SXSW Film Review: Wake
Wake (2010)
SXSW 2010
Directed by: Chad Feehan
Starring: Josh Stewart, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Chris Browning, Angela Featherstone
Studio: The Fort
Review by: Britt Hayes
Paul (Stewart) and Adrienne (Sigler) are on a road trip to Los Angeles for an old fraternity brother’s wedding when Adrienne decides to get a little frisky in the car. While Paul is driving. He almost wrecks the car and the two are visibly shaken, so they decide to seek shelter in a nearby hotel for the evening. I believe Adrienne actually said “You’re tired and I’m horny.” Sound logic to me after a near death experience.
The hotel is void of any other human life besides Frank, the nervous and bumbling inn keeper. In addition to the Paul/Adrienne storyline, we’re also shown a plot involving Frank and his wife, Sandy (Featherstone), which is infinitely more captivating than watching a young pretty couple stuck in a hotel for a night. After Paul and Adrienne get into a fight, Paul walks over to the hotel diner where he has an eerie discussion with a man who seems like he knows a little too much about Paul (in the credits he’s simply called The Man). For the rest of the evening, Paul is tormented by the lingering words of The Man, images of a woman he’s never seen before, and a dark secret in his past that Adrienne doesn’t know about.
The plot is awfully banal, but manages to culminate in a suspenseful climax. Most of the credit goes to the cast. Chris Browning and Angela Featherstone are terrific in their supporting roles, and I wish I had been watching a movie that was only about them for an hour and a half. Frank and Sandy are two heavily affected, very sad characters, and had this been a dramatic piece based on their story, I probably would have enjoyed myself more.
Unfortunately, it was a movie about Paul and Adrienne with a predictable twist and a groan-inducing message. Wake gets off to a slow start (okay by me) and begins layering the stories of these characters in a deliberate way. Director Feehan adds some not-so-subtle surreal and eerie moments that begin to make you question what reality these characters exist in before ramping up to a climax that would have been less interesting if it weren’t for the great performances delivered by the actors.
Chad Feehan is best known for his producing credit on All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, and Wake is his first film as a writer/director. It shows. Feehan knows where he wants this movie to end, but his real issue comes in executing that vision. It seems like he just sort of shrugged during the filming of the last 10 minutes and said, “Just wrap it up. They’ll get it.” Sadly, he’s done the characters and the actors a great disservice in being so careless with those last few scenes. With an ending as surreal as this one, you either go full-force or you don’t go there at all, and as a new director, I think he made the unwise decision of thinking he could pull this off with minimal effort. The result is nothing short of pretentious.
Before the screening, Feehan got up and said that he was heavily inspired by Kubrick’s The Shining, and there were three specific references to The Shining in the film that we should look for. Like I said, pretentious. As a filmmaker, you never want to say to your audience, “I made a movie that is supposed to be similar to this masterpiece of cinema.” First of all, you’re putting negative expectations in the mind of your audience, who will be nothing short of disappointed when your film is nothing like The Shining. Second, the audience will immediately and continuously compare your film to The Shining throughout their entire viewing experience, making it more difficult for them to connect to the film in any tangible way.
As a filmmaker, what you want is for your audience to walk out of the screening and say to their friends without any influence or suggestion from you or your associates that your film was like whatever film you were influenced by. If your intention is for people to think it was similar to The Shining, you don’t tell them that. You just hope that they end up thinking it on their own. It doesn’t help when the first reference you have to The Shining is a person slamming down a pack of “Overlook” brand cigarettes with a picture of a hotel on them. And it really doesn’t help when your film is nothing like The Shining at all after you said it was your biggest influence.
Wake is a tame and underwhelming attempt at a surreal psychological thriller. After a strong climax it loses its footing and its pace, leaving us with a half-baked spiritual message, and in my case, resentment. The acting is strong, the cinematography is well-executed, and Feehan has proved he has ambition. I’m interested in seeing something else from him, but as a first effort, Wake is weak.
