By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com
Sundance Review: For Ellen
So Yong Kim (In Between Days, Treeless Mountain) is back at Sundance this year with For Ellen, a quiet, meticulously paced character study about Joby (Paul Dano), a would-be rock star , who takes a road trip back to the small midwest town where his soon-to-be ex and young daughter live so that he can sign divorce papers. Joby needs the financial settlement the divorce will give him in order to finish his latest album — which he sees as his last chance to make it or break it. Upon his arrival, though, he learns that his inept attorney (Jon Heder) has negotiated a settlement that will require him to give up all rights to the daughter he hasn’t seen since she was a baby. Faced with this choice, Joby’s suddenly he’s not so sure what he wants.
Kim has a patience as a director for allowing her characters to draw us in slowly but surely; she steers clear of emotional manipulation and even particularly structured plot points, and gives her actors room to just be — an approach that can be dicey depending on the talent, but that works very well here with Dano in the lead role. Cinematographer Reed Morano, who previously shot Frozen River, puts her talents to good use here as well. Like Frozen River, For Ellen is set in the winter, and long, slow shots of the cold, frozen Midwest landscape serve to evoke the emotional state of the characters: Joby, who’s struggling with whether it’s too late to connect with the daughter he abandoned; his ex Claire (Margarita Lievieva), whose painfully walled off emotional disconnect is a much more interesting way of conveying their personal history than any weighty expositional back story would have been, and Claire and Joby’s daughter, Ellen (Shaylena Mandigo), who eyes the sudden appearance of her father in her life with wary, curious watchfulness.
The lean script doesn’t invest a lot of energy on overt character development or history, nor does Kim guide her audience one way or another, particularly, in determining how they should feel about Joby. Joby’s just a guy like a lot of guys, who wasn’t ready for fatherhood; he had to make a choice between life on the road as a musician, or living in this stifling small town with his wife and daughter, and when it came down to it he chose to take what he saw as a singular opportunity to pursue the career he wanted.
This sparseness of back story makes Joby more relatable, and at least empathetic, if not entirely sympathetic. He is what he is: not the father Claire would have had him be; not the father Ellen would like him to be. Joby’s the guy who likes to be on the road, who darkens his soul patch with mascara in gas station bathrooms and drinks too much in too many cheap hotel rooms, not the guy who’s going to be there for his daughter’s piano recitals and skinned knees. But he’s also a musician, an artist feeling keenly his inability to break through to find success in the way he wants it, and that’s certainly something that anyone who aspires to take a chance and create rather than just do a mundane job to pay the bills can relate to. Artistic pursuit almost always requires some kind of sacrifice, and Joby’s made life choices that have already defined his path.
The press notes indicate that Kim created this story to explore her feelings about her own absent father, so in that sense perhaps she wanted to keep it a bit more abstract to allow room for individual interpretation, rather that spinning out a more specific story that judges her protagonist one way or another. Joby’s not quite a hero, not quite an antihero. He’s simply a mirror against which our own ideas of parenthood and responsibility refract, which for me, makes For Ellen a million times better than stories of a similar theme that try to tell us precisely what to think.
Seriously? This movie was like watching paint dry. Awful. Do we really need to watch 22 second establishing shots and Dano smoking a cigarette alone for 5 minutes? Ummm… you just wanted to act like you “got it.” And “it” was a piece of crap.
John,
I doubt very much that you know me well enough to know whether I like a film or don’t. And frankly, if you’re accusing me of writing a positive review of any film because I care whether anyone thinks I “got it,” you’re completely unfamiliar with my work. Your unwarranted accusation about my motivation doesn’t merit much more response than this:
“Seriously? This movie was meticulous, patient, and intelligent. Brilliant. The confidence it takes for a director to hold on a 22 second shot, or stay with a lone character smoking a cigarette for an extended take, especially when dealing with a generation of moviegoers who lack the patience to so much as wait 5 seconds between cool explosions? Fantastic. Ummmm … you just don’t “get it,” sorry. Because “it” was brilliant.”
In all seriousness, though: Personally, the only issue I had with this film is that the last 60 seconds is a rip of Five Easy Pieces. Actually, the last 5 minutes or so is, but I liked the film overall a great deal up until that last minute.
But for the record, I also liked Elena, Father’s Chair, 28 Hotel Rooms, and Valley of Saints this year at Sundance, all of which are films with pacing that a lot of folks would perhaps consider akin to “watching paint dry.” And I’m generally a fan of directors like Claire Denis, Kelly Reichardt, and yes, So Yong Kim, who tend to work in slow, patient shots rather than pandering to an audience that can’t sit still for anything longer than a fast jump cut. So it’s likely we’re going to have to just agree to disagree on this one.