In the dog days of the Jersey summer of 2005, director Mike Ramsdell and producer Justin Barrett kept their word to one another. Dead set on making a feature film, the longtime friends defied limited resources, a small budget and two pregnant wives to shoot Montclair, an utterly sincere glimpse of the life of one town, focused by a pastiche of the individual lives held dear within it. Almost as if it were a series of short stories, the film rambles with its diverse cast of characters from couple Jay and Amy who argue about having another child to outspoken, rebel rouser Vaclav who chooses not to confront his own personal setbacks to lonely loner comedian Bruce to unassuming and uncertain Suzanne whose pregnancy seems progressively less a boon than a burden. From story to story, the film tackles with equal attentiveness the issues of marital strife, loss and depression.

It’s a film so subtle, however, that it barely rides the waves of conflict, and it touches upon, although refusing to wallow in, its drama. In this, it is perhaps an accurate picture of how life truly is, everyday existence just a blur of small moments all tied together later for a greater meaning. The film’s message is not specifically hopeful, but it is one that speaks to graceful acceptance of life as it is at one moment.

“When Justin and I originally conceived the movie, it had a more pessimistic tone to it. It had a darker comedy. We were kind of poking fun of the suburbs, and the whole movie was supposed to end with this moment where Jay and Amy roll apart from each other in bed and turn off the light, showing that this is where relationships really start to fall apart,” Ramsdell says. “In this process, in writing the movie and with everything going on in the world today, I said, “You know what? If I’m going to ask people to sit down in a theater for 90 minutes and pay attention to what we’re talking about, there’s no way that I’m going to send them away with some pessimistic message.”

“Underneath it all, there’s something that connects each and every one of us,” he continues. “If you want to take it to the highest possible level, we are all one, and there is no separation between us. That’s not some 60s love-hippie thing, it’s just a metaphysical reality, that this is all just one manifestation, and we just happen to be in different parts of it. Because we’re in these physical two leg, two arm things, we look different, but it’s really no different. If you believe that, and if you believe that at the center the only truth is that it’s all, then you have to start asking, “Well then, why do people see each other as separate?”

A question that in part goes to the heart of Montclair, the story looks not only at the relationships between people—husband to wife and neighbor to neighbor—but also at the relationship of man to himself: how he deceives himself, manipulates himself and hides from himself. Yet Montclair doesn’t set a measurement of morality. It remains at all times on the side of observation, an aesthetic helped on by its dual use of traditional narrative shots with documentary footage out and about in the Jersey town.

“The thing about Montclair that I’m most proud of is that I wrote a movie without an antagonist. There’s no bad guy in the movie, but there’s still inherent conflict. I think that is the interesting thing in life, and I think that’s an interesting thing in cinema. You don’t have to have somebody be right and somebody be wrong,” Ramsdell says. “If you believe that at the end of the day there’s really no difference between anybody, then why are these choices made? What makes one person choose this, another person choose this? It all becomes a fascinating observation of what’s going on, and if you can maintain that level of curiosity about things, then film does serve itself as an exploration of the collective unconscious, of the collective mindset.”

The film’s tagline, “The best thing is the people,” is perfectly appropriate not only to define the film and the way its characters are treated but also to describe the crew itself, a group of primarily first time feature filmmakers. 

Pulling double duty as both an actress and Unit Production Manager, Jenni Tooley sat on the street curb, dragging from location to location a box that served as a desk. Producer and lead actor Barrett ran between set and voice-over sessions with friend and co-star Jeremy Schwartz in order to earn income during his unpaid stint on the 19-day shoot. And, perhaps most remarkable, both Ramsdell and Barrett’s wives let the pair start production just two weeks after Ramsdell welcomed his first child, daughter Lincoln, into his life and just a month or so before Barrett would meet his second son Gavin.

“It was a bumpy road,” Barrett says about dealing dually with pre-production for the film and the pregnancy. “What you have is two strong people that essentially are going in two different directions at the same time, and whenever that starts to happen, obviously there’s going to be conflict. As (my wife, Jen) became aware that I was doing everything that I could to make her pregnancy as smooth as possible but at the same time still make this production happen…she saw that there was a level of dedication and passion about what I was doing but that I hadn’t lost my ability to love my family.”

“She ended up barefoot, pregnant and cooking craft services for three weeks in one of the hottest summers on record,” he says. “For that, I am eternally grateful.” 

Pulling much of the script’s story from experience in his daily life, particularly with regards to his marriage, Ramsdell worked closely with the actors in pre-production to hit on universal nuances and themes for Jay and Amy’s story.

“Some of things I was dealing with at home, Mike was dealing with as well and (lead actress Alecia Hurst) was dealing with from a female perspective,” Barrett says. “It was a little bit like there were three marriages that were all combining to give input into this one fictional marriage. At the end of the day, I really like to think that what we had was an amalgamation of these three different experiences, and what I’m hoping is that that gave us a bit of a generational feel.”

“These are things that members of our generation are actually going through right now, and by calling from all three of our marriages, it doesn’t feel autobiographical for any one of us…but at the same time, it was very specific to all of our lives.”

The idea of pregnancy also infused itself into the script in the form of hesitant mother-to-be Suzanne, a character whose individual journey is arguably the most controversial of the film. In crafting the character, veteran actress and practicing prenatal yoga instructor Tooley pulled on personal fears and habits as well as direct observation of the women she works with: “I actually supported my cousin during her labor and delivery, and at one point—she was trying to do it naturally--the pain became incredibly intense, and she said, “Okay, it’s time. I need some pain relief here.” Her eyes just kind of shot out when she found out that it was too late, that they couldn’t give her an epidural. We had to go ahead and keep going.”

“She told me later that at that moment all she wanted to do was to run out of the room, just run away from it, but she knew that it was just going to follow her because the baby was inside of her. I think that that’s really a lot about Suzanne. There’s this thing that’s growing in her, and it embodies all these emotions, things that she hadn’t had to deal with because they weren’t physically manifested.”

The strength of Tooley’s performance belies the challenge of pulling double duty on set. With UPM tasks always at the ready, Tooley says that she insulated herself as much as possible when she was getting into character. “I wore this pen around my neck,…and Justin and I agreed that the days that I shot, I was not going to be doing UPM duties, that I’d get to the set and be able to have my focus time.”

“But, I’d get to the set, and people would instantly start asking me questions. My response would always be, “Is my pen around my neck? Do I have my pen on? No? No. So you cannot ask me a question,” she says.

Likewise, Barrett’s double duty made for a story, but it was his relationship with the character Jay that was more compelling. “For me, I felt (Jay) was distinctly different from myself so much so that there were shirts that I had given over to the production at the beginning of production that I didn’t want to wear afterwards. I still have three or four shirts downstairs in my closet, and I’ll never wear them again,” Barrett says. “They don’t feel like my shirts anymore. They feel like another guy’s shirts, and yet at the same time, there was so much autobiographical work done (with Jay), it’s hard to say what that division was. Somehow, there was a discreet difference achieved. There was a coherent, ‘This is you, and this is Jay.’”

With its multiple narrative yarns, Montclair so much as it began to come together in production did not crystallize until post-production. “Our concern at a certain point was that we had made six or seven different movies. We were like, “At the end of the day, this has all got to fit together somehow, whether it’s funny or not, emotionally draining or not. It’s all got to fit into a coherent town, a coherent universe and a coherent piece of art,” Barrett says.

Hours spent in the editing room, splicing the narrative footage and the documentary footage together, finally paid off in final cut, the likes of which has gone on to screen in both the Palm Beach International and Atlanta film festivals.

“What really did it for me was when we screened it up here in (New York City),” says Schwartz, who plays the outspoken Vaclav. “The theater was full. People were so receptive to it and enjoyed it, enjoyed it in a way that I could not possibly enjoy it because I’m so close to it, have seen so many incarnations of it from its rough stages. Seeing it with this audience really gave me the opportunity to sit down, watch it and enjoy it. I had just seen this exact same cut just a week earlier on my own television. So to then watch it in a movie theater was very, very exciting because people reacted to it. They laughed; they were touched by it; they were really moved by some of the performances. People got a lot out of it, and at first I went, “Really?” And, then I went, ‘Oh, thank God. I’m so glad that people like it because I don’t know what to think about it anymore.’”

Unlike so many films, however, which seek a defined conclusion, Montclair fades out without a pinpointed message, each individual story ending honestly, Schwartz says. “In that respect, it’s more like life in general than a story. It ends not poorly, not fantastically, but it just ends. The overall message is that you have plans and plans change. Sometimes they change for the better and sometimes they change for the worse, and you can either be a part of it and be active in your life and the changes that are occurring, or you can drop out and rail against it and be angry, bitter and all of that,” he says. “I think it’s about dealing with life as it comes to you, being the reed in the river as opposed to stiff against the wind.”