Critics reviews

Perry's radical technique here is to use comic exaggeration to plunge viewers into the headspace of the central duo over the first half of the film, then subtly encouraging a re-evaluation of them during the second.

Mostly everything about The Color Wheel's climactic post-grad party... nearly throws the film off its rails, but the subsequent 10-minute pillow chat between JR and Colin makes everything right again, in addition to radically deepening the film's emotional landscape. The Color Wheel is pretty much virtuosic in its wall-to-wall chatter; the words are progressively meaningless so as to avoid any possible dead air that might force inner confrontation.

...[It's] among the most significant American films of the last decade-plus and a key work of the modern independent cinema... When The Color Wheel suddenly pivots, in its final act, from a comic register to something more tragic, the effect is more pronounced than a simple tonal shift; instead it feels as though the parameters of the film have changed. An almost undetectable pressure, you realize, has been building through the picture.

Perry directs these uproarious rapid-fire flareups with exquisite comic timing and incisive comic framing (the black-and-white cinematography is by Sean Price Williams); he and Altman go at each other with claws bared, revealing the terrifying vulnerability of a pair of wounded souls who know each other's wounds all too well.

In its ultimate affection for its oddball, damaged, aspirational characters, The Color Wheel isn't so much the reactive, oppositional fable its creators might imagine. And in its incestuous finale, Perry has merely checked off yet another hallmark of the contemporary American indie film: after time spent meandering, finally introduce a potentially interesting and perhaps irreconcilable complication, and then slink quickly into the credits.

“The Color Wheel” remains, in my estimation, a singularly unpleasant movie: full of obnoxious characters in scenes that seem overwritten and under-rehearsed, oblivious to the most basic standards of tonal consistency, narrative coherence or visual decorum. But it is also sly, daring, genuinely original and at times perversely brilliant.

The Color Wheel is a sticky handcrafted movie, built around characters afflicted with something like “postgraduate delirium,” to use a phrase from Tiny Furniture.

The characters barely develop (they finally admit to not being disgusted by one another's company after being humiliated in front of old classmates), but the film's tone is the dynamic party here, warping under the steam of Colin and JR's unnecessary suffering. This contrapuntalism is Perry's way of rhyming form with contemporary human drama.

More than a little bit paradoxically, The Color Wheel smothers you with its characters’ prickly dispositions while simultaneously giving you plenty of mental room to consider the implications of the psychosocial chaos unfolding within its rich mise en scène.

The Color Wheel is all about what is repressed and unspoken. As the film finds a breezy groove all its own, something shocking happens; Colin and JR begin to enjoy each other's company, and so do we. It's a small miracle you don't end up hating these people considering the vapid first impression they make. They're far more nuanced than they originally suggest, thanks in large part to the illuminating performances by Perry and Altman.

Hard to swallow but impossible to ignore, this nihilistic comedy may emerge as a cult touchstone.

That it's often difficult to tell which of those three describes Perry's work here more accurately isn't a product of some duplicity on his part; rather, it hints at its complexity and uncategorizable originality. Schooled in film history but not beholden to it, treating style as expression rather than a given, taking its ambitions seriously, willing to explore unexplored or marginalized territory: the cinema of the future, I hope.