Post by StevePulaski on Feb 26, 2019 14:35:28 GMT -5
Paddleton (2019)
Directed by: Alex Lehmann
Directed by: Alex Lehmann
Mark Duplass and Ray Romano in Paddleton.
Rating: ★★★½
Michael (Mark Duplass) works at a copy-shop and only has one true friend in life, his upstairs neighbor Andy (Ray Romano). The two men spend nearly every waking, non-working hour together, watching the same kung fu movie on repeat and occasionally hiking downtown to a closed drive-in movie theater to play their makeshift game "paddleton." The game involves hitting a racquetball off the wall into a barrel. There's not much to the titular activity, but there's a lot to this unassuming, amiable little buddy dramedy.
In the opening moments of Paddleton, Michael is diagnosed with inoperable cancer with Andy close by his side. He agrees to medically assisted suicide, but the appropriate pills are only available at a pharmacy six hours away. The two men make the trek to a quirky little town, obtain the proper medication to make the prescription cocktail, and do their best to make Michael's final days enjoyable and simple — just the way he likes them.
Michael and Andy are lonely, socially inadequate men with nothing to live for outside of one another. They hardly talk about their jobs, insinuating a lack of enthusiasm about their line of work, but the time they spend eating frozen pizza together and watching TV grants them a valuable escape that one can only achieve in the company of a best friend. The two men aren't clones of one another, however, but distinctly different. Andy's anxious, sometimes bumbling characteristics are ironed out by Michael's softness and ability to comb the ruffled feathers of his best friend.
While en route to the pharmacy and eventually back home, Andy struggles to come to grips with the fact that the only person who he can openly hold a conversation with will soon be gone. Even when Andy gets carried away, either embellishing details or finding himself overwhelmed with reality, Michael doesn't bat an eye. He just calms his friend and his overactive, neurotic thoughts. They don't feel the need to justify themselves because both know one another so well. There's a moving moment when Andy mentions how the shirt he got Michael — one with an incomplete "Hangman" puzzle on it — intentionally has no answer, despite two letters being filled in. Andy tells him how whenever the two finish a puzzle or complete a time-consuming task, he sees the "down" look of sadness in his friend's eyes; so he gifted him a puzzle that will never be complete and keep him smiling whenever he glances at it.
Michael's "right-to-die" prescription medication is in a touristy town comprised of tacky European construction and windmills, something straight out of a hokey Renaissance Fair. Even the hotel staff wears their hair in braids and appropriate costumes to capture the essence of a place a long way from home. The production provides something of absurd comic relief to a story that gets dramatically heavy at times, but subtly conveys the men as fish out of water. In a lesser movie, the town's eccentricities might have been overplayed. In Paddleton, however, the comedy is light and never usurps the central relationship between the men.
Alex Lehmann's third feature (his first two being other straight-to-Netflix offerings, Blue Jay and the documentary Asperger's Are Us, both, too, under the umbrella of Duplass Brothers Productions) shows the maturity and progress of the mumblecore style of filmmaking I'd like to think of as "post-mumblecore." Instead of films shot on cheap camcorder equipment with occasionally messy editing and a shoestring budget, these are emotionally mature, refined works of dramatic poignancy (see Andrew Bujalski's lovable Support the Girls and Hannah Fidell's 6 Years for other examples). Moreover, and more significantly, the film captures a platonic bond between two societal outcasts with no family and little money who only have each other despite living in such a crowded neighborhood.
How I never thought of Ray Romano and Mark Duplass teaming up for a film like this makes me feel I need to step my game up a bit. Romano's clunky awkwardness is, yet again, sometimes uproariously funny, and he works well off of Duplass, whose perpetually even-keel nature stiff-arms things from turning out like a Curb Your Enthusiasm aside. There's a great scene at the pharmacy, where Andy generously offers to pay for Michael's horrendously expensive, lethal medicine, but the pharmacist informs him that his card has been declined multiple times. Andy gets on the phone with the credit card company, and in true Romano fashion, begins spinning his wheels about security questions while Michael assures the man he himself has the money to pay for the pills. It's a fun scene, one that lessens but doesn't effectively undercut the painfulness of the moment.
Paddleton is very reminiscent of 50/50, the Seth Rogen/Joseph Gordon Levitt film everyone assumed was just another comedy until it proved to be a heavy drama about a man losing his best friend to cancer and a young, sick person's struggle to maintain the relationships he had amidst his final days. This is material ripe for maudlin treatment or downright incompetence if it had leaned to heavily into comedic territory. But writers Duplass and Lehmann, who has proven himself to be one of the most intriguing young filmmakers no one is talking about, are too smart to fall into such a clap-trap. They know better than to waste two authentic, real individuals with an enviable bond.
The final 20 minutes of Paddleton are powerful in the sense that both Michael and Andy are simultaneously forced to confront the reality of the situation. It doesn't go down with the yelling and waterworks you might be anticipating. Lehmann and Duplass keep their characters' demeanors consistent despite the mood drastically changing. It may also get you to examine your close friendships and see how far you're willing to go to aid and support the ones closest to you. The whole film did for me, at least.
Starring: Mark Duplass, Ray Romano, and Kadeem Hardison. Directed by: Alex Lehmann.