KODACHROME (2017)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
One of my favorite film genres is the road trip movie, especially the American Road Movie of which are far too many examples to draw from. The most recent in memory that is something of a masterpiece is Alexander Payne's seminal 2013 film, "Nebraska," which featured Bruce Dern as a codger looking to collect one million dollars from Publisher's Clearing House. He can't get to the destination by himself so he gets his son, an SNL alum (Will Forte), to drive him there. The point of the film was to expose the life Dern once had, and the future he might have left to live. "Kodachrome" is very much the same movie but with different, sadder notes to play, and we got Ed Harris as the codger and another SNL alum Jason Sudeikis playing Harris's son.
Sudeikis proves once again what a wonderfully subtle actor he is (his role as a coach in "Race" is something to see). Here he plays Matt, a dour, highly sarcastic record executive who has not signed any rock band to the record label in months. After meeting with his boss who is ready to fire him, Matt is given one last chance: sign a rock band known as the Spare 7's in 2 weeks or he is out the door. Making his life more complicated is the arrival of a personal nurse, Zooey (Elizabeth Olsen), to Matt's prick of a father, a world-class photographer, Benjamin Ryder (Ed Harris). It turns out that Benjamin is dying from liver cancer and wants to develop some old Kodachrome rolls of film at a Kansas store (the only one in the country) that is shutting down its business due to the digital age. Matt is more than reluctant to go on this trip since he downright hates his father but since the Spare 7's is performing in Chicago, which is on his itinerary to Kansas, he goes along.
Along the way, slowly but surely, Matt finds it difficult to warm up to his honest-to-a-fault father who smokes pot and loads film in his 35mm camera capturing moments along the way. Matt has an easier time warming up to Zooey, sharing their love of music and choice albums ("Live" the band being one of them, which is a hard band to warm up to) and both realizing that Benjamin's last days do not include any apologies to his own son. One scene involving Matt's aunt where Benjamin admits to an affair, angering Benjamin's brother (Bruce Greenwood, an underrated actor), is tension-filled and upsetting with no resolution. That is what I love about "Kodachrome," the film sticks to Benjamin's faults without sermonizing or moralizing - he is who he is. Ed Harris captures this man's last days without sentimentality and that is a rare thing nowadays. And yet the regret comes through and one of the last scenes between Sudeikis and Harris is a master class in channeling emotion that is unforced.
I do not think "Kodachrome" is quite in the same class as "Nebraska" but so few films are. It is a laid-back film that never forces its narrative or its characters into situations that could be formulaic. Most might see this film as something they have seen countless times before, but not usually with such sincerity and heartbreak (thanks to able direction by Canadian director Mark Raso and a tightly woven screenplay by Jonathan Tropper). As for the actors, Elizabeth Olsen is an adult actress with a magnetism that is hard to forget - her character is not quite a lost soul yet she is searching for her own reality. Ed Harris has always been a formidable presence in movies and the surprise is that Benjamin, despite his flaws as a human being and as a father who can't remember his son's birthday, shows a frail man whose regret was that he was selfish with his work and with himself. Jason Sudeikis gives a truly stunning performance of quiet rage and simmering sarcasm. There is one special visual moment that shows him sitting at his front doorstep with framed mirrors and picture frames in the background. One mirror frame shows the car with his father arriving. Considering Matt's office has no family pictures shows that reality has set in, it is high time for Matt to not be selfish either. Both men enter this trip knowing but never quite admitting that their souls need some tinkering.
Distributed by Netflix after premiering at the Toronto Film Festival in late 2017, "Kodachrome" is the kind of auspicious film that gets buried under the Superhero rubble with no viable theatrical release. Netflix did a great thing acquiring this film but it is only viewable on their streaming service. It is the dawn of a new era where even Martin Scorsese's next mob film will be directly streamed on their service as well, not to mention Orson Welles's no-longer-ill-fated 1970's film "The Other Side of the Wind." Netflix does a world of good for filmmakers lately so this is hardly an admonishment of them, only the industry that has longer-termed goals with bigger-budgeted blockbusters. "Kodachrome" is a shiny diamond in the rough that deserves a lot more attention than it is getting, just like Kodak film.
