Personal Velocity: Three Portraits

There's a point about an hour and twenty-five minutes into this film where the credits begin to roll. At this moment the viewer realizes "Personal Velocity" has come to a close. There's no plot to this film and, therefore, no ending. "PV" is a trio of vignettes, each about a young woman with some sort of sex/relationship crisis. Delia is the high school tramp turned battered housewife. Greta is a Jewish-American princess bored with her WASP husband. And Paula is a pregnant punker chick trying to mother a teen boy runaway who sucks his thumb. Yes, this is an arthouse project. It screams "We're an indie production! We can't afford light kits and tripods! We're all working for scale or for free! We made this film because we LOVE it!" In defense of Rebecca Miller: she wrote a book, adapted it for the screen, and cobbled together the funding and talent to turn it into a movie. Of course she has A-list family connections, but this is her own work. And it's a lot more than most of us could ever do. You go, girl! But unfortunately, it is a boring piece of work. The three lead characters are just plain dull and unsympathetic. It's hard to like them, and harder to identify with any of them. They've all made their own poor choices and now spend their screen time plotting an escape.

The male voice narration doesn't work. It's heavy-handed and annoying in a bad documentary way. Why can't the ladies narrate their own stories? What's wrong with Delia telling us in her own words how she spent most of high school entertaining the boys? Story line and characters aside, there's some potent acting here. Ms Miller enlisted top quality players Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey, and Fairuza Balk to perform the leads. Collectively, they are a knock-out. The supporting cast is spot-on. But you can only do so much with a one-note song. I really wanted to like this little movie. But I didn't.

Writer and director Rebecca Miller(daughter of legendary playwright Arthur) patches together three stories of three different women for this film and the movie itself is quite an intriguing curiosity for it.

Delia(Kyra Sedgwick,familiar yet still distinctive here)is an abused housewife and mother who's only known really one thing about herself-her sexuality-and has to find a way out of her sad,low-esteemed predicament,while wondering if she should use her sexuality or not; Greta(Parker Posey,for whom the type of roles she could inhabit are practically limitless) is a career-driven woman whose marriage is peaceful but uninspiring; and Paula(Fairuza Balk,whose angry eyes and wild visage is an ironic contrast to the scared character she's playing),has escaped a horrifying accident and now aids a runaway teen,all the while mindful of the fact that she's just learned she's pregnant.

I must say I was quite pleased with elements of the movie:the narration,the anthology of it and,of course,the actors,who all are very fine here. But I suppose what left me dry here was the way these stories played out. I will not go into any detail so as to inadvertently throw out spoilers,but it to me felt like these stories were resolved in ways that seemed only evident to the writer herself. I read one reviewer describe these tales as sorts of "Women's lib" stories,and that may be true,and not being a woman myself and certainly not a feminist,I suppose if these endings seemed lost on me,well,that's my problem I suppose.

Not a movie for those who absolutely NEED their films to have a sort of set,rising-plot/climax/denouement model in order to digest their usage of 90 min to 2 hours of time,but I suspect that the film's creator doesn't really care about that. She set out to portray three ordinary yet intriguing characters and,for the most part,I feel like she succeeded.

I am hard-pressed to explain the praise heaped on this movie, and must sadly choose the obvious. This film would never have been touted as it has if it were made by someone other than Arthur Miller's daughter/Daniel Day Lewis's wife.

Of the film's three vignettes--domestic violence survivor, conflicted editor, and confused runaway--the second is most telling. Greta, the failure to her family, craves success and power in the literary world and only needs to have her innate talents recognized to do so. Her skill is "trimming the fat" from others' writing. However, Ms. Miller seems to have had no such attention paid to her own work. The incessant and intrusive voiceover dialogue, I assume taken directly from her collection of short stories, features pseudo-deep lines that made me literally laugh out loud.

In addition, I found many of the camera tricks and plot devices amateurish and the characters shallow and essentialized. I cannot recommend this film, which basks in its own specialness and its claims to gritty reality. Ms. Miller is a tourist in the lives of the struggling women she attempts to portray.

I saw this film tonight at the First Annual Tribeca Film Festival and understood its success at Sundance. In short, this film is about the awakening of three different women in very different lives and circle around a news report of a shooting in Manhattan and an ensuing car accident. With the telling of each woman's tale, Miller uses a brilliant 'degree of relation' to the accident in order to develop an engaging and powerful film.

Delia casually watches the news report of the accident while waiting for the cook to bring up her next order in a small-town diner in upstate New York. Though the audience does not see a particularly unusual response that she has to it, we can imagine that her difficult circumstances allow her to relate to it on a level of shared human suffering.

Greta, who's story is told in a series of flashbacks, watches it on the morning news minutes before she has her epiphany about her failing marriage and the new turn that her life is taking as a prominent editor for a large Manhattan publishing house. Because it is the only scene in her story that takes place in the present time, the audience is left to wonder what sort of pivotal role the news report has played in her epiphany.

Finally, Paula's story brings the accident close to home as she is a witness to it. Her epiphany was a direct result of the accident since it was a near-death experience for her. She's not only shocked from the impact of it, but her struggle to explain it with cosmic signs allows her to transcend the accident and the events following it.

The performances were real, the direction was brilliant, and the common thread that ran through the intimate details of the women's awakenings flowed easily, despite the segmented telling of their tales. Miller's work in this film has inspired me to seek out her feature debut, _Angela_ as well.

I don't know why there are so many recent attempts at this sort of thing: individual episodes that approach and overlap the same concept. Perhaps it is because it is easier to craft episodes with power rather than worry about an arc of 90 minutes or more.

But we do have them. Some work amazingly well. I found 'Things you can tell' nearly lifealtering because of the crafty way all the actresses picked up each others' mannerisms to merge into the same woman. '!0 Conversations' was a different take, with the action all occurring in the same world. Less effective overall (with a more overt politics) but well structured.

This, however, is a mess. It bludgeons. It repeats. It insists on obviousness. No subtly is allowed: either an effect shouts or is bleached away. And the worst thing, the most damaging thing that can be said: there is no reward, no insight, no enrichment for the rawness we experience.

Wallace Shawn and a talented cinematographer wasted as well. Shame.

The reliable Parker Posey has a line so wonderful, so noticeably superior to all else, I am convinced she made it up: she says she needs to get an underwater camera.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 4: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.