Saturday, August 20, 2011

I’ve heard so many descriptions of Bellflower since it exploded at Sundance earlier this year, I walked in to the screening entirely wary of what I was going to be shown. Was it going to be a low-budget, post-apocalyptic thriller? A gritty tale of love gone wrong? A cheaply made film about the fucked up lives of a group of losers in LA? After walking out of the theater, my body flooded with adrenaline, I can honestly say that though the film checks off each of these boxes, at its core Evan Glodell’s directorial debut is a different beast all-together, an almost mumblecore film about how the 21st century male deals with the hard emotional truths of life filtered through the caustic mind of a Mad Max obsessed twenty-something.

Movie Review - Bellflower

Woodrow (Evan Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson) are two generally good-natured guys laying about in the arid heat of Los Angeles. They like drinking and building there own flamethrowers and talking about Mad Max and the brute strength of Mad Max villain Lord Humongous. Oh sure, they probably drink too much and Woodrow’s a bit awkward and Aiden’s kind of a spastic douche-bag but from any vantage point, as Bellflower starts, Aiden and Woodrow are just two fairly ordinary twenty-somethings trying to carve a spot for themselves in the world. And then Woodrow meets Milly (the very Juliette Lewis-esque Jessie Wiseman) and everything falls apart. Their first date is one for the books, a sprawling road trip in a beautiful car across the Southwest to a shitty dinner in Texas, drinking and smoking halfway across the country. But the happiness of their initial meet-up and the following weeks is short-lived. The relationship goes sour in a big way, and the second half of the film is Woodrow dealing with the aftermath of a broken face and a broken heart.

The third act of the film is so brutally pieced together that I found myself cringing in anticipation of what Glodell would throw at me next. Woodrow’s violent nature rises to the surface and the flame-spouting car Medusa and the homemade flamethrower come in to use. A lot of fists are thrown and bottles broken and the loving relationship of the beginning of the film falls directly in to the flames. Glodell uses the violence of the film to address the issue of how men deal with the bigger emotional movements in their life without compromising the societal depiction of manhood. Aiden and Woodrow are two very ordinary twenty-somethings with a similar amount of raging testosterone flowing through them, and the various screw ups and heart breaks they endure as the film progresses find resolution in the violent finale. Glodell seems to be asking: is this the final solution for how men react to emotion? Are we unable to express ourselves and therefore can only lash out when the issues have built up too much? A layer below this Glodell begs the question of friendship between men. Woodrow is a shell in the second half of the film and Aiden is his only lifeline, and even then he can’t express himself through anything but hard-boozing and the building of a fire-spitting car.

Glodell isn’t the strongest actor and the film relies too heavily on filters and bleached colors, but as a director and a writer he’s able to invest his debut film with a strong set of ideas that are sure to invoke conversations amongst men and women alike. It isn’t always perfect, but Bellflower makes Evan Glodell as his crew of maniacal pranksters as ones to watch.

- Noah Sanders -



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