Part of our ongoing coverage of the 2008 South by Southwest film festival.
Two quiet M. Ward tracks make perfect sonic bookends for this fantastic little film about a salesman struggling to make his numbers in the wintry countryside of Northwestern Pennsylvania. At the premiere today DirectorJake Mahaffy said that Wellness uses the modern day pyramid scheme as a metaphor for religion (Christianity, specifically) and the way it requires its adherents to proselytize to others. After seeing it, I think it's worth pondering how he manages to do this without proselytizing to the audience at all. On the contrary in fact. Wellness is deeply poetic and has a strong sense of character despite using all non-actors, most notably lead Jeff Clark who gives an incredibly soulful performance.
Mahaffy told IndieWire he first started making films in order to create worlds and have a sense of control over them, and you can definitely sense this in Wellness. AsThomas Lindsey makes his doomed sales rounds for a product that may or may not actually exist, the milieu is artistically curtailed; Mahaffy only lets in a certain amount of information--both visual and otherwise--and his gives the film a bleakly Zen quality that works perfectly for the subject. Scenes are suffused with the timeless anonymity of small towns in winter, but also studded with subtle references to modern consumer culture, like the incessant rustling of the plastic shopping bags Thomas carries to an ill-fated sales seminar.
The way Mahaffy uses music to cap each end of his film is another hallmark of a director who likes to create and control worlds; Lynch recently did it in INLAND EMPIRE to great effect, and it works well here too. Mahaffy plays the music during the opening scene in which Thomas is climbing a tree to snag one of the abandoned wasps nests he collects, and spins some more Ward at the end when the defeated Thomas falls asleep against the window of the bus he's had to board in order to get home. The wasp nests serve as a beautifully odd symbol of Thomas' battered but still in-tact humanity, and are as organic and mysterious as the bus is synthetic and straight forward. When they appear amidst the Greyhound's brushed nylon seats and blaring radio commercials, the world we humans have built for ourselves seems pretty ridiculous by comparison.
In the course of making the film, I came to think that by failing as a salesman Thomas succeeds at just being a man. So by failing in this material enterprise, no matter how tragic that is, he succeeds at keeping some of his own soul- really despite himself- and that's grace.
Wellness is proof that Mahaffy knows plenty about grace. Here's hoping that this film ends up on as many screens as possible, very soon.
Amazing film- I saw it at the Alamo too. So simple on the surface and still truly profound. Best film here so far!
Posted by: Terry Wilkins | March 09, 2008 at 09:57 AM