Ellie Parker

If you are a fan of Naomi Watts, as I have been since seeing her for the first time in Mulholland Drive, you will not want to miss Ellie Parker - a veritable tour de force for the actor, who gives us not a caricature but rather a sympathetic, flesh-and-blood, 3-dimensional human being whose plight pertains not only to the acting world but to anybody who has ever felt rejected, misunderstood and/or unappreciated by the world at large. This makes its audience much wider than merely the 'Hollywood community' without ever becoming preachy about it, which I especially liked. Some of the scenes feel completely improvised, which I also enjoyed, and her audition scene near the beginning is more than worth the price of admission alone.

"Ellie Parker" feels like an extended episode of "Unscripted" through the funny lens of Albert Brooks.

It does show the strains of being expanded from a short, for bits that feel like a "Saturday Night Live" routine, and for typical targets for actors -- acting class, slacker boyfriends, friends competing for the same lousy roles in cheesy WB and Fox TV pilots, pretentious indie directors (and I assume it was intentional that the guy looked like Jim Jarmusch), scheming casting agents, and phony producers.

But it still manages to very amusingly have some original takes on Hollywood. The funniest angle is that no one does know who they are any more, whether from class, day jobs, rapid-fire auditions, therapy, one-night stands of flexible sexuality and recreational self-medication drugs, so that they always feel like they are acting in the movie of their lives. And everyone seems to want to be someone else anyway, such as a night out to see Keanu Reeves wannabe rock star in his band Dogstar.

Key to the success of the movie is the amazingly versatile chameleon Naomi Watts. While I presume the short started in 2001 before her break-out in "Mulholland Drive" as a bit of envy revenge when her good friend Nicole Kidman was already getting big roles, it now seems like nostalgia because she's so beautiful here it's hard to think of her being dumped or cheated on and so talented as she morphs from tragic Southern belle to channeling Debbie Harry as a New York doll to looking astoundingly like the naive young Hayley Mills and a self-referential take on Marilyn Monroe that it's hard to believe Leslie Bibb would get a role over her. She has terrific best friend chemistry with fellow Aussie Rebecca Rigg (who I did not recognize at all from "Farscape"), making me realize how few films showcase Watts with female bonding relationships.

While the in-Hollywood jokes get a bit much and the basic arc is predictable, there are a lot of chuckles. Chevy Chase is very funny in a grown-up cameo as her agent.

I know this may come as a shock to actors, but job hunting is just as merciless in other fields so we civilians can relate to Ellie Parker's travails. It is very sweet that the closing credits include director/actor Scott Coffey's tribute to the strong women who inspired him, particularly his mother.

I've always suspected that some movies make Sundance mainly because a famous Hollywood personality is involved. If said star chooses to make a low-budget non-commercial film, it warrants a free pass to the big dance based on risk-taking and "independent spirit." So it is with Ellie Parker, a movie produced by and starring Naomi Watts (and directed by actor Scott Coffey) about the travails of a young actress searching for her identity in L.A.'s shallow and artificial cultural wasteland. It is clear that it was made for industry insiders, who saw in it a painful mirror to their world. The rest of us enjoyed a few funny moments in a movie that had no apparent beginning, middle or end, no discernible plot, plenty of conflict but no resolution. I'm sure there was a point in all that depressing futility. To make it worse, it was shot on a Sony HD cam, so the quality was maybe a tad better than my home movies.

Ellie Parker would be useful if one were trying to thin the herd of aspiring actresses. Maybe they should show it in high schools, kind of like Reefer Madness 50 years ago.

By the way, Chevy Chase has a small and rather cryptic role as an agent. (The audience wasn't sure if he was trying to be serious or comedic.) I love Chevy Chase, but unlike his old SNL partner Dan Akroyd, he should stick to comedies. He gives a really dreadful performance. But he was refreshingly funny at the Sundance Q&A.

"Ellie Parker" is the sort of movie that you wish you could have made in college. It's funny, somewhat different, and has a beautiful leading lady, that of which goes by the name of Naomi Watts in this case. It also has an incredibly low budget.

As a matter of fact, it looks as though it could have been a college student's project. An hour and a half showcasing Naomi Watt's fantastic amount of talent as Ellie Parker: A struggling actress jumping from audition to audition with the hope of landing a part in anything she can get. Her loser boyfriend is no help, neither is her agent, and as the days go by, she loses more and more hope.

Whether she's cruising down Sunset Strip to her next audition, or yelling into her cellular flying down the 101, there is a part of us throughout the entire movie that wants to know what is going to happen to Ellie next. She's lovable. She's talented. She's been through more than we (the audience) can begin to understand. But most importantly, she's determined.

If you adore Watts as much as this reviewer does and you want to see her in something realistic (as close as it gets), check out "Ellie Parker". You won't get to see her like this in "King Kong." That's for sure.

With the exception perhaps of "King Kong," Naomi Watts has looked like total hell at some point in every movie she's starred in. She's a brave actress, one with Hollywood starlet looks but without any of the Hollywood starlet vanity.

One can't help but feel that she's somewhat wasted in "Ellie Parker," an offbeat, super low-budget film about one struggling actress's daily trials in that vast wasteland known as L.A. The film looks like the kind of thing I would make if I had a fairly high-quality digital camcorder and some editing software. But I do not hold the movie's visual style against it, and it's not for that reason that I think Watts was slumming a bit. No, it's the material that makes "Ellie Parker" a less than (o.k. MUCH less than) satisfying viewing experience.

Parker is going through an identity crisis, but unfortunately for us, it's not a very interesting one. She spends all of her time trying to be something that other people want her to be. Even when she's alone, driving from one audition to another, she's practicing lines and accents, and putting on costumes to fit a part. One senses that the filmmakers wanted to show the acting life as it really is for the majority of people in the business: a harrowing, degrading, grueling and exhausting process that leaves those living it adrift. As Parker says at one point in the film, she feels like her life hasn't started yet, and that everything is an audition for some future part. I'm not sure we need yet one more movie that deflates the glamour of Hollywood. I had a hard time not getting frustrated with Parker -- she chooses the acting life, so it's up to her to deal with the consequences. There's nothing stopping her from getting an unglamorous desk job like millions of other Americans who go to work every day and don't spend all of their time whining about it.

"Ellie Parker" does provide some fascinating glimpses into the entertainment industry, especially in a scene that shows Parker and her friend attending an acting class -- it goes a long way to supporting my half-serious belief that all really good actors must be to a certain extent mentally unbalanced. There's also a delightfully weird final scene that shows Parker auditioning to a living room full of stoned and bored movie producers, a scene that leaves you wondering how certain films ever get made at all.

But most of the movie feels underdeveloped and inconsequential, like a film-student experiment.

Grade: C