The Best Screenplay award winner at the Sundance Film Festival, Safety Not Guaranteed is an entertaining and endearing little seriocomic bauble that, while having a smidge of fun tweaking genre conventions and expectations, also richly mines for laughs the pained regret and fumbling desires of its characters in much the same manner as Alexander Payne. A movie of exquisite silver linings — which locates the humor in the swallowed ache of emotionally stunted men without ever selling out the legitimacy of their feelings — director Colin Trevorrow‘s debut offering heralds a solid new talent on the indie film scene.
Needing a story, Seattle magazine writer Jeff (Jake Johnson, of New Girl) pitches his boss (Mary Lynn Rajskub) on tracking down the person responsible for a strange classified ad seeking someone to go back in time with the author, reading in part, “Must bring your own weapons, safety not guaranteed — I have only done this once before.” Given the go-ahead, Jeff snatches up two interns — Darius (Aubrey Plaza), a disillusioned live-at-home college grad, and the timid Arnau (Karan Soni, above center), a studious biology major trying to diversify his resume — and sets out for the tiny seaside community of Ocean View, where the ad has a listed post office box number.
There, they discover Kenneth Calloway (Mark Duplass), an eccentric and paranoid grocery store clerk who’s convinced he’s solved the riddle of time travel. The real impetus behind Jeff’s desire to hit the road turns out not to be the story on Kenneth, but instead an old… well, adolescent sexual conquest, Liz (Jenica Bergere). With Jeff spending his time pursuing her, the specifics of getting the actual journalistic scoop fall mostly to Darius, who slowly gains Kenneth’s trust. In the process, she finds herself becoming decidedly intrigued with his nerdy survivalist ways, and the fact that, Kenneth’s weirdness notwithstanding, people really do seem to be following him.
As penned by Derek Connolly and directed by fellow New York University graduate Trevorrow, Safety Not Guaranteed is a beguiling combination of melancholic character notes and pin-prick comedy (Darius is told she’s “not a quality hire” by a restaurant manager after a painfully blunt interview). There’s a breezy, lightweight quality to a lot of the movie’s banter, but it never seems false or out-of-step with the characterizations, which are actually quite nicely sketched, and deepen emotionally with time. As Darius and Kenneth kind of trip and fumble toward something approaching romantic bloom, and the movie flits about the edges of the grander sci-fi fantasy its conceit suggests, Jeff’s blossoming disillusionment and unhappiness is rendered in contrast to Darius’ emotional thawing.
Duplass, kind of jittery and guarded, nicely captures both the hurt and hope in Kenneth (who will only say that his mission involves “mistakes, regret and love”), and Johnson delivers a winning turn as a man-child who finally if improbably seems to discover the tools that might enable him to grow up. If not for all its other considerable pleasures, Safety Not Guaranteed is also, at the very least, a winning feature showcase for Plaza, an ensemble player on Parks and Recreation whose sardonic wit is here, for perhaps the first time, leavened with grace notes of vulnerability and longing. It’s the look of someone who wants more, and is realizing that she’s capable of it, and it’s a look that suits both the character of Darius and Plaza herself.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Safety Not Guaranteed comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen with an English language 5.1 Dolby digital audio track. Kickstarting its bonus features is a quite nice 15-minute making-of featurette in which Trevorrow talks about how he wanted to make a movie that wasn’t about time travel per se but rather “the emotional needs that time travel satisfies,” as well as how screenwriter Connolly is in many ways an amalgamation of the four lead characters of Darius, Kenneth, Arnau and Jeff. Other fun bits include reminiscences about blind trust in the Seattle crew base and their design for the Kenneth’s time travel device, as well as how folks pitched in to finish shooting a slow-speed car chase when one of their vehicles broke down on the allotted day. All in all, it’s a great overview of not only the film itself, but also the all-for-one-and-one-for-all spirit of independent filmmaking.
Other supplemental extras include a two-and-a-half-minute tidbit with the author, John Silveira, of the original ad upon which the movie is based. Needless to say, it’s better to leave this unviewed until one has seen the feature, but even then it’s a fluffy and inessential extra that doesn’t shed much satisfying light on the story’s roots. There’s also a 90-second Easter egg, located on the bonus slate menu, in which cast members ruminate on what they might do if given the chance to travel through time. Rounding things out is a slate of previews, inclusive of looks at Looper, Robot & Frank, Playing for Keeps and more. Something on the movie’s Sundance premiere might have been nice, but this is a solid home video treatment of one of 2012’s most whimsical and pleasurable debuts. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) B (Disc)