by Frank Calvillo
Box Office Alternative Column
Box Office Alternative is a weekly look into additional/optional choices to the big-budget spectacle opening up at your local movie theater every Friday. Oftentimes, titles will consist of little-known or underappreciated work from the same actor/writer/director/producer of said new release, while at other times, the selection for the week just happens to touch upon the same subject in a unique way. Above all, this is a place to revisit and/or discover forgotten cinematic gems of all kinds.
It seems the best offering that this lackluster summer has for the first week of what would normally be the most exciting month of the blockbuster season, is another Zac Efron comedy. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates stars Efron and Adam Devine as two brothers who place an online ad looking for dates to an upcoming wedding the two must attend, which leads them to a raunchy pair played by Anna Kendrick and Aubrey Plaza.
Enough of Efron’s fan base could turn out for the film ensuring that it will make SOME money. However, a more honest and sensitive example of a movie star needing a date to a wedding was certainly seen when Michelle Pfeiffer asked Ashton Kutcher to be her plus one in the 2009 indie drama Personal Effects.
Based on a short story by Rick Moody (author of The Ice Storm), director David Hollander’s film tells the story of a one-time aspiring wrestler named Walter (Kutcher), who was on his way to the nationals when the rape and murder of his twin sister brought him back home. The lonely Walter spends his days doing weights, working at a chicken restaurant and attending every court session regarding his sister’s case. When he accompanies his mother Gloria (Kathy Bates) to a support group, he meets Linda (Pfeiffer), who recently lost her husband in a drunken gun fight with his best friend and who is currently on trial for his death. Faced to raise their deaf teenage son Clay (Spencer Hudson) alone, Linda has taken a job at a community center where she oversees weddings. When she asks Walter to accompany her to one of the weddings in an effort to keep her from crying hysterically as she is prone to do, an unexpected romance develops.
One of the areas in which Personal Effects is completely uncompromising, is in its depiction of people suffering from loss. Both Linda and Walter are shown to have experienced some of the deepest kind of pain there is, and the film wonderfully shows the different ways in which grief manifests itself. Walter becomes closed off from everyone, including his mother and his young niece, dividing his time between the gym, his workplace and the courthouse, refusing to ever make a solid effort with the outside world. By contrast Linda has chosen distraction to deal with her grief and has taken the job of a wedding coordinator as a way of trying to help create joy in a world she knows is more than unfair at times.
The bringing together of Linda and Walter has less to do with romantic chemistry, than with the shared bond that exists between them. The two are wounded souls who find in each other someone like them who has been through the same level of pain and betrayal from life. Through each other, they find someone to believe in who reminds them of the kind of people they were before their tragedies hit them and, most importantly, that they have the ability to be that way again. It should be pointed out that while there is a love story at the heart of Personal Effects, the filmmakers have refreshingly chosen not to make it, nor the obvious age difference between the two, the sole centerpiece of the film, instead letting the characters and all the differing emotions within them speak for themselves.
There’s a comment on the modern justice system in the film, which is so wonderfully understated and plays out both beautifully and naturally. The fact that one character gets justice for their loved one’s death, while the other doesn’t may not have been the most audience-friendly route to take, but it works as an honest and fitting lesson. The film makes it a point to say that closure isn’t always available, at least not in the ways everyone would prefer. Sometimes closure needs to come from some other source, in some other form, rather than the one people seek it from. Regardless of how life determines an individual’s fate, Personal Effects shows that healing is ultimately possible.
A vanity-free Pfeiffer is so radiant in her role as a woman struggling to keep herself together for both her child and her sanity. Watching her deliver Linda’s monologue in the film’s final act with warmth and contentment is a prime example of the kind of acting the actress does so well. Personal Effects may be a given for Pfeiffer, but many would not expect someone like Kutcher to be up to the task of such dark material. However, the actor impresses with what is his probably his deepest film performance to date. The two are well-aided by the dynamic Hudson and especially by Bates, who manages to add even more poignancy to the proceedings.
Those few who knew of Personal Effects were hard pressed to actually find it. Not long after production wrapped, issues with the selling off of the film’s rights made potential distributors weary of acquiring it. As a result, the film bypassed the festival circuit and played for about a week in New York and Los Angeles before being shuffled off to home video purgatory.
On paper, Personal Effects seemed to have had everything going for it including name actors, impressive source material and stellar production values led by Hollander’s devoted filmmaker’s hand. The fact that all of the combined elements didn’t transport the film straight to indie glory is the kind of textbook tragedy that has befallen so many otherwise quality films in the past. In the end however, it hardly matters. The soft power which flows throughout Personal Effects with regards to offering up a genuine portrait of grief and closure remains impossible to deny, no matter what kind of screen it plays on.
