So Yong Kim (2012)

Joby Taylor sings and plays guitar in a heavy metal band that hasn’t made it.   He comes to an anonymous town – we don’t know from where exactly – to conclude his unsuccessful fight with his estranged wife for shared custody of their young daughter Ellen.  He eventually hitches a ride on a timber lorry and disappears back into nowhere, leaving his girlfriend asleep in their motel room, unaware of his departure.   The ending of For Ellen clearly acknowledges – right down to the timber lorry – that of another movie about a shiftless, discontented man in whose life music plays an important but troubling part.  Although So Yong Kim’s movie is wan and small beside Five Easy Pieces, the ending is one of its more arresting moments – if only because you’re not sure what’s going on in Joby’s mind.  Is he traumatised by the brevity of a happy couple of hours he spent in Ellen’s company the day before, shortly before signing the papers that ensure he won’t see his child again?  Or was his daughter Joby’s latest bound-to-fail project now come to (as it were) fruition, and leaving him clueless as to what to do, where to go next?

As played by Paul Dano, Joby is abysmally asocial:  it’s nearly always a long journey from the start of one of his sentences to the end.  While Dano’s halting, tortured delivery may express part of Joby’s personality, it’s also characteristic of For Ellen as a whole.  The writer-director and her lead actor confuse deliberateness with depth.  (This is the first picture I’ve seen that Paul Dano is expected to carry.)  The key images are held for too long in order to underline their meaning.   The film opens with Joby driving through a snowy landscape, looking unhappy and uncertain of where he’s going.   This would be enough to make the point but the sequence culminates in his losing control of the car on the frosty but deserted road; the car skids and bumps to rest against a snowbank, and the camera is stuck with it.  (The winter world of the film is, though, at least more fully integrated than in A Late Quartet.)  Something similar afflicts Paul Dano’s solo scenes:  he describes Joby’s misery without revealing anything much about it.  What makes For Ellen worth seeing are the parts of it in which Dano is sharing the screen with either Jon Heder, as Joby’s lawyer Fred Butler, or Shaylena Mandigo, who plays Ellen.

I may have completely misunderstood the middle part of the film, when Fred, who lives with his mother, invites Joby for supper.  After giving him a litany of bad news about the terms of the settlement with Ellen’s mother Claire (Margarita Levieva), Fred suggests to Joby he come over to try ‘my Mom’s really awesome lasagne’.  The little we’ve seen of the young lawyer up to this point suggests a nerd but, from the point Joby enters his home, I assumed that Fred was a repressed homosexual, who, as well as feeling genuinely sorry for his client, fancied him:  Jon Heder is full of nervously smitten glances at Joby.  It struck me as an interesting idea that Fred should use his briskly amiable mother (Mara Pelifian) both as a means of getting to spend the evening with Joby and as a guarantee that nothing happens between the two men.   When Joby suggests, after supper, that the two of them go to a bar, Fred appears both scared and excited – things are going further than he’d intended or hoped for.   At the bar, as Joby gets drunk, the normally abstemious Fred seems to sense danger:  anything could happen.   I liked the way that Paul Dano gave Joby an almost unconscious but nonetheless powerful awareness of his ability to dominate Fred as he pleased.  But there’s nothing in any review of For Ellen that I’ve read to support this reading:  Fred is referred to as ‘deeply uncool’ and a ‘man-child’ but he seems to be regarded as asexual.

What So Yong Kim really had in mind probably excuses lines that struck me as unconvincing if it mattered deeply to Fred that the evening turned out well – such as his failing to check that Joby’s not vegetarian until the lasagne is being served.  Even so, I’m not convinced that Kim has thought things through in the script.  Shortly after his meeting with Ellen, Joby’s girlfriend Susan arrives, hoping to give him a nice surprise.   Jena Malone is very likeable in the role – it’s certainly a pleasant surprise to the viewer that someone as disconnected as Joby has this kind of centred, supportive partner.  Yet he’s so mournfully remote from Susan from the moment he sees her that you can’t believe she’s oblivious to this, as she seems meant to be.

For Ellen has plenty of handheld camerawork, some costive improvisation and several artily composed images – a sequence in which a fly buzzes round a sleeping Joby and into his ear, a static, peopleless shot of ladies’ and gents’ toilets in a department store (Ellen has briefly gone missing and Joby has disappeared to find her).  But the movie, for all its indie-auteur cred, comes to life at the point at which it more closely resembles a conventional tug-of-love picture.  In a desperate phone call to Claire, Joby reminds his wife that, if it hadn’t been for him, she would have had an abortion when she was pregnant with Ellen – and that he has documents to prove it.   This is enough to persuade Claire and her attorney (Julian Gamble) to let Joby see the girl, under strict conditions of what can and can’t be said, for two hours.

When Ellen enters the scene, the prevailing hesitancy of the film comes to mean more.   We see that it’s hard for Joby to express himself to someone to whom he wants to express himself; hard too for him to read this wary, puzzled child, who stares unsmiling at him before breaking into a – for Joby – miraculous grin.  Ellen’s silent snail’s pace round a toyshop, to replace the doll Joby bought her but which she already has, is broken suddenly by, ‘I want this one’.  When she first says thank you to him he replies, ‘You’re welcome’, a phrase she repeats each time he thanks her, as he finds increasing reason to do.  Shaylena Mandigo is really good as Ellen; she’s able to suggest, at the same time, that she’s got the upper hand and a kind of yearning for Joby.  During their last moments together, Ellen is practising ‘Für Elise’ on a virtual keyboard.  Joby makes a supposedly unobtrusive exit through the window that the child opened to let him in through.  It’s a pity this bit is so contrived.  It would be difficult, in the physical circumstances of the scene, for Joby to disappear without Ellen’s noticing yet we see no reaction from her.  And the For Ellen/’Für Elise’ connection is merely pat.

19 April 2013