Aside from those rare brilliant directorial debuts, first
features these days tend to fit into one of two modes: the mumbling relationship film or
the scrappy horror flick. Evan Glodell’s Bellflower
is both low-budget options in one, an aimless, mumbling romance with a
thick layer of dread and dirt slathered over the lens. When Bellflower opens, with random flashes of
ambiguous trauma run in reverse, followed by a souped-up black car with the
word “Medusa” scrawled across the side in rough white paint rumbling towards
the camera in slow-motion, it seems to be announcing its position as a film of style
and confidence.
What follows, though, is a slow sapping of my interest and
sympathies. The film concerns two friends (Glodell and Tyler Dawson) who moved
to California from Wisconsin just because it seemed like something cool to do.
Now they spend their time barely making ends meet, using what little they have
on preparing for the inevitable apocalypse. The growling car of the opening is
one of their contraptions that they hopefully feel will help them rule the forthcoming
post-apocalyptic wasteland. They hope to one day build some flamethrowers to
add to their arsenal.
But these guys aren’t just
preparing for a Mad-Max-style
society; they also like the ladies. So, the film turns out to be devoted most
primarily to a couple of women (Jessie Wiseman and Rebekah Brandes) who unfortunately get
involved in the guys' lives. There’s a Meet Cute at a dive bar over a plate of
grasshoppers that leads to a slow courtship between Glodell and Wiseman that
leads to nothing but hurt. The characters are on a course to inevitable
calamity, with their eyes on the end of the world but blind to the trajectories
that take them towards their own end. It’s a film about personal Armageddon in
which good and evil is muddied until only a brown ugly stew is left behind.
There are perfectly fine concepts here, but the film is
assaultive and meandering. It’s wild-eyed and navel-gazing, crisp and grungy,
preposterous and monotonous. I could never shake the feeling that the
characters were written, that the situations were created. I never once fell
for the fiction that feels performed rather than lived, invented rather than
felt. This isn’t necessarily a problem in and of itself, but the film is more
than merely fictional. It feels false. The emotions are affectations. The
characters are pawns. The events of the plot are arbitrary, seemingly occurring
for no good reason other than that’s what Glodell wanted to happen. Maybe he
thought different moments would look cool, upset the audience, or fill up the
run time? I’m glad he wasn’t content to make a safe movie but, like the purposely
ugly look, with grit smeared across Joel Hodge’s otherwise pristine digital
photography, it feels unhinged just for the sake of it.
It’s clear that Evan Glodell has the energy and skill of a
driven and talented director. That energy and skill has just happened to
coalesce into a movie that didn’t work for me. I’m reminded of a line that
Roger Ebert wrote about Quentin Tarantino at the time of his debut with Reservoir Dogs. Allow me to reuse and
adapt Ebert’s phrasing here. Now that we know Evan Glodell can make a movie
like Bellflower, it’s time for him to
move on and make a better one.
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