Made on a less-than-shoestring budget, One follows two friends at a critical juncture in their lives -- Charlie (Jason Cairns, who has kind of a Christopher Walken thing going) has just gotten out of jail and moved into his friend Nick's parents' basement (into a room the family refers to as "the cat's room," which I found hilarious but no one else did), where Nick (Kane Picoy) himself lives after having blown a shot at a promising major-league baseball career. Nick discontentedly drifts along, working as a garbageman, but Charlie immediately starts trying to turn his life around. The pair seem to be coasting on an old friendship anyway, and this divergence in ambition gradually widens the rift between them. The movie, or rather, the movie's website, asks, "Is a downward spiral that easy to break? Can any friendship survive the strain if that spiral can't be broken? At what stage, if any, does loyalty become a form of poison?" (Yes, these sound like book-club discussion questions, but trust me, they really help form your thoughts about the film.)
One takes its time unfolding. We get the backstory on Nick and Charlie gradually -- there are no forced expository speeches along the lines of "So, you've gotten out of jail, where you were sent because you did this bad thing." Equally unobtrusive and elegant is the camera work -- I especially loved a scene where the focus ever so slowly changes from Charlie and his girlfriend lying in bed to a joint in an ashtray in the foreground. It's so gradual that you don't realize it's happening for a while, and there's a long stretch where everything's blurry, which is disconcerting until you realize it's intentional. It's hard to describe, but it's very cool.
Don't expect car crashes or fireworks -- this is a deliberately spare film that focuses on the evolution of two young men's lives. Don't let that description scare you away, either -- it's not some navel-gazing, metaphysical, self-conscious film school exercise full of fatuous soliloquys. It's clever and funny, but not in a flip, Kicking and Screaming way. It's so simply done that you feel you know these two guys. In fact, director Tony Barbieri gives us an ominous hint early in the movie that some bad thing will happen. Then, for a long time, you don't feel the threat, but when it surfaces again towards the end, you find yourself hoping the bad thing will stay away from Charlie and Nick, Chekovian story-telling conventions be damned.
You know, the more I think about this movie, just over the time it's taken me to write this review, the more I like it. Charlie is a winning character, and even Nick, with whom we're not really supposed to sympathize, is so charismatic that you find yourself wishing the best for him. The ending is abrupt and sort of a cop-out, but it's satisfying, poignant, and refreshingly unsentimental. Yes, I'm going to definitely recommend this one. Just don't procrastinate seeing it, or it may be gone.
In closing, I'll quote from the film's production notes on the
website,
lines that seemed self-important and pompous to me before I saw the
movie,
but that now seem to encapsulate it elegantly. "In life, one is
blessed
to have even one outstanding talent, to have (and keep) even one
lifelong
friend, find, or win, even one shot at redemption."
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