There isn’t much of a plot to Desert Blue. Kate Hudson plays Skye Davis, a rising actress who gets dragged around the country by her over enthusiastic father, Lance (John Heard), to see roadside attractions. Their latest excursion is to Baxter, California to see the world’s largest ice cream cone. While in Baxter, a tanker carrying the secret ingredient to a new soda overturns on the main road and the driver is coated in the liquid. He dies shortly afterwards prompting the authorities, lead by FBI agent Frank Bellows (Michael Ironside) to quarantine the town until they can discover what killed the driver and if it is contagious. The locals, most of whom never leave town anyway aren’t too happy now that they’re told they can’t leave. The remainder of the film plays out like a slice of life drama filled with emotionally damaged people and stereotypical small town folks.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the setup for this story. The main problem is in its execution. Everything is a setup for something else and it’s all heavily telegraphed. A prime example of this is with the character of Ely (Christina Ricci). Ely is the town arsonist, a young girl who has a connection out of state who helps her acquire things like explosives and supplies to make pipe bombs. Just prior to the events of the film the local motel burns down taking somebody with it. The insurance claims arson and the sheriff, Ely’s father, believes she did it. This is an obvious red herring, so much so that, had it turned out to be Ely after all, it would have been a bigger surprise than what actually happened. The same goes for most characters in the film. Skye starts out as snobbish and stand-offish with the local kids and will end up falling for one of them, Blue (Brendan Sexton III), enough to avoid taking a call from her agent in order to ride off on a four wheeler with him metaphorically into the sunset. This is character development in its most basic form.
With the story basically non-existent and the characters mostly one-note all that leaves for us as an audience is the actors themselves and this is where Desert Blue shines the most. Most everybody is stellar in portraying roles underwritten for them. Kate Hudson’s Skye is utterly believable as the spoiled daughter out of her comfort zone. She sells us on the frustrations of possibly missing the audition of her life because she is stuck behind a quarantine. Her icy demeanor only begins to thaw when she starts to spend some time with the other teens in town and starts to see them as real people with their own issues. Likewise Brendan Sexton III is a fundamentally broken young man who has recently lost his father. He wants to continue his father’s dreams of building a water park in the middle of nowhere despite everyone telling him it’s just a pipe dream and will never succeed.
Rounding out the cast are Casey Affleck as Peter, a four-wheeler enthusiast missing out on an important race, and Ethan Suplee as Cale, a young man with a crush on the girl working at the sole convince store, Sandy. Sara Gilbert gets a few scenes here, too, antagonizing the FBI agents but not much else.
Slice-of-life films can work but they need to really get you invested in the characters and their stories. Without that they just become unsatisfying and shallow. That is the case here. What little we get here is interesting in and of itself but it’s just not enough to be worth the journey. The characters are shallow and lack clear motivations. Ely sets off explosives but we never know why. Blue is obsessed with building the water park but, aside from some dialogue about his father’s plans, we don’t understand why he’s so driven to do so. Lance is given no backstory about why he likes driving around looking at obscure monuments. Cale’s romantic attraction to Sandy is surface level deep at best and the only thing we really learn about Sandy is she likes to compare herself to the standee model her father puts up in the store. It’s cute, but that’s where it stops.
Looking at Desert Blue as a whole is a bit disappointing. It has a lot going for it including a very good cast. But really that’s all it has. It’s mostly just ninety minutes of people being angry, depressed or dysfunctional while waiting to be allowed to leave, kind of like us as an audience waiting for the film to end so we, too, can leave. The journey isn’t awful but it’s not really worth the time it takes to get there. As a story it’s functional but it’s not fun. Even as a curiosity it suffers from just how shallow it all is. Ultimately it’s best forgotten as a film; an actor’s reel best used to promote the cast for future, better, projects.
Directed By: Morgan J. Freeman
Comments
Post a Comment