Two New Indie Films That Go Against the Trend
Smiling Fish and Goat on Fire Directed by Kevin Jordan
The title Smiling Fish and Goat on Fire is a mistake; the phrase refers to nicknames the heroes' Native American grandmother gave them as children, but this explanation doesn't erase the suspicion that the filmmakers were desperate for a title that would force casual moviegoers to ask, "What the hell is that about?" Get past the cute-absurd moniker and you're looking at a consistently pleasing debut from director Kevin Jordan and coscreenwriters Steve and Derick Martini, who play brothers Tony and Chris Remi. These guys will be familiar to fans of early Scorsese and Barry Levinson (think Diner). Chris, the more responsible and tightly wound brother, is a white-collar accountant. He's in a rocky, six-years-and-counting relationship with a young woman who has become increasingly withdrawn; she cries every time they have sex and refuses to say why. Tony is a sweetly rakish actor who spends a lot of his time laying around the house?often in the company of beautiful women who can't resist his roguish man-child vibe.
Just when the Remi brothers fear they've settled into a permanent bachelor groove, their lives are complicated by new career possibilities and new chances at love. Chris' boss has just hired his widowed old uncle (actor and jazz musician Bill Henderson) to do time-killing work at the accounting firm, and Chris is charged with driving the gnomish old raconteur to and from the office each day. A cross-generational, interracial friendship develops. At the same time, Chris, who's on the outs with his girlfriend, meets a lovely woman from Italy (Rosemarie Addeo) who works as an animal wrangler on film sets, and falls head-over-heels in love with her. Meanwhile, Tony, who never met a commitment he couldn't evade, starts hanging out with a single stage mom (Christa Miller) with a charmingly precocious young daughter (Nicole Ray). Both brothers are pulled toward the same ideals of romantic love that they once viewed with deep suspicion.
Jordan and the Martini brothers (sounds like a comedy team from 1940s radio) aren't trying to reinvent the indie film wheel here. They just want to make a low-budget romantic comedy that, in its own lighthearted way, gets at real anxieties and concerns. The film looks great and moves well, and the performances are consistently surprising. Though the characters and situations seem familiar, the dialogue and the actors' deliveries keep you pleasantly off-balance. I was especially fond of Miller, who makes her character decent and kind yet also sexy and distinct; Steven Martini, whose slightly dreamy grin suggests Mickey Rourke in his Diner period; and, best of all, Henderson, whose alternately jaunty and mysterious presence elevates him way beyond the Yoda of Love stereotype that African-American character actors are often stuck with. The writing helps: the Martinis have given Henderson's character real depth and complexity, going into great detail about his charmed marriage, his pain over the death of his wife and his early days in Hollywood as a soundman who worked on a number of all-black low-budget productions.
Though the cast is comprised mostly of young, good-looking white Americans, Jordan and the Martinis (sounds like a cocktail lounge ensemble) place their experiences within a multicultural Los Angeles whose denizens are united by their childlike fascination with Hollywood's dream machine and their sadness at being slowly ground up in its slow-moving gears. The small setpieces have the ring of authenticity: rugby games in public parks, parties that mix romantic and professional opportunity, auditions that mingle forced optimism with abiding fear of rejection.
The smallness of the film puts the moviemakers at risk, though. Because they don't try anything too showy, Smiling Fish and Goat on Fire is likely to be dismissed as another cute, harmless calling-card production. Already some reviewers have written it off as a minor pleasure of the festival circuit and nothing more, without properly acknowledging its surefooted style and surprisingly relevant depiction of post-boomer dating attitudes. In his New York Times review, Dave Kehr calls the film "a study in delayed development, in which helpless, childlike men in their late 20s are rescued and redeemed by domineering, motherly women. As romantic fantasies go, it's hard to imagine anything more regressive." That's not the movie I saw, and I suspect it's not the movie most post-boomer audiences will see either. When I looked at the Remis and their girlfriends, I didn't see hapless man-boys rescued by surrogate mommies (by the way, in what universe could this film's rational, sexually confident, thoroughly charming women be considered "domineering"?), I saw wary, life-scarred single people of both genders falling in love, then making conscious decisions to pursue committed long-term relationships. These characters come from a generation raised in single-parent households and are keenly aware of the fact that both love and marriage are things that must be built and maintained rather than discovered and claimed. The filmmakers take the characters' feelings and experiences?and the audience's feelings and experiences?for granted, using them as background material rather than some sort of thesis statement. It's a casual, comic approach to what is, after all, a pretty serious topic, and I appreciated the low-key way of teasing it out. The dismissive reviews don't worry me, though: I think post-boomer audiences will instinctively grasp what critics aren't interested in seeing.
Much more impressive is God's Army, filmmaker Richard Dutcher's feature about a group of young missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Like Smiling Fish and Goat on Fire, it takes a familiar dramatic template?the master-and-apprentice story?and embroiders it with emotions, situations and even thematic issues rarely addressed by any American movie, much less the typical Sundance-baiting indie. I've often complained to friends that American films routinely neglect two of the most fertile patches of dramatic soil: work and religion. God's Army merges the two, in a film that mixes a documentary's anthropological detail with an elegant, austere but never dry style. Dutcher, a Mormon and a graduate of Brigham Young University, takes faith seriously?all faith, not just Mormon faith. But he also acknowledges the validity of skepticism and doubt. Then he goes a step further, placing the film in the same position as its missionary heroes: in a fallen, secular world that's continually giving people fresh reasons not to believe in God, how can God's army make religion seem both reasonable and attractive?
It's a tough job. And at first glance, the film's hero, Elder Allen (Matthew Brown), looks like he's not cut out for it. He arrives on a Greyhound bus from Kansas, fleeing a deeply dysfunctional family (the exact nature of the dysfunction is withheld until much later). Though raised a Mormon by his stepfather, Allen seems neither devoted to the church nor willing to research and understand its teachings.
Fortunately, his mentor, Elder Dalton (strikingly well-played by the filmmaker himself), is patient, insightful and surprisingly hip. He's trained quite a few missionaries in his short life (he's 29 and looks older), and he tailors his teaching strategy and his speaking style to suit each student's individual needs.
The other elders living in the house with Allen and Dalton are unexpectedly diverse, both ethnically and in terms of personality. The African-American Banks (DeSean Terry) struggles to reconcile his own devotion to the church with the skepticism of the black non-Mormons he hopes to convert; they point out to Banks?accurately?that it took the church a long time to ordain black ministers, and Banks has no good explanation for why this shouldn't be considered a sore point. Another elder, the smart and somewhat smart-alecky Kinegar (Michael Buster), is spending a lot of time reading literature that criticizes Mormon history and practice, which causes tension in the house.
The city of Los Angeles creates its own kind of tension. The film frankly details the difficulty of old fashioned, house-by-house missionary work in a time when urban residents think every knock on the door could signal the arrival of scam artists, robbers or cops. During routine walks near their house, Dalton and Allen are playfully approached by a couple of streetwalkers, and to the filmmaker's credit, these scenes aren't just played for cheap laughs?fallen women vs. modern monks. Dutcher, like his onscreen character, sees every non-Mormon as a potential convert, but understands the reasons why they'd either reject organized religion or go through their entire adult lives without giving God and faith any serious consideration. One of the finest scenes in the film has Dalton learning that one of the prostitutes not only read the Book of Mormon he gave her, but can describe her favorite section and haltingly express why it moved her. A similarly impressive scene has a Mexican-American father patiently telling Allen and Dalton that he can't permit his teenage daughter to convert because the family is Catholic and has always been Catholic. That such a scene would exist in an American film is rare enough; that Dutcher would insist on respecting the father's faith?and insist that we do the same?is close to miraculous.