…Around – Movie Review

One of the real downsides to being a movie critic is that every film school student with a camera wants to send you their work.  God forbid the thing got accepted to, or received some award from, Bob’s Film Festival, because then you’re getting a giant press release along with it.  The save of this problem is that they’re pretty simple to review if you bother at all.  95% of them are utter garbage, and 4% of them strike you as really special.  Those are easy reviews either way.

…Around falls into that really bastard one percent.

I should definitely clarify that it also isn’t the sort of movie that might be put into your mind when I mention that everyone with a Handycam wants me to review their films.  It’s actually pretty good… but it has a lot of problems.

…Around is the story of a man named Doyle who is going to make the leap (across the Hudson) to New York in order to attend film school.  More generally, he’s going to escape his overly odd family, and his overly uninteresting life.  His friends refer to him as “the guy who made it,” and, “the guy who had a plan and just went for it.”  He’s from that part of town.  After we quickly run into a financial snafu, Doyle ends up homeless, but he’s still going to film school.  By the way, it’s a really fabulous film school, just ask any of the faculty.

We follow Doyle through his entire film education experience.  He befriends a sage homeless man, puts up with pathetic fellow students, eventually gets an apartment and a job, and gets involved with a woman from a crowd a few steps beyond the recently homeless.  He also deals with his mother, who is that special sort of mother who will tell him he’ll fail if he leaves in one breath, and tell him to remember to call in the next.

The story is just putting Doyle under the microscope, and he’s an interesting character.  He’s fascinated with creativity and confused about most everything else.  But, as is noted in the film, there are a growing number of people who yearn for some angle on “the creative,” largely just because it sounds great, but they aren’t particularly sure what that turns into in a practical sort of way.  The general viewpoint on creative people made me reflect that I was painfully reminded of such people recently.  To borrow from a wonderful quote by Emerson which aimed at “love of nature” – When a person says to me, “I am incredibly creative,” I at once know that they’ve never had an original or creative thought in their lives.

On the negative side of things, …Around is almost a primer on why one person shouldn’t do everything.  David Spaltro is writer/director/producer, and probably a lot of other things besides, and it really shows.  The film could have used a bit of collaboration, and a few more eyes examining things.  As it stands, the mother is almost silly in her “bad motherness,” a lot of the dialog runs far to the odd side of suspecting everyone just swallowed a copy of the I Ching, and a lot of the scenes go too long.  The movie is almost exclusively conversations, and while some of them are done exceedingly well, others are delivered poorly and run themselves into the ground.

On the other side of that coin, there is an almost brilliant honesty in what’s going on.  Some above-average acting (but by no means is all the acting above-average) carries through, and underneath the flaws (which are hard to ignore at times) there is a decent, moving story that isn’t spun into destruction by the demands of Hollywood.  It also has one of the better endings you’ll see in a while, and it’s a brave ending, because a lot of people will probably hate it.  The saving grace of the film is that it has a story to tell, and by God that’s the story it’s going to tell.

It’s the kind of movie that’s not only worth watching, I’d recommend it to people I knew weren’t going to like it.  For all its flaws, it has a lot more in common with what movies should be doing than 95% of the movies you see.  You may not like it, and you might not even find the story interesting (I did), but you can’t argue with the reality or honesty of the thing.  It’s honest even when honesty is probably the wrong decision… from a lot of viewpoints, and you’ve got to respect that.

Rating:  

Are You Screening?

…Around stars Robert Evans as Doyle.  He was actually quite good, and I tend toward blaming his poorer moments on the script.  It also stars Molly Ryman as Allyson.

As of this writing the film has played The Big Apple Film Festival and is making its bid for several festivals in the near future.  Keep an eye out for this one.

Check out the …Around homepage here.