Jumping Off Bridges

This was one of three films that I saw at South by Southwest this year (2006), and by far the least enjoyable. Didn't work for a number of reasons. First, an excruciatingly slow introduction. When the teens-dealing-with-suicide theme does finally get moving, the material is, quite honestly, embarrassing. I got the impression that the author of the material was trying to address something that was over her head. I have a teenage kid, but I have a hard time picturing him or any other teenager behaving quite the same way the characters in this film behave. It's more as if an adult psyche was being projected onto a kid. Who is this film going to appeal to? A teenager who can't relate to the main characters because of their behavior, or an adult who can't relate to these characters because of their age?

Bottom line - slow, amateurish, unbelievable.

Still, kudos to the crew of this film for completing something on a presumably small budget.

...it's about suicide. So I'll call it compelling and deeply affecting instead.

I caught this a month or two back on our local PBS station's Saturday night indie movie slot, and was glad I stuck with it. Michael Emerson's presence was a pure gift, and it was so nice to see him as someone other than crazy Ben Linus, King of the "Lost" Island. He was excellent as the well-meaning but essentially clueless widower father, and the young actors were good as well.

The only character who grated on me was the young girl, Grove. She just didn't seem real or even particularly interesting, and at times I found her deeply irritating. The character, not the actress, who did a good job.

But the music. When Sufjan Stevens's "For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti" played all the way through over what was all but a real-time progress from home to school, I cried like a little girl. A gorgeous, moving song, used brilliantly.

I'll be buying this on DVD.

I first thought it was a Canadian film. I had no idea until I read the credits that it was filmed entirely on location in Austin, Texas. This film is quite a gem and treasure about the relationships between a father and son, Frank and Zak Nelson, after the suicide death of the family matriarch. Zak blames himself as does Frank for her death. The father and son moments in the film are alone worth watching. There is no glamor with this largely unknown cast. They do a brilliant job worthy of awards. Zak becomes withdrawn from his girlfriend and his friends as well as his father. He paints his room black to symbolize his mourning. It isn't until a life-changing experience that determines how to live after a family tragedy.

It stands to reason, I suppose, that a movie about depression is one of the most depressing movies I've ever seen. JUMPING OFF BRIDGES, which aired last night on Reel 13, adds insult to injury, however, by not even being a good movie about depression. It is slow, boring, quiet, sparse, ill-conceived and with one exception, poorly acted. I was counting the minutes until it was over (I suppose I could have turned it off, but something in my DNA insists that I watch movies all the way through).

Overall, the downfall of JUMPING OFF BRIDGES is that it isn't very natural in any way. The unnaturally sparse production design can be forgiven in most indies – it's a byproduct of low budget cinema, but unnatural writing/performances are less justifiable. Chiefly, it is the quietness of the film that doesn't ring true. I've always suggested less is more, but director Kat Candler took that concept to an extreme and divorced the film from any energy or any sense of life surrounding the primary characters and hence left the film devoid of the verisimilitude that I believe she was aiming for.

The film deals with four teenagers who cope with a series of tragic events, but the kids don't seem to have any acting training, which can work out fine (see THE 400 BLOWS or May 17th's RAISING VICTOR VARGAS). However, given the emotional territory that these kids were asked to explore, I wonder that it wouldn't have benefited the film to cast young actors with more experience. The film is anchored by the fine performance of Michael Emerson as the father of the main boy. He seems to be the only real actor in the film. While he is best known for his work on LOST, I personally still can't get his performance as Oscar Wilde in the 1997 off-Broadway play GROSS INDECENCY out of my head. As good as I know he is, I still see his Wilde in everything he does, which can be distracting.

Of course, none of the actors are helped by the awfully simplistic writing – there's very little complexity or depth to the scenes. It seems to me that Ms. Candler, who also served as the screenwriter, had a mission or a point to make before she had a story to tell. In other words, I suspect that her life or family has been touched with issues of depression and suicide and she had something to say about it; something to tell the world and she shaped her story around that concept. One has to be careful when approaching a project that way because one can get so wrapped up in what they want to preach that they neglect the basics of strong storytelling. The result is what you get with JUMPING OFF BRIDGES – a glorified after-school special.

(For more information on this or any other Reel 13 film, check out their website at www.reel13.org)

I got to watch this at SXSW (3-11-06), and it was certainly a breath of fresh air. Most mainstream movies are glazed over with frosting. A lot of indie movies seem to stress unnecessarily long scenes with witty sarcasm. Jumping Off Bridges seemed to contain neither of those elements, because life isn't the way it is in movies.

The technical aspects of the movie are easy to handle. The costumes certainly looked real. When I saw the dad in his classroom, I giggled because everyone one of my math teachers dressed just the same. No one in the movie had hip, trendy clothes, and none of them looked alike. The neighborhood that everyone lived in was very much a normal neighborhood. Most movies seem to want to have everyone live in $200,000 homes where everyone has expensive cars and an endless supply of money. The students weren't driving Hummers, Lexus', or Range Rovers. The camera-work was pretty decent, coming from a photographer who pays extra attention to cropping, angles, lighting situations, depth of field, etc. The sound was also very good, especially the original music -- I love piano. The editing was also very good, coming from an editor who also pays close attention to editing in movies.

If you want movies like The Notebook, Forest Gump, Dumb and Dumber, crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, then you won't like this movie.

If you want movies like Pieces of April, Broken Flowers, I Am Sam (Sean Pess should have won the Oscar that year), then you will probably like this movie.