeated line as he pays for everything in his life with a $20 bill – a taxi, a rose, a carnival ride. He lives on Long Island, in his parents’ grand white house. They amble about the lawn in pastel sweaters. His cousin, who he considers his brother, is a famous Broadway actor. David has ridden a bus once in his life, and it was horrible; when a homeless man climbed into the seat next to him, he was afflicted with a powerful sense of, as he calls it, “hobophobia.” We suspect his parents have never spoken openly with him about his autism, even as an adult. To escape out of their life and attempt to find his own, he sits in his room browsing dating websites, morphing his cornucopia of jokes into pick-up lines.
Sarah takes the bus every day; it is literally the only way she knows to get home. Home is her grandmother – an alcoholic, by Sarah’s unashamed admission – and her bedroom, where she’s become far more acquainted with sex than David ever has, despite his repeated attempts at online connection. She, like most everyone at the meetings, is there of her own volition. As David insists that he – and by extension her – is above everyone else in the group, everyone less “normal” than he is, she makes it clear that the gatherings are her community, that the attendees are her friends. David has no real friends. The anger he lays at his peers, his rant at the “bum” on the street who asks him for change, his thinly veiled homophobia: these betray his hatred for a part of himself, the part which doesn’t allow him to have a “normal” life, that piece he’s never had an honest conversation about.
Of course, David’s ability to remain ignorant of his struggle and the struggles of those around him depends on his vast wealth. Along with his penchant for spending money indiscriminately, the collection of jokes he relies on to navigate social situations includes tired riffs on race, gender, poverty, homosexuality, and Judaism (David and Sarah are both Jewish). A terribly painful scene takes place on a first date, when David tells Angie, a girl he met online, an unfunny joke about rape. She immediately gets up and leaves, while he is left confused and alone with his ice cream.
Money, for David, is segregating. It is a convenience that keeps him from having to recognize anything unpleasant about the world – like that rape, to some, is not a punchline, and neither is the Holocaust – or about himself. David’s story turns out to be one of privilege as insulator, a force of seclusion that does not change unless you will yourself – or are forced – out of it. The best scene in the movie is when we realize why David is always paying $20 for everything: he doesn’t know how to count change.
All that said, Keep the Change is a first film, and a humble one. The message is not a subtle one, though it is carefully drawn; the pacing drifts between a few too many emotional climaxes; there’s a safety present in the visual choices that is disappointing for such a bold premise; and there isn’t much attention at all given to lighting, which casts the whole thing as stark and naturalistic, more aesthetically cold to its cast than need be. But that cast does a truly remarkable thing just by being seen, and the film never feels unsensitive; quite the opposite. Some of the tonal shifts are palpably discomfiting, but that’s by design. We can’t all stay insulated forever.
The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.
