The new documentary "Rebel with a Clause" opens Thursday at Digital Gym Cinema. The film follows Ellen Jovin as she takes her pop-up grammar table on a road trip across 50 states, navigating dangling participles and split infinitives along the way.
Jovin has always loved language.
"I think it's a combination of nature and nurture," Jovin said. "But I've always just loved language. My earliest childhood memories are mostly of language incidents. I loved my eighth-grade diagramming-sentences class. I've always lived a very grammar-filled life. I've been a writer. I've taught. I've studied a lot of languages. I always had a ton of grammar things going on in my life."
Then, about seven years ago, she spent $40 on a folding table — and it changed her life.
"It just allowed me to move it to the street," Jovin said. "So all my activities, basically, whatever I was doing online or in my brain."
She took her table out onto a Manhattan sidewalk, and put up a homemade sign that said “Grammar Table.” Immediately, passersby stopped to ask questions about grammar and share stories. The Grammar Table was a hit, and Jovin started getting media attention for her pop-up interactions.
And then Brandt Johnson started loitering around her table.
"I would sit at a park bench nearby and just take in what was happening at the grammar table," Johnson said. "After a few weeks, I was convinced I really needed to start filming."
So Jovin and her filmmaker husband, Johnson, decided to take the table and a camera on the road to visit all 50 states. They encountered people from every imaginable background who wanted her to settle grammar disputes, answer questions and even share their grammar insecurities. The conversations took place in small towns, big cities and even on beaches and mountainsides — wherever the table and Jovin could set up.
The results delighted Jovin, who sees language as something that can bind us all together.
"I initially did this just for grammar hedonism," Jovin said. "But it changed so quickly. Having a grammar advice stand and setting it up on the streets of a random place is one of the most efficient ways to learn about the community that you've just entered into because language is intimate, and so people share stories from their childhood. You meet their relatives, their children. It's very moving. We all negotiate language in our daily lives, so I hope people enjoy the language part of the film. But I also think in our lives we need to have time for the things we have in common and that give us peace and pleasure. There's a lot of negativity around. We do actually still all punctuate, mostly, and deploy language. I want them to feel that thing, that sense of community, whether they're at the table or not. I think the way Brandt filmed this has made that really possible for them."
Johnson culled through hundreds of hours of footage to create a film they hope transcends grammar. Their press release says: "Come for the grammar. Stay for the humanity."
The film serves up a delightful journey through language, sometimes teaching us something about grammar, other times revealing how language can define us. It's a breezy road trip with wonderful moments that deliver on the humanity Jovin and Johnson promise.
Jovin and Johnson will attend Thursday's screening of the film, with "A Way With Words" host Martha Barnette moderating the discussion. That screening sold out almost immediately, but audiences will have three more opportunities to see the film on Oct. 25, 28 and 30.
