After listening to that tape, the somewhat-tense dynamic between Jim and Amanda softens. They decide to play-act again, pretending to be a married couple celebrating over dinner. They dance to Annie Lennox. They talk about their lives and their issues. In a sense, they are still those sweetly romantic kids, but jobs and families and other trappings of adulthood just got in the way. They act goofy, almost too much so, but the actors make it feel believable that they’re really acting like teenagers again.

There’s so much fine detail in the acting work, especially by Paulson, who was so drastically different in her Emmy-winning role on “The People v. OJ Simpson” that everyone who saw that should watch this just to see her remarkable range. Her take on Amanda contains so many subtle layers. There’s a scene early in their time at Jim’s home in which she just laughs and moves her body ever so slightly into his, conveying a comfort through body language, an underutilized tool of the modern actor.



“Blue Jay” is a dialogue-driven piece, of course, but it works because of what’s unsaid verbally and what we get from a look by Duplass or a laugh from Paulson. They are both fantastic here, especially her. It’s one of my favorite actress performances of the year.

Of course, there’s a shadow that hangs over “Blue Jay” in that the question of why Jim and Amanda broke up in the first place isn’t answered until the climax, and that makes it a bit more of a “mystery” than I would have liked. I’m also not sure that, as good as he is the rest of the film, Duplass quite nails the big reveal, although Paulson makes up for it. More than judging it individually, I just wish that movies like this would either reveal the break-up cause early or not at all, making it more about where they are now than the mystery of how they got there.

Having said that, I’m a sucker for two-handers with performances this good. I always have been and I always will be. It’s probably my theatre background, or simply my adoration for Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy. It could also easily be because of how saturated we are with CGI blockbusters lately, and how much I appreciate it when a film goes back to character and gives us people who feel like we could know them. Or, at their best, like we could be them.