'Matt and Mara' is a witty film about friendship and time

Canadian comedy-drama packs a lot of insight into 80 minutes.

The main character of “Matt and Mara” isn’t Mara (Deragh Campbell), a Canadian creative writing professor raising her young daughter with her husband, an experimental musician (Mounir Al Shami). And it’s not Matt (Matt Johnson), a “lad lit” novelist of some success now living in New York.

It’s, as the title of Kazik Radwanski’s comedy-drama suggests, “Matt and Mara.” That is, the film is really about the invisible, undefinable bond between the two main characters, friends since college who have unexpectedly reunited in their 20s. The perceptive, chatty film looks at how that friendship has affected each of them, and how they seem to carry very different ideas about what that bond actually is. 

Mara doesn’t seem unhappy with her settled adult life, but she moves through it in a low gear, reacting rather than acting. At a dinner party, she tells friends that music really has stopped affecting her, emotionally and intellectually. She says it offhandedly, like explaining that she doesn’t like cilantro. But that can’t be a great sign for someone who is married to a musician?

When Matt literally pops back into her life on a visit to Toronto, his presence reawakens the younger, more engaged person she once was. Charismatic and chatty, with the tousled hair of a man five years younger, Matt seems preserved in amber from his college days. Matt and Mara are delighted to be back together again, having long, playful conversations, and playing little games like telling strangers they’re a married couple.

Of course, what the viewer can see, but Matt and Mara seem oblivious to (or unable to acknowledge), is that they’re not just playing little games, and there’s an attraction rekindling between them. “Matt and Mara” reminded me a lot of the earlier films of Noah Baumbach like “Kicking and Screaming,” full of very smart, articulate characters who are nonetheless clueless about how to deal with other people and themselves.

The dialogue feels loose and improvised, and it’s a pleasure to hang out with these characters.  Radwanski’s often shoots his actors in tight close-ups, so we can see on their faces what they’re not saying to each other. Gradually we get more of a sense of the contours of their friendship. Mara may feel excited and reawakened around Matt, but she’s also often the one who takes care of Matt, cleans up after his messes, waits around when he forgets an appointment. 

And we start to see Matt as less of a “cool guy” and more of an arrested adolescent whose free-spirited ways may not age well in either his personal or literary life. (My favorite line is when a colleague of Mara says of Matt’s writing, “This book is emblematic of a time in Canadian literature that gives me a rash.”)

I’m a little surprised to see “Matt and Mara” presented as a straight drama, because while it’s very perceptive and unsparing about these characters, I also thought it was laugh-out-loud funny. I responded to every wry line or odd detail, such as the faculty party where Mara’s dean spends the entire time in the hot tub.

The film is only 80 minutes long, which feels like too short a time to spend with such entertaining and interesting people. And yet, by the end, we feel like we’ve gotten complete, nuanced character portraits of both of them.

“Matt and Mara” played at the 2024 Toronto Film Festival and will have its Madison premiere at 7 p.m. Thursday at the UW Cinematheque, 4070 Vilas Hall.