By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4 cats
Director: Gren Wells
Country: united_states
Year: 2015
Running time: 100
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2962876/combined
Kyle says: “The first line of dialogue in THE ROAD WITHIN takes place during a funeral service, as a young man with Tourette’s Syndrome shouts out at the presiding priest, ‘Shut up, fucking pedophile!’ After a few more wildly inappropriate outbursts, Vincent (Robert Sheehan) storms out of the church where his mother’s funeral is taking place and screams out uncontrollably and repeatedly, ‘FUCKING CUNT! FUCKING FAGGOT!’, hurling himself at the church door as Franz Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’ is heard being sung inside. To say that my attention was instantaneous and total is an understatement.
“Vincent’s father Robert (Robert Patrick) confines him to a facility for the mentally challenged, where his roommate Alex (Dev Patel) is a germ-phobic latex glove-wearing young man who listens to Bach and is horrified to share a room with a young man who shouts ‘RAGHEAD!’ over and over. Vincent encounters the anorexic Marie (Zoë Kravitz), who steals the keys of Dr. Mia Rose (Kyra Sedgwick), and they go on the lam, ostensibly to get away from the clueless confines of the mental health facility, but actually because Vincent has his mother’s ashes in a can and wants to distribute them in the ocean. They are joined in their lunatic escape by Alex, pursued by Dr. Rose and Robert.
“’There’s a clown in my head, and he shits between my thoughts, and he forces me to do the most inappropriate thing at the most inappropriate moment’, Vincent shares with Marie, as they are forced to manipulate and steal their way around the Nevada/California border. Much of the narrative is the standard movie argument that supposedly sane people are infinitely more troubled than those adjudged by society mentally compromised, and the chase structure allows for humor that occasionally strains credulity. We understand that the two adults have limited insight into the problems of the young people, whether those may be lessened by them being on their own, as much as being written that way by the director. But dramatic balance is maintained through delicately nuanced performances by the three young leads. Dev Patel, the best known of the trio, gave the outstanding performance in the otherwise cloying Oscar stew SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (2008); but Zoë Kravitz and Robert Sheehan share with him an easy camaraderie that enables us to care about the well-being of the three, who with director Gren Wells received accolades from numerous international film festivals. An inevitable if still disappointing sentimentality mars the ending; but so many titles of the independent cinema offer next to or less than nothing that it feels churlish to complain. 4 cats
“Seen Tuesday, October 20, 2015, on Netflix, New York.”