Review: Personal Velocity: Three Portraits (2002)
Steve Rhodes
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2002 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): *** 1/2
PERSONAL VELOCITY: THREE PORTRAITS, written and directed by Rebecca Miller, is
more like a great reading experience than it is a movie. Telling three brief
but powerful stories about women with relationship problems, PERSONAL VELOCITY
makes you feel like you're reading a great compendium of short stories in which
vibrant images literally burst from the pages. The screen seems less like a
physical medium and more like an extension of your subconscious. Enhancing your
"reading" experience is the insightful and frequent narration by John
Ventimiglia. After a while, you'll be convinced that his voice is your inner
thoughts speaking to you.
You will be impressed by the strong acting talent that appears in these images
that you have created in your mind. Kyra Sedgwick plays Delia, a white trash
mother with an abusive husband. Parker Posey plays Greta, a Harvard educated
editor who suffers from her own fidelity issues. And Fairuza Balk plays Paula,
an ex-runaway who befriends an abused runaway. Each actress is terrific, but
Sedgwick and Posey are given the best developed material with which to work.
Delia became the town slut in high school so that she could use sex as her
personal weapon of power. In a couple of frighteningly realistic scenes of
spousal abuse, the film shows that Delia is no longer in a position of power,
which is surprising given that she once won a bar fight by breaking a chair over
a guy's head. "She felt the other women's suffering like a vortex, pulling them
into her own suffering," the narrator tells us when she finally seeks support in
a women's shelter. The movie can also be quite funny. When she goes to work as
a waitress, Delia keeps control over her environment with a strange moral
compass. "If anyone was ever rude to her," the narrator explains, "she spat in
their food -- sounded fair. She never did this if she had a cold."
The daughter of a bitter, hard driving father (Ron Leibman) who is a famous
lawyer, Greta is a bit embarrassed to be working as merely a cookbook editor.
She has a great husband who is employed as a fact checker for the New York
Times. It's really a perfect marriage, but she is burdened with her father's
infidelity genes. In this episode's most telling scene, Greta grasps her
husband's shoulder from behind, and sheds an unseen tear. She is scared and
saddened because she realizes, "She was going to dump her beautiful husband like
a redundant paragraph."
The final episode just doesn't have the depth of writing of the first two but is
still good as Paula tries without much luck to help an abused kid. PERSONAL
VELOCITY is such a wonderful experience that it may tempt you to give up movies
entirely in favor of the written word.
PERSONAL VELOCITY: THREE PORTRAITS runs a fast 1:26. It is rated R for "brief
violence, some strong sexuality and language" and would be acceptable for
teenagers.
The film opens nationwide in the United States on Friday, December 13, 2002. In
the Silicon Valley it will be showing at the Camera Cinemas.
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Email: Steve....@InternetReviews.com
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Laura Clifford
-----------------
Delia (Kyra Sedgwick, "What's Cooking?") still loves her abusive husband
but has to face his impact on their kids. Cookbook editor Greta (Parker
Posey,
"The Anniversary Party") takes the opportunity to live up to the potential her
famous lawyer father demanded of her. Paula (Fairuza Balk, "Almost Famous")
runs away from New York City after a freak accident and comes to terms
with her troubled childhood. In writer/director Rebecca Miller's Sundance
2002 Jury Grand Prize winner, three women have all reached "Personal
Velocity."
"Personal Velocity" is one of those quiet films whose impact sneaks up
on you gradually. Miller, who adapted her novel for the screen, has
subtly linked her three vignettes with common themes that may not be
initially evident, but her heavy use of narration (by John Ventimiglia,
"Series 7: The Contenders") has a negative impact on her film, making
it ofttimes feel like an audio book with pictures.
In each segment, a female character is making a change in a lifestyle
rooted in her relationship with her father (Miller dedicates the film
to her mother). A quicksilver look of disdain from Delia results in a
sudden and explosive beating from husband Kurt (David Warshofsky, "Don't Say
a Word"). As Delia makes her decision to pack up her kids and leave,
Miller flashes us back to Delia's childhood with hippy dad Pete
(Brian Tarantina, "City by the Sea"), so laid back that he relaxes in
his living room smoking pot and listening to visiting 7th Day Adventists
- until one of them oversteps his bounds and is beaten. Delia develops
sexual power which gains her a loving husband, until the power is reversed.
After leaving him, she regains the upper hand with Mylert (Leo Fitzpatrick,
"Kids"), a teenage cretin who gets his comeuppance in an amusing way.
Greta is a law school dropout married to the nurturing, nonjudgmental
Lee (Tim Guinee, "John Carpenter's Vampires"), a man 'who will never
leave her.' When, out of the blue, Greta's suspicious boss Mr. Gelb
(Wallace Shawn, "Curse of the Jade Scorpion") tells her she's been
requested to work with best selling author Thavi Matola (Joel de la Fuente,
"Return to Paradise"), we begin to learn that Greta has 'a problem with
fidelity' that began weeks before her wedding. Greta's new success
brings out her sexual prowess, and, following in the footsteps of father
Avram (Ron Leibman, "Auto Focus"), who abandoned her mother for a younger
woman, Greta's new confidence makes her realize she must shed her crutch,
the nice guy husband.
Pregnant and panicky, Paula picks up a young boy, Kevin (Lou Taylor Pucci),
as she drives 'aimlessly' in a beeline to her mother's house in upstate
New York. Mother Celia (Patti D'Arbanville, "Celebrity") listens to a
strange tale burble out of her daughter, who met a Norwegian video exec
who seemed to be her soul mate, only to have him snatched away
in a freak accident the same evening (Delia and Greta have
heard reports of this accident, another linking device to this trilogy).
Paula's flight and confusion over this event mirrors her reaction to her
abandonment by her father as a child. Mom's current boyfriend Peter
(David Patrick Kelly, "K-PAX") is 'just like dad, only uglier,' says
Paula. As Paula's NYC boyfriend Vincent (Seth Gilliam, "Courage Under Fire")
tries to convince her to come home, Paula realizes Kevin, her first
hitchhiker, is an abused child. Once Paula has convinced Vincent to
let the young boy stay with them, she feels free to return with her
unborn child.
Miller weaves strands within and without her trilogy, yet each episode
has a distinct tone attributable in large part to the actress who anchors
it. Kyra Sedgwick has never been better as Delia, a tough, gritty
blue collar mom with fragile beauty and a steel spine. When Sedgwick
breaks down sobbing, that pain is coming from a deep place. Posey's
performance is more mischievous, flighty and flirty, but still weighed
with regret. Balk regresses into a childishness that makes Paula a
real innocent, suitable for the fear of abandonment themes of her piece.
Cinematographer Ellen Kuras ("Blow") creates images like memories, from
opening shots of a child's swing set to the home movie feel of her interiors.
Odd angles are used to varying degrees of effect, however, with some
needlessly arty and pretentious, while those interiors also suffer from
a preponderance of haze.
"Personal Velocity" is more a work of literature than cinema, with
images that look like large format paperback book jackets, but the
source material is thought provoking and the actresses worth watching.
B-
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David N. Butterworth
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 2002 David N. Butterworth
*** (out of ****)
The full title of Rebecca Miller's "Personal Velocity" is "Personal
Velocity:
Three Portraits" and that better defines what the film is all about-- three
snapshots of three quite different yet similarly independent women on the run
from what life has dealt them--domestic abuse, marital ambivalence, and
familial
rejection--bang bang bang, one after the other with no questions asked.
The film runs about 90 minutes and each woman, each portrait, is given
equal screen time (I didn't clock each segment but it certainly felt that way)
and it's done simply and straight and well.
There's a sequence in the third segment that's referred to via a radio
broadcast in the first two but other than that there's no clever linkage or
forced ties between the stories other than the theme of three women trying to
escape the troubles of their respective lives--how many filmmakers would have
brought our protagonists together at the end, or pointed out that they were
all sisters, for example (they're not)? Credit the director for not taking
the easy way out. In that regard each story stands alone, as an individual
(if aggravatingly short) film unto itself.
The overall film's strengths include its poetic passages (Miller based
"Personal Velocity" on her book of the same name and her keen writing style
is very much in evidence; she's the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller so
she comes by this talent honestly) and its casting: Kyra Sedgwick, Parker
Posey,
and Fairuza Balk are all excellent. Less effective is a sub-standard
voiceover
(by John Ventimiglia; a woman would have seemed a more empathetic choice) that
grows on you after a while but shouldn't have to, some predictably shaky
hand-held
camera shots that scream "low budget!" and, oddly enough, too little
definition.
The actors are so comfortable with the material, and the director equally
comfortable with her performers, that a mere half an hour (on average) to tell
each tale feels like a rip off. Just when you're beginning to get into each
portrait, it ends.
In "1. Delia" Sedgwick ("Phenomenon," "Singles") plays a spunky, working
class mother of three who finally ups and leaves her abusive husband, moving
her brood to a part of upstate New York where she can recapture the sexual
power
she had as a teenager. In "2. Greta" Posey ("The Anniversary Party," "Best
in Show") is a bottom-rung Manhattan copy editor who hits it big when a famous
(and particularly attractive) author requests her services. Her newly found
fame and fortune forces Greta to question her relationship with her terminally
nice husband. And in "3. Paula" Balk ("Almost Famous," "The Waterboy") heads
home to her estranged family carrying the child of a boyfriend she no longer
seems to want. On the way she picks up a young hitchhiker who bears more than
a few scars of his own.
There's definitely no fat here; Miller has pulled the good stuff and
found
the right women to deliver her goods. And while "Personal Velocity" (as a
work
of cinematic fiction) doesn't always have the maturity to stand up to its own
convictions, Sedgwick, Posey, and Balk make the whole experience ultimately
worthwhile.
--
David N. Butterworth
d...@dca.net
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