Executive produced by Jesse Eisenberg, Jeremy Workman's film celebrates the art of DIY without thoroughly researching it.
Some solutions to the housing crisis are more creative than others. For a group of artists in Providence, Rhode Island, that idea was put to the test when they infiltrated and inhabited a hidden corner of their local mall for four years: a symbol of gentrification that they repurposed into a decidedly anti-capitalist community space. The aptly titled "Secret Mall Apartment," directed by Jeremy Workman and executive produced by Jesse Eisenberg, is a thoughtful celebration of the DIY art behind that experiment, but only mediocre research.
Director: Jeremy Workman
Stars: Michael Townsend, Colin Bliss, Adriana Valdez-Young
Like many grand plans, this one was barely planned. After he and three friends decided to see who could live the longest inside Providence Place Mall, Michael Townsend, drawing on a fortuitous memory from the building's construction four years earlier, recalled a "lost space" where he and his companions could find refuge: a hidden "architectural anomaly" that had clearly been empty for the building's entire existence. What was enough for one night ended up being enough for several, and four years later they were still there, until they weren't.
That these events occurred in this particular mall was no coincidence. Providence Place Mall opened in 1999 as part of an effort to revitalize the city's economic activity, but many residents felt it wasn't for them; some even pointed to its exact location as a sort of dividing line between Providence's exclusive and undesirable neighborhoods. The space itself, a windowless annex with cinderblock walls, gives the impression of a low-budget sitcom set in its ramshackle building, cozy and cold at the same time.
Settling in Providence Place wasn't so much a matter of economic necessity as an exercise by self-described "micro-developers" taking advantage of an underutilized space. Townsend and his cronies wanted to see if they could pull it off, and for how long. They encouraged each other to take their experiment further, half seriously, half jokingly, until, little by little and then suddenly, they furnished the 70-square-meter space with a couch and slept there. And while filming activities that exist in a legal gray area isn't generally considered a good idea, "Secret Mall Apartment" wouldn't exist if Townsend hadn't carried a small, low-resolution camera with him virtually everywhere during this period. The grainy footage of the group squeezing between narrow walls and carefully hauling their secondhand sofa up a ladder gives the documentary a cozy, lo-fi atmosphere, in keeping with its original intent.
The film loses a fair amount of interest when it's not directly about the apartment. It seems to spend a questionable amount of time convincing the audience of Townsend's rectitude, with testimonies from loved ones and a segment on the murals he created for a children's hospital and a 9/11 memorial feeling particularly hagiographic. At times, it feels as if "Secret Mall Apartment" was expanded into a feature-length film from a more focused short, with much of its middle section added after the fact.
There may also be a sense of marginalization to the whole project: no one appears to have lived there full-time, and Townsend's then-wife complains in contemporary footage that she preferred them to work in her own house rather than on their passion project, turning the space more into a clubhouse than an apartment. It's not until the end that the filmmakers question the impulses behind all this rather than assuming their goodness.
They do this by reconstructing the apartment on a soundstage and having Townsend reenact the moment he was finally caught, a slightly surreal sequence that feels a lot like Nathan Fielder's "The Trial." Capturing something through a camera lens tends to make it feel simultaneously more and less real, which is entirely appropriate for a four-year period in which a once-liminal space became something of a home.
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