Austin Film Festival: ‘Fallen Stars’ (FILM REVIEW)

It’s hard to be critical of a movie that was made with such earnestness and heart. In Fallen Stars, which had its world-premiere at the Austin Film Festival, writer/director Brian Jett crafts an uncomfortably empty world, focusing on the abyss that lies between listless, 30-something bartender Cooper and listless, 20-something Daisy, whose purple highlights meets Patton Oswalt’s Hollywood criteria of “weird, crazy girl.”

“She keeps her records in orange crates. She’s crazy!”

While the film retreads much of what was previously explored in films like Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, it does manage highlight a stronger sense of alienation by having both characters remain in the city in which they live, rather than one they’re visiting. Without any sort of star-gazing fascination in the whimsy of being surrounded by another culture, the film does succeed in striking a nerve by showing two characters from similar, but strikingly different, generations, who are nonetheless affected by the same boredom and anxiety.

It falls short in the dialogue, which taken line by line all seem true-to-life, but somehow loses its luster on screen. That same problem carries over into the casting, which is pleasantly diverse, but ends up suffering from shades of stereotyping, particularly in the harsh, broken English of the Asian bar owner, the thrice-divorced, joke-telling and martini-swirling businessman, (Leslie David Baker, better known as Stanley from The Office). Playing the de facto Norm of the film’s bar, he and the other secondary characters all seem to blissfully go about their knowingly boring lives, but have somehow saved themselves from the anguish of thinking about it.

All this aside, it is genuinely difficult to completely invest in a film that so singularly resorts to the ‘white guy just trying to figure some stuff out right now’ trope. Particularly when these issues are ‘resolved,’ even temporarily, in the arms of a much younger lover.

In all fairness, when Cooper and Daisy do share screen time, their complete lack of fulfilling interaction seems to work a little too well, coming off as uncomfortably frustrating. The two fail to have one single conversation, making the entire film seem like an exhibition of self-loathing and codependence. Ryan O’Nan is believable enough as a disaffected bartender who owns way too many jackets for only having one pair of pants, and Michelle Ang seems to lose herself in the role of Daisy, though it’s hard to tell if the film holds itself together through its chasms of silence. Which may have been the point.

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