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.

Scott Coffey's Life of A Lower-Rung Hollywood Nitwit, Ellie Parker, is interesting only as a showcase for the shape-shifter charms of Naomi Watts, a performing chameleon with an endless repertoire of faces (sultry, girlish, devious, ravishing, vacant). The film might actually be more worthwhile, and would certainly be more bearable, with the sound off, sparing us the interminable feather-headed nattering of its deliberately shallow, narcissistic characters, and allowing us to concentrate more fully on the thespic acrobatics of Watts, who, through the character of struggling, stubborn, wayward Ellie Parker, is afforded a chance to show off her near-freakish ability at sudden metamorphosis, going from harried phone-talking California twit to foul-mouthed gum-chomping Jersey girl and back, working the shift, the brakes like a race-car driver navigating the twists and turns of Watkins Glen. It's a show-off performance but Watts is not a show-off, she occupies the character of Ellie Parker fully, never tipping her hand. Her commitment to the role is commendable, her willingness to place herself in absurd situations, to unmask herself a little (some of Ellie's struggles are no doubt culled from Watts' own biography), but it's all in service of material that's not worthy of her, that cheapens her accomplishment, diminishes her. It's a thin gruel of a movie, lacking in insight, full of scenes that don't go anywhere, shot like a film student making an audition reel.

I'd looked forward to this one, as most attempts at satirizing Hollywood life in the last two decades, both from studios and indies, have ranged from mediocre to unmitigated disasters. This one offered Naomi Watts in a starring role, and I've adored her since "Mulholland Drive", both as a terrific, versatile actress and as an unqualified beauty (they all seem to come from Australia and the U.K. these days, don't they?).

Well, Ms. Watts does shine in the title role, and she's in every scene, but somehow the film still falls flat. I'm not a big fan of film-making on digital video -- it always comes across to me like I'm watching someone's home movies, an experience I should be paid for, not that I should have to pay for -- but I understand why it's done in certain cases. In this case, it was a mistake.

Writer-director Coffey appears to be going for verite-style realism (I'm assuming he's not so arrogant as to place himself in the uber-pretentious Dogme 95 school), but he doesn't seem to realize that in order for any film to work, the result shouldn't come across as a home movie or, in this case, a student film.

Too much time is spent on Ellie in her car, doing all the things that Angelenos do in their cars because they're just too busy to do them elsewhere (applying makeup, changing clothes, practicing their lines, and the universal asshole-identifier, talking on their cellphones) and too self-absorbed to care how it affects their driving or those around them. This works as satire for one scene -- the next four times it occurs it feels just like being stuck in a car behind one of these narcissists, and it's not an enjoyable feeling. There's a related scene about halfway through that's amusingly ironic, but not worth the endurance test.

Just as with the interior car shots, much of the satire is overripe, pushing the irritation factor of nearly every character to its limits, testing the thresholds of both humorous exaggeration and simple tolerance. No satire should leave you wanting to burn the characters and their milieu to the ground (apart from "Day of the Locust", in which Hollywood does in fact burn, deservedly, but in context).

(As an aside, and for a chuckle, this may be the first time Keanu Reeves isn't the most annoying element of a movie he's in. But then, he appears only as a member of his band Dogstar, playing in a club, and he has no lines.) The other key problem is often endemic to film satire: it moves at a snail's pace. Unless you're the rare individual who's both an struggling thespian in Hollywood AND a caring, thoughtful individual, you will probably find yourself yawning a lot more frequently than laughing during this 95 minutes.

For all its drawbacks, though, this is a showcase for Naomi Watts to show how versatile she is, with the verisimilitude of her having to switch between characters, accents, moods, etc. The overall comment, that she doesn't really seem to be herself very often and has no idea who that self really is within the realm of all her "performing," is funny and worth exploring, but Coffey (or someone else) needs a vehicle that's more engaging, clearer about its objectives, and at least somewhat watchable.

"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.

As someone that spent 18 years in the city of Angels, I have met many Ellie Parkers. I adored this little gem, albeit low budget movie, with some of best acting one could feast their eyes on. The scene with Ellie in the car in a complete hyped up, Star Bucks frenzy, smeared with lipstick, banging her head to Blondie and madly shouting out " I wanna suck Vinnie's ####'!!!" in her New Jersey accent, had me rolling on the floor.

For those that know nothing of the dashed dreams of Many desperate Hollywood starlets, and the pure sleaze these women encounter as they try to fulfill their dreams, forget it, you just won't 'get it'. LA is a town, of big talking wannabes and 'Ellie Parker' really led you into that world with it's fake facade and empty promises. Naomi Watts just shines as Ellie Parker. She totally engulfs the screen with her magical expressions of pain, joy, angst, fear, confusion and loneliness.

I felt very empty after the final scene, just as Ellie did. The City of Angels changes you, makes you selfish, egotistical, and almost insane. Ellie knew her pursuit of acting had caused her to become a shell of a person, and as a viewer I really felt her pain.

So it was shot with a cheap camera, big deal. The messages where there, contrary to what many other reviewers said, you just had to be sensitive enough to pick them up.

This film really transported me back to LA, and made me shudder, thanks 'Eliie parker' for reminding me why I left!