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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Sundance Review: Safety Not Guaranteed

One of the biggest surprises of this year’s Sundance is just how terrific Safety Not Guaranteed, Colin Trevorrow’s film based on a real Craigslist ad seeking a companion for time travel, turned out to be. The film’s quirky premise, which sends three magazine employees to investigate whether the man who placed the ad really thinks he can travel through time, seems funny enough just based on the premise (and it is), but like the writers who go off in search of what they think will be a wacky story to poke fun at, we find instead a very human film that’s complicated and genuine and never cruel in its use of humor. I thought this was by far the strongest script at this year’s Sundance in terms of sheer quality of writing and execution of idea, and apparently I wasn’t the only one; screenwriter Derek Connolly won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for Safety Not Guaranteed at last night’s awards ceremony.

Parks and Recreation‘s Aubrey Plaza carries much of the film as Darius, a cynical intern roped into traveling to the shore town of Ocean View, Washington with fellow sad sack intern Arnau (Karan Soni) and their annoyingly smug and smarmy boss Jeff (Jake Johnson), who really pitched the story so he’d have a paid trip to Ocean View to hunt down ex-girlfriend Liz (Jeneca Bergere), the first teenage romance that he’s never quite gotten over.

The three writers stalk and hunt down their target, Kenneth (Mark Duplass) and Darius is pegged to make contact with him. And she does, in a hilarious, brilliantly written comedic scene in which she approaches Kenneth as he’s stocking soup at his day job at Grocery Outlet, and convinces him that she is the one to go on his time travel mission with him. But the more she gets to know Kenneth, the more she likes him. She’s no longer so cynically certain Kenneth’s a nut case, and what’s more, his paranoid delusions about government agents following him might not be so paranoid after all. As Darius’s feelings about Kenneth and the story she’s investigating grow more complicated, so too do Jeff’s for Liz. At first Jeff is disappointed to see that Liz – like him – has actually changed and aged a little over the past twenty years, but as he gets to know the woman who’s grown from the girl in his memory, shallow Jeff starts to see Liz in another way.

Side stories like this can detract from the storyline of the protagonist, but here Jeff’s budding new relationship with his old love is used to enhance the underlying theme of not judging others by first appearances, and learning that even someone who might seem to be flawed in some way might still have something special to offer. The Jeff sideline is a smart choice from a writing standpoint also, in that it allows this character who would otherwise be merely an annoying one-dimensional prop to have a richness and complexity that’s often neglected in secondary characters.

What I most enjoyed about Safety Not Guaranteed, though, is a performance by Mark Duplass that made me see him as an actor in a completely different way. He’s always likable, generally funny, and undeniably talented, and yet in most of his roles there’s still that little bit of “Mark Duplass” under the surface peeking out. His turn in Safety Not Guaranteed, though, is a bit of a revelation, much more complex and layered than we’ve seen from him before. In his hands, Kenneth is quirky and funny, which you’d expect from Duplass, but he’s also deeply flawed, sad, and utterly sincere. Between this role and his role as a guy mourning his dead brother in Lynn Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister, this is the year for me that Mark Duplass has become more than just another indie hyphenate; he’s stepping up into “seriously good actor” territory.

This is just a solid film all the way around: the strong confident direction by Trevorrow, the terrific script by Connolly, gorgeous cinematography by Ben Kasulke and some really excellent production design by Ben Blankenship and art direction by Lisa Hammond (the design work on Kenneth’s house is particularly noteworthy). Safety Not Guaranteed is a cut way, way above the average Sundance film. When it makes its way to your neck of the woods, I’m betting you’ll enjoy it a lot. Pretty much guaranteed.

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2 Responses to “Sundance Review: Safety Not Guaranteed”

  1. Ken Wilson says:

    I think your assessment was right on. We saw the movie in the 1200 seat Eccles Theater in Park City, and it received a standing ovation. I look forward to seeing it again this summer when it is released.

  2. Tom Carr says:

    Truth in advertising: the director is my nephew-in-law. So I can’t truly separate “This is a really, really good movie” from “Wow — this is Colin’s movie and it’s really, really good”. But trying to focus on the objective, this is a really, really good movie.

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon