Volume 108: Out of Exile / The Stalking Fields / A Perfect Day for Caribou
THE VOICE OF ENERGY VOL. 108
Out of Exile (dir. Kyle Kauwika Harris)
With few exceptions, the people responsible for Out In Exile, the new crime drama that hits select theater and VOD servers today, work to the very edges of their abilities as actors and filmmakers. It's the kind of effort that never quite spills over into greatness but never collapses into disarray either. This movie bends but somehow doesn't break.
That tensile strength makes it far easier to swallow the obvious influences driving the film (Heat, Justified) while amplifying the tension and flashes of humanity within the story.
Adam Hampton plays Gabriel, a crook who, after his release from prison, gets right back into the mix of robbing banks with his best friend, an earnest family man (Aurelian Smith Jr.), and his hothead brother (Kyle Jacob Henry). His first job out of the joint results in the death of an armored car driver, putting the FBI on the trio's trail. Somehow, our antihero has the time and energy to attempt to reconcile with his estranged daughter (Hayley McFarland), a young woman dealing with an abusive partner and an unexpected pregnancy.
The strain of this multi-layered plot is squarely on the shoulders of everyone on screen, and impressively it's a rare few who let it show in their performances. Hampton especially lets silence and slight changes in his vocal timbre reveal the depth of his regret over his strained relationship with his daughter and the pain of being pulled in a half-dozen different directions at once. With a little more experience under his belt, he could easily transition into some meatier leading man roles. Veteran character actor Peter Greene pops up to do some reliably nasty work as the crime boss pulling the strings on Gabriel's heists.
Another member of the Exile team that could graduate to bigger and better projects is the film's writer / director Kyle Kauwika Harris. His visual work throughout is patient and thorough, giving scenes and his actors the room to breathe. The shifts to a more run-and-gun style of shooting during the initial armored car robbery and other confrontations never pulled me completely away from the film's flow - a skill that's becoming increasingly rare among filmmakers. Only his insistence on squeezing in as many additional details — coating upon coating of motivation, psychological underpinnings, and back story — among even the most tertiary of characters works to break the spell of the film, as does some of the more overdriven or leaden performances dotting the film. (in select theaters and available for rent)
The Stalking Fields (dir. Ric Maddox)
On the other side of the coin where Out of Exile resides is The Stalking Fields, a poorly conceived and poorly executed low-budget thriller. It bears all the markings of having been made by folks early in their careers. This is director Ric Maddox’s first effort as a director, and only the second film written by Sean Crampton, who co-scripted with Jordan Wiseley — all of them have on screen roles, large and small, to boot. As novice filmmakers are wont to do, they all swing for the cheap seats in their work in front of and behind the camera. Their performances are uniformly histrionic, and the rest of the cast, naturally, follows suit.
There’s at least some motivation behind the maniacal mood that some of the actors bring to their parts. Many of them play everyday citizens who are abducted and have a small explosive device planted in their brains before being sent into the woods to serve as human prey for a group of soldiers. The goal is to help these vets overcome their PTSD, and if you’re straining to unpack the logic behind that, you needn't bother. Everything about it is blinkered, from the paltry cash prize of $500,000 should one of the human targets survive to the reasons behind these folks being picked for this awful assignment to the arrival of Crampton’s character, a Navy SEAL mourning the death of his wife and who comes to question this Most Dangerous Game-style exercise.
No one and nothing seems to calm down in The Stalking Fields. The hunted all pitch their performances to the heaven, switching between fury and fear as the film lumbers forward. And Maddox and team shoot even the most quiet moments with an intensity usually reserved for scenes set in police interrogation rooms. They are all reaching for skills they don't have and flex muscles they have yet to develop. The effort is appreciated. The finished product is not. (available to rent through VOD services)
A Perfect Day For Caribou (dir. Jeff Rutherford)
In an entirely different universe from the other two films reviewed this week resides A Perfect Day for Caribou, the debut feature from writer / director Jeff Rutherford. There's as much drama and tension, but nearly all of it is directed inward by the movie's two main characters.
As the story opens, we sit in the truck cab of Herman (Jeb Berrier), a depressed middle-aged man who is planning on committing suicide after he dictates a long message to his estranged son Nate (Charlie Plummer) and the grandson he's never met. All of Herman's possessions are in the bed of the vehicle and a revolver sits by his side. Nate surprises him with a phone call, asking to spend some time together, and soon, the two men are wandering the manicured grounds of a cemetery, trying to find common ground amid their fractured memories.
That alone would be a fine recipe for an engaging two-hander but Rutherford moves the story into the nearby wilderness (the film was shot in the small town of Condon, Oregon) after Nate's son Ralph wanders off. The two keep up a conversation as they search, sifting through their dysfunctional romantic lives and, for Herman, seeking some kind of forgiveness for leaving his son behind.
The journey into the woods and hillsides of central Oregon does start to reveal the cracks in Rutherford's script and vision. He lays on a thick metaphor having Herman carting around a large box as they walk, and he tucks some unnecessary extra characters into the mix like a well-meaning hunter (Dana Millican) and an escaped convict. Too, the overheated philosophizing by the two men belabors the script at moments — particularly as they tend to deflect many of their failings onto their apparently awful choice in partners.
Those rough patches in the film are thankfully few and are smoothed over by some truly lovely black and white cinematography and the finely tuned, lived in performances by Plummer and Berrier. They both clearly empathize with these characters — two men who are scraping by on the margins of society even as they reach out for little flickers of better things. You may not relate to their circumstances but you will certainly recognize the aches and pains within their frail bodies. (debuts Saturday Jan 21 at Slamdance; available from Jan 23 - 29 on the Slamdance Channel)