A Public Ransom (2014) Reviews

• Fascinating debut feature

  mark_r_harris2014-07-10

  Pablo D'Stair's micro-budget, monochromatic, minimalist neo-noir (how's that for some abstract descriptors?) is more rewarding to watch and think about than many a conventional mainstream film, and I heartily recommend it to the adventurous. I noticed points of contact with Travis Mills' first two features, "The Big Something" and "The Detective's Lover," although the two directors may not know each other's work. Both are operating out of small-city America (D'Stair - Gaithersburg, Maryland, Mills - Tempe, Arizona) and have an eye for the particular scale and atmosphere of these places which film-makers typically ignore, although so many people make their lives in them. Both directors seem to call out a certain deadpan quality in their actors - Goodloe Byron's Bryant in "A Public Ransom" is distinctly reminiscent of supporting male characters in the two Mills features. Both directors draw attention to their framing in a way that that commercial film-makers try to avoid; among D'Stair's a priori decisions for "A Public Ransom" were to shoot everything from stationary camera positions and to hold those positions for fairly long scenes, which naturally throws a focus on the unmoving edge. I'll stay away from straightforward plot summary here, because there is plenty of it in the external reviews. D'Stair has promoted his film energetically to bloggers; that is how I first found out about it. Looking at all those reviews, I notice that even a few of the film's champions get some key points wrong. They almost uniformly note that the film is dense in dialogue, which D'Stair in interviews has acknowledged was very precisely written - no improv here, thanks - but then some of the reviewers seem not to have paid as careful attention to that dialogue as they might. Specifically, in a film with only three on-screen characters, they bobble their descriptions of the key relationship between Carlyle Edwards' Steven and Helen Bonaparte's Rene, his good friend. The two are NEVER romantically or sexually involved; instead, Steven cheats on his unseen wife Lisa with another unseen woman, Deb - he has multiple phone conversations with both of them, and in the last scene Rene explicitly says that there is no way she ever would have become involved with Steven. I thought I'd clear this up because, as you will see if you watch the film, these issues are pretty pertinent to any meaningful discussion of the story. (By the way, "Carlyle Edwards" is D'Stair himself, and I wouldn't be surprised if "Goodloe Byron" and "Helen Bonaparte" are assumed names also, because Carlyle-Byron-Bonaparte, it's just too perfect.) Anyway, the dense dialogue is worth engaging with, the images are worth absorbing, and the movie as a whole has a mesmeric middle-of-the-night quality. The meta-fictional angles are involving, too, since what we have here is a story about not one but two writers who are "collaborating" (sort of) on a story that is partly appropriated from real events that may or may not have been set in motion by the active member of the pair ("Strangers on a Train" with scribes). In the end it's the passive one who seems to come in for harsher moral judgment - but is the character who expresses that judgment standing in for the director? and is the audience meant to share that judgment? Most of the reviewers take it that the answer to both questions is "Yes"; I am not sure, but in any case I did not share the stringent view of the passive writer's inaction. The movie ends on a question mark; each viewer needs to work out his or her own answer.

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