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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
"Ellie Parker": A star is born -- but not necessarily overnight
When aspiring Hollywood thespian Ellie Parker (Naomi Watts) is sitting in her agent's office lamenting her languishing career -- the agent is an almost unrecognizable Chevy Chase -- we see a movie poster on the guy's wall. It's for "Living in Oblivion," the semilegendary 1995 Hollywood satire that made director Tom DiCillo a hero to an entire generation of film-industry misfits. "Ellie Parker" is a completely different movie, but like "Living in Oblivion" it was made by someone who has survived the ridiculous Hollywood wars with his essential faculties intact. Not only that, the subtle note of homage made me feel, even more than I did already, that Scott Coffey, the director, writer and costar of "Ellie Parker," is a stand-up guy.
At first, "Ellie Parker" seems artless and chaotic. As I wrote above, Coffey shot it with an ordinary, consumer-level video camera, and for most of the film there's no crew, just him and Naomi Watts (or him, Watts and a cameraman, if Coffey is acting in the scene). So the visual vocabulary mainly consists of the close-up, the extreme close-up and -- every once in a while -- the medium shot containing two or three people, which in this context looks like a vast, wide-screen vista. As Coffey is aware, the film looks like reality TV, so it takes you a while to figure out that it isn't improvised or unscripted or a quasi-documentary about Watts' life.
It isn't any of those things. Instead, it's a tightly structured comedy about a plucky, likable young actress trying to make it in the perverse wonderland of Hollywood, without receiving any clear signals that she's going to. Ellie's neither a dumb-ass nor exceptionally bright; she's talented, but has a mile-wide hambone streak; and like most of us she vacillates wildly from confidence to rampant insecurity, from determination to self-pity, from tough-minded decisions about her life to reckless and stupid ones.
What makes this movie work, both as satire and as pathos, is the obvious intimacy and trust between director and actor. Watts gives a big and fearless performance, showing us Ellie weeping copiously through a mouthful of glazed doughnut, barfing up a bunch of blue-green sherbet after discovering her doofus guitar-hero boyfriend in bed with one of her so-called friends; indulging in splashy bathtub activities with the same doofus boyfriend; and, later, lying in bed with another guy who announces, right after they have sex, "Well, I'm definitely gay."
Ellie also has to change her clothes, apply makeup and practice her Brooklyn accent ("Yeah, I sucked his cawk. I sucked it good! I sucked them all!") while driving from an audition for some trashy Southern gothic to another for an even trashier Noo Yawk scunge-fest. The director of the film is named Smash, looks and dresses slavishly like Jim Jarmusch, and has one of those transatlantic accents you can't quite place. Is he German? Estonian? From Ohio, and faking it? The director of the scunge-fest is "in Vancouver," and Ellie has to do her scene into a video camera, with a 50-year-old woman reading the part of the dude whose cawk she has presumably sucked good.
All of this, along with the acting class where the students have to "practice their animals" while the hard-ass instructor in a poofy sweat suit disappears into the bathroom to do some blow, is pretty funny. But to anyone who has spent even a little time amid the dingy lives and corrupted dreams of the Los Angeles waitron population, it's also disturbingly accurate. I wonder if the secret to successful satire is to pile up the details but never make any individual detail less than convincing. Coffey's script doesn't spare Ellie, either (or himself, as her maybe-schizo, maybe-gay second-string boyfriend): When Ellie and her Aussie pal Sam (Rebecca Rigg) engage in a bitchy acting contest in the car to see who can cry the most "honest" tears -- and then break it off at the sight of a cool secondhand store -- you see that the second-rateness and self-indulgence of the whole enterprise have gotten inside them like a virus.
Does it ruin "Ellie Parker" that in fact its star -- a relative unknown when she began working with Coffey in 2000 -- defied the odds and became the success story that Ellie Parker never will? I don't think so; that's just a functional paradox that allowed the film to be finished and distributed. "Ellie Parker" is the sharpest, most authentic portrait of Hollywood life made in the last several years. (As a movie about contemporary Los Angeles, it's approximately 617 percent better than the monumentally bogus "Shopgirl.") If Scott Coffey now gets to make a movie with a budget larger than what he can find in the dryers at the Silverlake Boulevard laundromat, he better not forget how he got there.
"Ellie Parker" opens Friday in New York, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Calif., and Seattle; Nov. 18 in San Jose, Calif.; Dec. 2 in Dallas, Houston and Washington; and Dec. 9 in Austin, Texas, Boston, Chicago and Miami, with more cities to follow.
