Progressive Wednesday

The TGIF Movie Review: Ellie Parker

Let me start by saying that Ellie Parker was not produced by the Los Angeles Board of Tourism. Much of the picture painted by this Stealth Bomber of under-the-radar independent films is of a city that can dismantle the dreams of the weak-willed. (It’s no accident that a movie theater in Ellie Parker is showing the eponymous The Day of the Locust, a film based on the grotesque novel by Nathaniel West, which sticks So-Cal on a spit like a pig.)

However, this 2005 flick — apparently set during the late 90s based on the clunky cell phones — is less an indictment of L.A. as it is an engaging portrait of a woman, Ellie Parker (played exquisitely by Naomi Watts), who isn’t sure what she pines for: a career as an actor or a happy life, two things she seems to believe are mutually exclusive. At the same time, she’s neither personally content, nor professionally “successful.”

What we see feels like an authentic glimpse into the life of a struggling actor: the anxious rush of back-to-back auditions; the obligatory “That was good. We’ll get back to you.”; the discreet inveigling; and the shape-shifting of those who entertain and inform our lives through their art. Shot exclusively with a digital hand-held camera, the movie takes on a useful, visual realism: it almost looks like a documentary, one that moves from intense drama to occasional dark comedy.

As Ellie speeds from one audition to the next, we feel her nervousness, and we feel ourselves rooting for her, someone who is actually a fictional character. Ellie does her make-up and changes clothes while driving on the notorious L.A. highways. She practices her lines in the rear-view mirror, trying one version after another, criticizing herself out loud along the way. She and her best friend have a race to see who can cry more authentically first. There’s a bit of an ugly love story lingering here, but that seems less a classic Hollywood requirement of films, and more about the loneliness we all can suffer.

At one point, Ellie, during a therapist appointment, reveals her central dilemma, one most of us once understood or currently understand: “I feel like I’m waiting for my life to start. Like all that’s going on now is a big rehearsal.” And later she asks: “Remember when the future was a promise? Now it’s like a threat.” As someone who struggled for a decade to figure out what he wanted to do with his life, I couldn’t help but nod, and then nod again.

Ellie Parker reminds us that to be an artist, of any kind, involves a kind of emotional philanthropy, and that to be a viewer involves an unfortunate willingness to ignore the real lives of the people creating the fictions we relate to and, therefore, adore.

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Editor’s note: This trailer ain’t PG.