Andrew Bujalski’s Results fixes his unflinching gaze on the trainers and trainees of Power4Life, a gym in suburban Austin, TX. The gym as a sphere of human activity occupies more prominence in peoples’ lives than ever, but has remained more or less ignored cinematically, or reduced to a punchline in films like the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading. But Bujalski, one of our most adept observers of social minutia, mines this territory for an insightful and unpredictable character study while still making Results, with its professional cast and crowd-pleasing genre (it’s more or less a rom-com), his most accessible film yet.
Results centers on three characters: Kat (Cobie Smulders), a tightly-wound trainer who excels at her job, but struggles with things in life that are more difficult to understand and control than her body; Trevor (Guy Pearce), Power4Life's achingly sincere founder, who relentlessly spouts motivational slogans and even seems to believe them, while being an emotionally open softie in his personal life; and Danny (Kevin Corrigan), the film’s unstable element, a depressed man who came into a windfall of cash the day after his divorce finalized and now spends his days smoking weed and plunking away dissonantly on an electric guitar in his empty rental house.
Guileless Trevor loves prickly Kat, who just might love him back though they’ve pushed their feelings into the background due to working together and their conflicting personalities. Danny ostensibly wants to get in shape and Kat becomes his trainer. Danny charms Kat, but with his halfhearted approach to life and fitness, he’s also a threat to her perspective on life – “We may disagree on the definition of health,” he tells her after another meal of pizza and weed. Their relationship leads to a mutual make-out session one night, but Kat pulls back after her next visit to his house, when he’s hired a jazz band and professional chef. Trevor’s jealousy is aroused, leading to the film’s most delightful scene, where Trevor goes from unconvincingly threatening the passive Danny, to urging him not to give up on his fitness goals. That scene encapsulates Bujalski’s talents; a jealous ex threatening someone is a rather rote scene, but Bujalski extends the scene, allowing his characters’ contradictory impulses to take their course and bring the scene to an exciting, unpredictable new place. On a broader level, Pearce’s Trevor would simply be a comic figure in most films, and he starts that way in this film before Bujalski shows the audience that for all of his cheer and aphorisms, Trevor is a good and caring person, struggling to help those around him.
Unfortunately, the film doesn’t remain as unpredictable in its second half, when Danny is relegated to the background, but it’s entertaining throughout. A brief treat later in the film is Anthony Michael Hall playing a somewhat scary Russian fitness guru. Smulders gives her most interesting work to date, Corrigan as usual plays himself to perfection, and Pearce goes from the most overlooked character of the ensemble to the most compelling. Results is not a perfect film, but it’s a perfect antidote to mindless summer entertainment - a goodhearted, probing comedy that gives its characters room to breathe and room to surprise themselves and the audience.
