Movie Review Personal Velocity

Personal Velocity (2002) 

Directed by Rebecca Miller

Written by Rebecca Miller

Starring Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey, Fairuza Balk 

Release Date November 27th, 2002 

Published December 25th, 2002

I have many times in the past lamented the lack of good roles for women in Hollywood. 2002 did a great deal to quiet my complaints offering a wide range of excellent female driven movies. One film with three sensational lead female performances won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2002 Sundance Film festival. It's called Personal Velocity and though I had to wait over half of a year to see it, the film was worth the wait.

Written and directed by first timer Rebecca Miller, Personal Velocity is a set of three half-hour vignettes about three diverse women whose lives we join in progress. The first story is about Delia (Kyra Sedgwick), whose voiceover explains how she grew up quickly, earning the reputation of town slut before finally settling down with one guy because he was the one who asked. Sometime into the marriage, the husband develops an affinity for rough sex that evolves into physical abuse. 

Once Delia realizes that the violence could go beyond her to her children she makes the choice to leave but has nowhere to go. In desperation she calls on a woman she knew just barely in high school whom she once saved from bullies, or at least that is how she remembers it. The woman is kind enough to let Delia and her kids live in her garage and Delia gets a job in a greasy diner. Therein, she endures the come-ons of the owner’s greasy son. The half hour segment ends with no real resolution but rather a continuing spiral that seems destined to continue as we move on to the next story.

The film’s middle segment starring Parker Posey is its strongest. Posey is Greta, a cookbook editor who has fallen into a relationship of convenience with a guy who is a fact checker for The New Yorker. The guy is exactly the guy her father, a high powered attorney who divorced Greta's mother, doesn't want her to be with. That may be exactly why she married him, though she is cheating on him. When Greta gets a break at work (she's asked to edit the book of a best selling author who requested her specifically), she must deal with success for the first time in her life as well as a challenging relationship with the author. Posey is fascinating, communicating classic slacker indifference until confronted with real emotion, which she never learned to deal with before. Something many of us children of the divorce culture can relate to.

The final story is about Paula, a formerly homeless girl who is running away from the man who pulled her off the streets. After an accident nearly took her life and instead killed a man she had just met, Paula got in her car and just began driving. For some unknown reason she has picked up a young hitchhiker and now finds herself on the road to her mother’s home. Paula hasn't seen her mother since she ran away. Her mother had been divorced and remarried to a man Paula didn't like. After contacting her boyfriend, Paula hits the road again with the hitchhiker and finds that his problems may be far worse than her own. He provides the cautionary tale that Paula and the movie needs to end with a little ray of hope.

Each of the stories is connected in a small way but the connection is insignificant when you know that the stories were culled from a collection of seven stories by Rebecca Miller. It's not surprising that the stories are well written as Miller is the daughter of Playwright Arthur Miller. Rebecca Miller has a strong familiarity with her characters which helps, given that each story only has about 30 minutes to tell its story. Miller and her amazing cast are never hampered by the runtime and the stories are likely better served without the padding it would take to make each feature length.

The film has its problems, the voiceover narration by John Ventimiglia is at times rather prosaic and Ventimiglia's voice a little too arrogant. Also, shot for a very small sum on digital video, the film has a look that’s grainy and unpolished. That might be what they were looking for but I found it distracting. Those minor problems aside, Personal Velocity is a well written and very well acted film that announces Rebecca Miller as a filmmaker to look for in the future.

Movie Review: Deuces Wild

Deuces Wild (2002)

Directed by Scott Kalvert

Written by Christopher Gamble 

Starring Brad Renfro, Stephen Dorff, Fairuza Balk, James Franco, Johnny Knoxville, Matt Dillon, Norman Reedus, Deborah Harry, Frankie Muniz 

Release Date May 3rd, 2002

Published May 3rd, 2002

The troubles of actor Brad Renfro are well documented. Renfro has had multiple run-ins with the law and is also notoriously difficult to work with. What gets lost in Renfro's problems is the fact that the kid is one hell of an actor. Renfro has a Brandoesque persona, handsome with deep soulful eyes that emit a piercing gaze that cuts like a knife. Sadly, Renfro's troubles have kept him from the acting status his work aspires to and is likely the reason he is relegated to such B-release fare as Deuces Wild.

In Deuces, Renfro plays Bobby, a street tough who runs with a gang called the Vipers. The film begins in flashback with Bobby's brother Leon (Stephen Dorff) carrying the limp lifeless body of their brother Al. Al is dead from a drug overdose administered by rival gang members Marco (Norman Reedus) and Franky (Balthazar Getty), members of the Vipers.

Three years later Leon is the leader of the Deuces and Bobby is his thuggish enforcer. The Deuces are dedicated to keep drugs off their block. This comes into conflict with the Vipers and their leader Marco, fresh from jail and looking for revenge against Leon for sending him there. Neither gang can make a move without the approval of a local mobster named Fitzy and played semi convincingly by Matt Dillon.

Deuces Wild is as much a gang movie as it is a love story, as Bobby falls for a Vipers girl named Annie (Fairuza Balk). The courtship between Bobby and Annie would be sweet if it weren't steeped in cliché and bad 50's dialogue. In fact, the whole film is buried under clichés from West Side Story, The Outsiders, Lords of Flatbush and whatever greaser gang movie you can think of.

It gets worse, even with the problems of the ridiculous attempts to ape 50's lingo, the film introduces and dismisses subplot after subplot. Marco seeks revenge on Leon for sending him to jail, while we in the audience find out in a dream sequence that it wasn't Leon who did the deed, a piece of information that makes no difference whatsoever and is never resolved. Then there is Leon's romance with Betsy (Soprano's actress Drea Demateo), which exists solely to provide Leon with something to do while not beating the crap out of people in fistfights.

And why does Leon feel so bad about everything he does? Where is the commitment to the cause? In one scene he watches as the Vipers burn down his block. In another scene he admonishes his gang for acting against a pair of drug dealers moving into their territory. It was interesting to note that gangs of 50's Brooklyn only controlled one block. Literally one block! So, the Deuces kept drugs off of one city block, but if drugs were sold right around the corner, it was all good.

Renfro for his part is uncomfortable with the lame attempts at 50's dialogue, but still communicates with body language and his laser stare. This kid is a contender, as he showed in Apt Pupil and his Tour De force performance in Bully. With Deuces Wild, Renfro signals an attempt to move into mainstream Hollywood roles. Here's hoping he develops the same eye for Hollywood material as he has for his indie work, and that Deuces Wild is just a minor annoyance on the way to an Oscar nomination.