"Linoleum."

How a 2022 indie movie helps bring some clarity to the question of whether everything needs to make sense when we watch.

Over the weekend I was batting around an idea that started with the end of the first season of “The Bear” and then returned, with some urgency, as I watched the last few remaining episodes of my much-delayed foray into “Severance.”

The question was this:

How important is it that things make sense when we’re watching? My default (and, admittedly knee-jerk) reaction has always been consistently this: A fucking lot.

I swear because it’s a very touchy subject, to me, as a TV critic. I’m willing to give films — ambitiously great ones, experimental ones, those telling a story mostly with emotion (and all of its complicated gray areas) as opposed to logic — more leeway.

With TV, I’m a little more stern because when things don’t make sense it’s almost always because there was no sense to make and it wasn’t a grand experiment gone astray — it was a poorly written television series, of which there are countless examples. And, most egregiously, a television series has multiple hours of plotting to have it all make sense. (Don’t let anyone tell you that more hours are just more potential plot problems — the fail came early, as it always does).

A movie is, to me, like a short story or a poem or a snapshot in time — a blurry Polaroid where you get a feeling for what the image captures even when it lacks, say, a digital cameras sharp clarity. In 90+ minutes, a story is isn't expected to be neatly concise and the points perfect.

On the other hand, if you can’t achieve that intentionality in, let’s say nine hours of television, well, you’ve done it wrong.

I don’t want to deep-dive on the issues I might have had (and then mostly let go of) in “The Bear” or “Severance” — that’s not the point right now. I’ll write that post in the near future. What’s relevant was having those series on my mind and then rolling unexpectedly into a Sunday viewing of the 2022 indie movie “Linoleum” streaming on Hulu.

My partner had it on her Letterboxd must-watch list and so we did just that on a lazy Sunday morning and the result, once the film was over, perhaps makes a compelling case for being just a slightly bit more loose — in the right situation, which is the big trick of course — on the idea of, well, ideas needing to make sense.

Gaffigan, Seehorn, in the quirky and touching “Linoleum.”

“Linoleum” is a lovely little film that was written and directed by Colin West, starring Jim Gaffigan, one of our current Everyman for the Ages, and Rhea Seehorn, whose work in “Better Call Saul” solidified her as one of the most underrated actresses of recent times. Both are excellent character actors and “Linoleum” relies on character to achieve what’s a fairly ambitious goal that, keeping true to the point of this whole thing, doesn’t really nail it all down but creates something viscerally charming and affirming, collecting delightful surprises that maybe don’t add up to the intended ambitions, but is perhaps better off revealing more heart than head.

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