Robert’s self-absorption, and inability to understand the eccentricities of those around him (a version of how his parents treat him), comes to a head with his attempts to get Wallace to help him with his drawing technique. Veteran character actor Matthew Maher, left in photo, is appropriately menacing as Wallace, the comic book “assistant colorist” from whom Robert (Daniel Zolghadri), right, seeks help. Played to menacing perfection by veteran character actor Matthew Maher (most notably seen in TV series, such as 2018’s “Mozart in the Jungle”), Wallace is at once threatening and pathetic, presenting a challenge to Robert to relate to someone who is unpredictable and yet who offers the young artist something he craves. Thirty-year-old writer and director Owen Kline, in his debut feature film, moves beyond farce when Robert meets the disturbed, talented comic “assistant colorist” Wallace. The parents are caricatures (although also frighteningly realistic in their desires for their child’s success), as are most of the strange misfits-there are more than just the two in the basement. Using Dante as our guide, Robert’s move looks like it’s from Purgatory to Hell, to an under-class nightmare, but it’s more like Hell to Heaven for the teenager, who finally has shed the parental and school-life chains for what seems to him total freedom and a nurturing environment for his alternative sensibility, even as it means sweating profusely in a shared, noisy, dark room underground. To pursue this passion and make his giant leap, Robert abruptly moves out of the middle-class home in Princeton, New Jersey, that he shares with his controlling, frustrated parents, and into an overheated basement in Trenton that he shares with two-let’s call them what they are-weirdos (the startling Michael Townsend Wright and Cleveland Thomas Jr.). According to his teacher, one of the few people he relates to, he’s on track to be the Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant of the comics world. Robert is obsessive in his passion for drawing comics, of the underground genre. Daniel Zolghadri, who is rarely off-screen, makes this protagonist not only believable, but fascinating. The high-school senior-though when we meet him he’s about to drop out, precipitously-is a bevy of contractions: thoughtful and uncaring, naïve and shockingly mature, nasty and nice, self-centered and engaging. The trajectory for Robert, a disaffected, driven, and often unlikeable 18-year-old, is not so much the standard coming-of-age arc as a giant leap from childhood into adulthood. A Portrait of the Artist as a (Selfish) Young Man
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |