Open Road

This movie feels (at best) like a 1980's after-school special, with lower production values and dialog that would embarrass a 1940's comic book writer. When it feels like it breaks the after-school special mode, it is merely because it slips into feeling like an old VHS tape shared by all the local xian churches.

Juliette Lewis was the selling point for me and she failed to deliver, I can blame her on some levels but the writing was just so atrocious that I am shocked she took the part. Andy Garcia must have been bored, and the lead actress basically derps from scene to scene without actually acting.

simple story. very well acted. dialog i would guess is at least partly improvised, since it comes across very fresh and direct. very well acting in the smaller characters. male main actor totally convincing in his early going as the young gun, then later in his transformation as a ... man.

the camera finds a good blend of hand held realism without being trashy. i enjoyed it very much. i believe this is not as simply done as it looks like.

i understand why some might not like this movie. this is no cinema for everyone. but this is good, solid and modern film making in every bit of the piece. definitely a director who knows very well how to treat actors. i don't think i have seen many pictures where i had the feeling of such well done actor-directing. juliette lewis makes so much out of here scenes, it is unbelievable.

i must say i am usually not a huge fan of camilla belle, since i feel like she depends too much on her (admittedly stunning) looks, but in this picture it fit the role very well that she is always quite distant. yet in the scenes where she could not do it here, cause a scene depended on her opening up, she really closed this very distance and was convincing on all levels.

solid work in all departments. great work in actor directing. 9 out of 1o.

g

The beginning of OPEN ROAD is highly suggestive, with director Marco Garcia depicting different moments in Angie's (Camilla Belle's) life, as she works as a server, travels along a lonely road, and tries to communicate with her mother back in Brazil. It's clear she's got something to hide, but we have no idea what; all we know is that she is a talented artist, who translates all her emotional pain into her paintings. So far so good; but then the film experiences a failure of nerve and transforms itself into a familiar tale of self-discovery. Angie meets nice boyfriend (Colin Egglesfield), and his skeptical cousin (Juliette Lewis), leaves her boyfriend in the lurch as she goes off on the road, and discovers at the end of the film that her friend Chuck (Andy Garcia) - whom she encountered at her lowest point during her journey - has a dark secret directly relating to her own life. At times the script veers towards the banal, and although the film is well photographed, with several aerial shots of the rolling landscape with Angie's car just a speck on the horizon, one cannot help but feel that director Garcia could have done far more with the material.

My cable blurb for this film listed Juliette Lewis first, then Camille, then described the story in just One sentence. I've enjoyed Lewis a lot in the past, so I viewed the film. But that one sentence blurb was about the right length! I don't want to blame the actors, but the director and writer? Probably. The characters' "character" were mostly hidden: by flashbacks out of context, or by brief sentences or silence in response to direct questions. The dialogue itself may well have been too cryptic to even give the actors insights into their part. Seemed they still had little to show us about their characters in non-verbal ways. When actors don't "get" their character, certainly the director must fill in gaps left by the writer. The feeling I got (& this isn't a verdict, just a description of what scenes "felt like") was that some actors' insights here, maybe weren't heard, or were passed over, by the director. I kept my ears and eyes open for gut level insights, 'cuz the dialogue was empty. When people try to hide something, they may fib but even those untruths can offer viewers some insight into what the character is feeling. Not here, only that they didn't want to talk, or they felt uncomfortable (about good things or bad). Lewis' late scene with Egglesfield's "David" was a bit different, but when everything "Jill" said was nasty, David's verbal response was in disgust, but his behavior wasn't. His character seemed vacuous for not just leaving the cafe - the table seemed empty, and Jill was not "helping". Visually too, like in the cloaked flashbacks, viewers were given little help in several (many?) scenes, like Angie & David sitting inside the trailer, the camera is bouncing around. I'm listening to them talk, and the bouncing is just a distraction. It's almost like the photographer saw too little evidence of the tension in the actor's behavior, or in their words; and so decided to move the camera, at least to supply evidence of some inner struggles in these two friends. If the trailer had at least been in motion, I could have stayed in tune to the dialogue, having seen that the road was bumpy (literally and figuratively). Most of us (the viewers and the makers of the film) know more about the feelings prompted by some situations in this plot, but a better review here, may be implying a reviewer has inserted his/her own experiences into this story; filled it out. I think that viewers can plant more insights into this film, than the film can drop into the viewer.

...could have been really good. The acting seemed a little stiff and almost like the actors were a bit bored. I have seen all the main actors in other movies and in those, they were great. This movie brought up some good ideas but they were either never developed further (so, why raise them in the first place) or they were not resolved. And, there were a few instances where I was a bit confused as to how that situation came about, although, I figured it out fairly quickly. There are much worse movies showing on "mainstream" circuit. It was also pleasant to watch a movie with no violence, gore, swearing etc. With a bit more story development and more convincing acting, wow, what a wonderful movie this could have been. So, overall, not bad.