Review (Theatre)

Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Scott Coffey
Produced by	Scott Coffey Naomi Watts
Written by	Scott Coffey
Starring	Naomi Watts Rebecca Rigg Scott Coffey Mark Pellegrino Chevy Chase
Editing by	Matt Chesse
Distributed by	Strand Releasing
Release date(s)	November 11, 2005
Running time	95 mins.
Language	English

Ellie Parker is a 2005 American drama film, written and directed by Scott Coffey. The title character, played by Naomi Watts, is a young woman struggling as an actress in Los Angeles. The movie centers on a quote from the prologue to Shakespeare's Henry V:

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention,

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

Ellie Parker began as a short that was screened at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. Using a handheld digital camera, writer-director Scott Coffey expanded it into a feature-length film over the next four years. It was released in 2005.

Plot

Ellie Parker is a semi-autobiographical story of an Australian actress struggling to make it in Hollywood. Ellie is young enough to still go to auditions back and forth across L.A., changing wardrobes and slapping on makeup en route, but just old enough that the future feels "more like a threat than a promise". She lives with her vacuous musician boyfriend (Mark Pellegrino), who leaves her just about as dissatisfied as any other part of her life, and has a loose definition of the word "fidelity". Helping make sense of their surreal and humiliating Hollywood existence is her best friend Sam (Rebecca Rigg), another out-of-work actress trying her hand at design, who attends acting classes with Ellie to stay sharp. When Ellie gets into a fender bender with a guy who claims he's a cinematographer (Scott Coffey), her perspective on her work and the dating world starts to change. Chevy Chase also makes an appearance in this series of Hollywood vignettes, playing Ellie's agent.

Review

Well, Ms. Watts does shine in the title role, and she's in every scene, but somehow the film still falls flat. I'm not a big fan of film-making on digital video -- it always comes across to me like I'm watching someone's home movies, an experience I should be paid for, not that I should have to pay for -- but I understand why it's done in certain cases. In this case, it was a mistake.

Writer-director Coffey appears to be going for verite-style realism (I'm assuming he's not so arrogant as to place himself in the uber-pretentious Dogme 95 school), but he doesn't seem to realize that in order for any film to work, the result shouldn't come across as a home movie or, in this case, a student film.

Too much time is spent on Ellie in her car, doing all the things that Angelenos do in their cars because they're just too busy to do them elsewhere (applying makeup, changing clothes, practicing their lines, and the universal asshole-identifier, talking on their cellphones) and too self-absorbed to care how it affects their driving or those around them. This works as satire for one scene -- the next four times it occurs it feels just like being stuck in a car behind one of these narcissists, and it's not an enjoyable feeling. There's a related scene about halfway through that's amusingly ironic, but not worth the endurance test.

Just as with the interior car shots, much of the satire is overripe, pushing the irritation factor of nearly every character to its limits, testing the thresholds of both humorous exaggeration and simple tolerance. No satire should leave you wanting to burn the characters and their milieu to the ground (apart from "Day of the Locust", in which Hollywood does in fact burn, deservedly, but in context).

For all its drawbacks, though, this is a showcase for Naomi Watts to show how versatile she is, with the verisimilitude of her having to switch between characters, accents, moods, etc. The overall comment, that she doesn't really seem to be herself very often and has no idea who that self really is within the realm of all her "performing," is funny and worth exploring, but Coffey (or someone else) needs a vehicle that's more engaging, clearer about its objectives, and at least somewhat watchable.