Summary:
An alcoholic playwright travels to Michigan to prepare for his next play, where a man who idolizes him will pick him up from a train station.
My Thoughts:
Movies based on plays always have an extra hump to overcome when facing production; they were written for a different medium, and oftentimes the stage is the best way to see them. This film is primarily set in one location, a train station, and as the runtime is rather short, it tends to feel like a bottle episode of a TV show. For the most part, this film worked for me, though at times the pacing was a bit slower than I’d anticipated, and the dialogue, which revolves heavily around the idea of art and what makes an artist, tends to wade into pretentious waters (that’s not inherently a bad thing). I think this film has a lot to say about the topics it chooses to address, and it plays into a theme that I’m seeing is very prevalent in a lot of the films I’ve seen during my time at the 2019 Traverse City Film Festival: truth, while it might not always be the easiest thing to say, is always what will be what connects with people the most.
“I AM AN ARTIST AND THIS IS MY ART!”
Jeff Daniels (“The Martian”) plays Joseph Harris, an alcoholic playwright whom once won the Pulitzer, but now spends his days doing little but drinking. After not having a play on Broadway for years, his agent Helen (Erika Slezak) convinces him to take his latest play, which he claims is unreadable, to a small theater in Lima, Michigan, where he meets Kenneth Waters (Thomas Macias) an overeager wannabe playwright whom idolizes Joseph. When Joseph arrives in Lima, he seems intent on only returning to NYC, and Kenneth tries to convince him to stay.
Jeff Daniels is the driving force of this film. He wrote the play and plays the lead in the film, and his performance is most of what makes it worth watching. His ability to portray a broken man that is, at his heart, still trying to create, but unable to fully face is demons, is beautifully tragic. What makes his performance even better is the way that he’s able to maintain a semblance of decency even when he’s vomiting on a train or passed out drunk on a station pew. Harris’s character is broken, but he’s not unintelligent; he knows how to pull himself up, but he refuses to do so because he is used to the way his life is now. Daniel’s range of emotion is really put on display in a wonderful way, and, as he is the one that wrote the words he’s saying, it’s easy to see why he’s so earnest about the words that come through his character. There is truth in what Harris’s character says, even though it might not be easy to accept.
I liked a lot of the themes in this film, and many of those themes came into play when introducing the character of Kenneth Waters. Kenneth is, a bit overeager to meet Harris, whom has always been his idol. Kenneth is a wannabe playwriter whom has just finished the first draft of his first play; as Harris says, he’s “barely out of the womb.” This kind of dichotomy- our main characters being a writer who thinks he’s past his prime and a writer who is just getting started- allows us to see both sides of the spectrum when it comes to making art: the amateurs and the professionals, and in a way, it levels the playing field and it tosses out any kind of preconceived notions about what the quality of work should be before it is considered art. At a point, Harris convinces Waters to fight for the right to produce his own work, even if it is flawed and horrible when he begins.
But while I enjoyed the themes, Jeff Daniels’ performance, and most of the writing, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a great film. Macias is a stage manager working at the Purple Rose Theatre Company in Michigan, and it seems to me that most of his acting in this film would feel more at home in a play than it would in a film. Stage acting and film acting are very different beasts. For the most part, Macias holds his own, but there are scenes where I didn’t quite buy his earnestness. Also, there were a few audio issues throughout, where characters would fade away and come back in one take, and there were a few scenes of overlapping dialogue in the train station that were simply impossible to discern what was being said.
Verdict:
As I mentioned above, this is really Daniels’ show, and he’s the reason I would recommend this film. I think people whom generally enjoy dialogue-heavy films or movies about art and the artistic process would probably really enjoy this film. This is a movie that really likes to live inside and dissect artists’ minds, and for the most part, it works.
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