The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

Among the many perks of being a noted filmblogger, I am sometimes given the chance to watch incredibly tiny indie movies that most of you would otherwise never hear anything about. What better way to pass the time between bloated, over-budgets summertime commercial epics than with their very opposite: tiny, intimate films made for a sum of money that probably wouldn’t have purchased one day’s worth of sandwiches on the Prince Caspian set.

A New Zealand production that embraces its hand-hewn nature like a badge of honor, Wait Up Harriet begins with what ought to be two strikes against it: the co-director is also the lead actor, and almost every scene consists of long dialogues that end in a stalemate. Fortunately, Angus Benfield is a strong enough actor, and Hanna Eichler’s writing is unexpectedly smooth and natural, and thus these apparent sins are turned into strengths, enough so in fact that the film ends up transcending its microscopic production scale to find something quite beautiful to say.

That’s not apparent from the opening scene, in which Jack (Benfield) and his wife Harriet (Melanie Cannan) sit around yammering mumblecore style with a couple of friends. As is often the case, the strain put into making this group of people seem like really laid-back pals is almost enough to strangle the film aborning, particularly in the gloppy application of exposition. That makes it even more of a shock when the rest of the film unfolds with enough subtlety that most of the subsequent reveals seem almost like accidents. Not least of which is the immediate discovery that Harriet is in fact dead, and the opening was the first in a line of non-linear flashbacks by which the mourning Jack remembers his loss.

The present and past scenes are divided according to a simple technique: if it’s a flashback, everything is saturated in reds and yellows, if its “now”, everything is blue. That’s hardly an original concept, but sometimes clichés are clichés because they work. And Wait Up Harriet is about other things entirely, and relying on an quick shorthand to differentiate the two time frames is an easily forgivable choice. The meat of the film is in how Jack deals with his grief, long after everyone else thinks it’s time to move on; the flashbacks are a literal representation of his inability to move out of the past.

For the most part, the film moves at a slow crawl; Harriet’s spiritual mentor Marty (Lynda Milligan) shows up and Jack ignores her; he pays no mind to his friends; he avoids his son. In another script we might well regard this as “pointlessly slow”, especially given that when things happen they happen quickly. But that would be to miss the point of the story entirely: life keeps going on but Jack refuses to engage with it, and every day for months is just the same damn thing over and over again. As directors, Benfield and Eichler are brave to keep the momentum in their film dampened to this degree, but it works.

There are a few moments where the film’s budget gets the better of it; besides the cheap video that was used, some shots have the telltale feel of “we don’t have time for another set-up, just use this one for a lot of different scenes.” One moment is particularly marred by some kind of problem with the tripod, and a very long conversation is rendered almost unwatchable because the camera keeps wiggling back and forth for a good two minutes. But in the main this is a perfect example of what indie movies are supposed to be about: showcasing the talents of people who might not otherwise get a shot, proving that they can tell a reasonably smart story in an appealing way.

Other than a teeny-tiny budget, there’s not much that Wait Up Harriet has in common with the Chicago-based Cold December, a typical exercise in all the problems that can befall micro-budget indies. Written, directed, edited, shot and produced by Brian Wright, the filmmaking bears the unmistakable mark of a man overextending himself (and I mean hey, who hasn’t been there, right?). When one person is juggling that many balls, something is going to slip through, and Cold December feels like somebody needed to pay more attention to…something. At first it’s minor details that don’t work, such as the early scene when a woman wears a hooded sweatshirt to bed. It gets cold in Chicago in the winter, but not that cold.

Eventually, it’s the whole edifice that starts to sag. There are shots that aren’t lit right at all (though there’s not a single example of poor focus, which is much less rare in the micro-budget world than we might like), and plenty of the incredible awful sound recording that has plagued independent cinema since the dawn of the camcorder. Many scenes – including a drunken party that might otherwise be the highlight of the film – are edited hectically and confusingly, snipping the ends off lines and hopping from character to character with abandon.

These are small gripes compared to the problem of the actors: leading man Chris Fountain delivers many of his lines with a curious whine, and when he isn’t speaking, he just sits doing nothing at all. There’s a fairly wide range of quality amongst his co-stars, but nobody stands out particularly highly. In some cases, obvious mis-readings are permitted to stand, probably because there was no time or money to fix it, or perhaps because the over-worked director just didn’t notice.

This is all quite a shame, because there’s definitely a script here. Following a couple weeks in the life of Chris Payton (Fountain), the film asks somewhat tired questions about the purpose of life on the cusp of 30, mixed with plenty of tired observations on the insubstantial culture of the American suburb. But the precise way that the film looks at these issues is actually somewhat fresh – Chris is happy to be the unhappy one, but when he finds out that everyone he knows has the same professional, social and marital problems he does, he finally becomes terrified enough to change, if only to avoid having to deal with other people’s problems and his own. We’ve all seen character arcs like this one, but on paper at least, it’s convincing.

The execution, though; it’s a small disaster. It’s very hard to tell if Wright actually has it in him to be a good director or cinematographer or what have you, but it’s clear that he lacks the experience to be everything at once. Nothing comes together, and the whole movie feels like a dry run more than a final cut.