Shared Darkness

A somewhat pedestrian and air-quote small story of blue-collar despair, familial fracturing and choking uncertainty, writer-director So Yong Kim’s mastery of tone and elements turns For Ellen into a thing of tender, forlorn beauty. Anchored by a strong performance from Paul Dano, this wonderfully wrought character study is a spare, intimate treat that should find welcome reception with arthouse audiences.



Struggling singer-songwriter Joby Taylor (Dano, quite good) takes a break from life on the road — and rather purposefully leaves behind girlfriend Susan (Jena Malone) — to come in and try to amicably settle his impending divorce from wife Claire (Margarita Levieva), whom he has not seen in a very long time. Joby’s willing and ready to sign off on the house and other assets, but is distraught to learn that Claire does not want him to have any visitation rights to Ellen (Shaylena Mandigo), their six-year-old daughter that he long ago abandoned. As his buttoned-up lawyer, Fred (a bearded Jon Heder), tries to negotiate matters, Joby reflects on whether he can really walk away from Ellen for good.

Korean-American Kim, born in Pusan, South Korea but raised in Los Angeles, has a deft touch with alienation expressed through environmental chilliness. This was especially true of In Between Days, her semi-autobiographical feature debut, which in 2006 picked up a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and it remains true here. Working with cinematographer Reed Morano, Kim crafts a movie whose haunting, beautifully captured wintry landscapes are a physical stand-in for the roiling, distressed and self-destructive inner feelings of Joby.

Kim’s works also frequently touch upon issues of parental separation and abandonment, and it’s her comfort level and communicative skill with this theme that make Joby’s eventual visit with Ellen so arresting. Spanning more than 25 minutes, this sequence between Dano and the young Mandigo is masterfully orchestrated — almost a short film unto itself, full of carefully dosed regret, pain, ambivalence. Plenty of other films, and filmmakers, could (and have) tread the same terrain Kim does in For Ellen. She makes it personal, however, which — combined with her shrewd powers of observance, reservoir of passion for her characters, and refusal to indulge in a pat or “correct” conclusion — make her movie something special. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Tribeca Film, unrated, 93 minutes)

An offbeat, hipster-inflected road movie that almost steadfastly refuses to conform to expectation and sense, multi-hyphenate Ryan O’Nan’s Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best is a to-scale victory of quirky charm and feeling over sagacity. If that sounds like a backhanded compliment, which it kind of is, it’s also one certainly fitting for its protagonists. The tale of two struggling musicians trying to find their place in the world, Brooklyn Brothers is a film with a restless soul. It likely wouldn’t exist in a world without Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen movies, and yet for all its considerable outlandishness it doesn’t concern itself with or model itself after those comedies. It’s something of an analog dramedy in a digital world.

When it rains it pours for underachieving New Yorker Alex (O’Nan), a would-be musician who can’t seem to catch a break. Dumped by a girlfriend and ditched by bandmate Kyle (Jason Ritter), Alex snaps and quits his mind-numbing day job at a low-level real estate office, only to land in further hot water when one of his weekly musical therapy performances for special needs teens goes awry. Seemingly out of nowhere appears Jim (Michael Weston), a gung-ho oddball who channels his unique musical sensibilities through a variety of children’s instruments.

Jim tells Alex he’s a huge fan of his, and that he has a cross-country tour for which he needs a partner already booked, culminating in a battle-of-the-bands contest out west. Throwing caution to the wind, Alex finally agrees to join Jim on this unlikely journey. Hijinks ensue, naturally. Along the way the pair pick up Cassidy (Arielle Kebbel), a small town Pennsylvania girl looking for adventure, and even end up paying a visit to Alex’s much older brother Brian (Andrew McCarthy), where Alex connects with his 10-year-old nephew, Jackson (Jake Miller).

Drafting several friends and colleagues from past projects, O’Nan (The Dry Land) crafts a broad enough palette to capture and hold a viewer’s interest. Abetted by good work from cinematographer Gavin Kelly, Brooklyn Brothers is rangy enough that the sort of discrete set pieces that road movies naturally engender feel fairly practical, and diverse to boot. If there’s a problem, it lies in the movie’s sometimes whiplash-inducing tone, and its scattershot focus. Weston feels like he stepped out from an It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia-based improv class, while O’Nan has a raw-nerve melancholy that — even when filtered through dialogue meant to be a bit funny — bends toward the realistic. That’s not really the case with Jim.

Certain narrative beats, too, feel more like duty-bound inclusion than honestly invested in, as if O’Nan had some Conventional Story Nazi peering over his shoulder and rapping his knuckles, preventing him from fully veering off into wild, Napoleon Dynamite-type territory that the movie’s opening initially augurs. A more disciplined “bromance,” sifting through personality and attitudinal changes in Alex and Jim triggered and enforced by one another, might have made for a film of deeper and more lasting interest. The inclusion of Cassidy perverts that focus, however.

Still, Brooklyn Brothers is different in many other respects, and its atypicality and handcrafted qualities make it more endearing than something more polished. The film’s music, too — a kind of nerdy synth-pop characterized by one character as “the Shins meets Sesame Street” — is one of its undeniable selling points. If its romance feels forced, the original songs by O’Nan and others (an album is forthcoming from Rhino Records) root Alex’s journey and the movie as a whole, and give it a sincere heart. Brooklyn Brothers isn’t the best, but it beats plenty of other indie offerings out there. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Oscilloscope, unrated, 98 minutes)