Somewhere Slow: Film Review

An unhappy woman embarks on a journey of self-discovery with a hunky teenager in tow in Jeremy O’Keefe’s aptly titled Somewhere Slow. Starring Jessalyn Gilsig, who also co-produced, this lugubrious drama fails in its essential goal of making us care about its central character’s existential crisis, wasting such estimable talents as Robert Forster and Lindsay Crouse, both barely seen, in the process.

Gilsig (Glee) stars as the forty-something Anne, who early in the proceedings manages to get unceremoniously fired from her dead-end job as a sales rep for a Delaware cosmetic company. Trapped in a loveless marriage to an oblivious husband (David Costabile) and barely on speaking terms with her sister and cancer-ridden mother (Crouse), her unhappiness is all too vividly signaled both by her acne-scarred face and her bulimic tendency to order huge amounts of fast food and immediately throw it up.

Related Stories

Movies

Jordan Peele's Next Movie Set for Christmas 2024

TV

Julianne Hough Rejoins 'Dancing With the Stars' as Co-Host

After witnessing a convenience store robbery in which both the perpetrator and victim wind up dead, Anne impulsively decides to bolt from her oppressive life and board a bus to Maine. Along the way she meets Travis (Graham Patrick Martin), a Mormon teen drifter and gay hustler who explains his penchant for giving false names thusly: “I prefer to be anonymous on my journey of self-discovery.”

After such pit stops as an acrimonious visit to Travis’ drug-taking older friend (Wallace Langham), the mismatched duo steal a car and wind up in a summer lakeside cottage once owned by Anne’s family. Their relationship soon turns romantic, although their respective emotional scars threaten to prevent them from living happily ever after.

The lugubriously paced proceedings, which include such extended episodes as when the couple compares their stone-skipping abilities, might have been more interesting if the central character was a more compelling figure. But Gilsig takes Anne’s disaffectedness too far, delivering a blandly monotonous performance that never succeeds in drawing us in. Her charismatic young co-star is more effective, although he too is ultimately unable to fully compensate for his character’s opaqueness.

Opens: Friday, Jan. 31 (Logolite Entertainment/Screen Media Films)

Production: Logolite Entertainment, D Street Pictures, In Like Flynn Productions, Lady in the Tree Productions, Tax-Free Films

Cast: Jessalyn Gilsig, Graham Patrick Martin, David Costabile, Wallace Langham, Lindsay Crouse, Robert Forster

Director/screenwriter: Jeremy O’Keefe

Producers: Michael Anderson, Christopher Sepulveda, Jessalyn Gilsign, Jeremy O’Keefe

Executive producers: Dexter Davis, Joseph Norton, Adriana Trevino, David Nyblom, Wendy Benge

Director of photography: Justin Talley

Editors: Brian Voelkerding, Marilyn McMahon Adams

Production designer: Lee Tosca

Costume designer: Tasha Goldthwait

Composer: Barry J. Neely

Not rated, 96 min.