Let's say you're going to see a movie that's playing a half-dozen times on a Saturday, starting at 11:05am. Even if you really want to make that 11:05 show for some reason, at what point would you give up and decide to catch the next showing? Probably earlier than 11:45, right? RIGHT? I mean, I consider myself a fairly reasonable person. And I can see showing up for an 11:05 movie at 11:15, sure. Maybe even 11:20. But multiple groups of people at my theater apparently thought the first third of a movie was not something they really had to see to get the full experience. I do not understand this.Follow-up question: how many times is a reasonable number of times for an adult to giggle at an actress saying something profane or sexual on screen in an R-rated drama? Probably zero times right? Maybe once is allowable. If an actress, perhaps an actress elsewhere known for her role in the popular film adaptations of a teen romance series, announces on-screen that a handjob costs fifty dollars because said actress is playing a prostitute, I suppose we can excuse a small giggle or titter. But when the actress says moments later that a blowjob costs one hundred dollars, why would an adult feel the need to laugh again? It's a mystery to me, but apparently it was not a mystery to several of my fellow audience members.
All of this is to say that if you see nothing wrong with showing up to a movie 40 minutes late and see nothing wrong with laughing out loud at the very presence of curse words, Welcome To The Rileys is not the movie for you. You were looking for Jackass 3D. For everybody else, it's pretty good.
James Gandolfini and Melissa Leo play Doug and Lois Riley, a Midwestern couple whose lives have stalled out in the wake of a family tragedy. Doug travels to New Orleans for a business conference and meets Mallory, a young runaway/stripper/prostitute played by Kristen Stewart. Doug reaches out to the troubled Mallory and they begin an awkward friendship.
WTTR is a very “indie” indie film. It's generally uncompelling visually, as we're meant to focus on the characters. James Gandolfini and Melissa Leo both sort of contain multitudes in their faces anyway, so we don't need to see pretty wide angles of the Indiana neighborhood where the Rileys live or even spend much time admiring the decaying beauty of New Orleans. Obsessing over New Orleans is becoming a visual cliché, really, and Welcome To The Rileys admirably strives to avoid cliché.
Not that they are entirely successful with that. There are several groan-inducing lines throughout, though the most egregious ones (“I'm nobody's little girl!”) are in the trailer so you know they're coming. While we're at it, “hooker with a daughterly heart of gold” is really not a particularly strong genre innovation, though I very much like Dan Kois's description on Twitter of Kristen Stewart's character as a “Manic Trixie Nightmare Girl.” The clichés are still the exception to the rule here – there are several places this film could have gone and doesn't. It's unexpectedly and unflinchingly slight; even the big emotions are small.
Kristen Stewart brings an easy vulgarity and an authentic vulnerability to her role – we're light years from Bella Swan. That said, we're not that far from Joan Jett. I wanted this film to be an eye-opening role for her, for people to walk away from it reconsidering everything they'd said about her the way I reconsidered everything I'd said about Robert Pattinson after Little Ashes. That won't happen. Though if anyone walks away with an Oscar nomination it will probably be Stewart; James Gandolfini's accent inexplicably wanders into different dialects throughout the film, and Melissa Leo's mannered and manic behavior garnered inappropriate laughter from my audience (my audience laughed inappropriately at everything, but I'm fairly certain a few of Leo's moments on screen would have had the same effect even on less moron-saturated crowds. None of that is to say that there aren't moments of levity in this film. There are a few. But only a few). It warrants mentioning that even if Stewart's performance here is similar to her performance in The Runaways, neither performance is at all like any of the performances of her peers. People say Kristen Stewart always plays the mumbly and insecure girl, implying that that's all she can do. Maybe nobody does it better!The worst part of the film was, for me, the score. Much like previous Biterion Collection entry Up In The Air, WTTR is scored by irritating and repetitive loops that probably have names like “pensive indie upright bass 1.” I understand that these movies are made on the cheap, but why are we so afraid of silence? The actors are adept enough at conveying emotion without music cues, especially such obviously low-rent ones. Just because Mallory's apartment looks like crap doesn't mean it needs to SOUND that way.
Despite my fellow audience members' efforts to the contrary, I enjoyed this film. It did nothing to shake my confidence in Kristen Stewart, even if it only advanced said confidence by proving that The Runaways wasn't a fluke. And wandering accent aside, I will literally watch James Gandolfini do anything. If this film is playing in your city, check it out. I'd probably be telling you to see it even if it wasn't very good – it's hard out there for an independent filmmaker. Jackass 3D made more money in its first day than this movie will ever make. And even if there's very little we can do about that, we should do whatever little we can. It is a good film, but it would be worth your money anyway just to see Kristen Stewart trying to carve her own path. Godspeed, you Manic Trixie Nightmare Girl. Godspeed.
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2 comments:
Does it play like a tutorial on how an old guy goes about taking care of a Manic Trixie Nightmare Girl? I could see myself doing that.
There is definitely some "how to" shit. Like, if you're going to try to help a sort of crazy runaway child prostitute, this is how you gain her trust. Etc. So maybe it would be a good thing for you to see.
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