Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Serious Funny: Look Both Ways

Look Both Ways (Kino International, PG-13)

As much as I like big, Hollywood-player heavy films, sometimes a small movie is just right. The director is an unknown property. The stars might as well be people you run into at the gas station. And, when the end product is as good as Look Both Ways, you quickly realize those things couldn't matter less.

Meryl Lee (Justine Clarke) and Nick (William McInnes) are having a crappy day. She just got home from her dad's funeral, he just found out he has cancer, and they meet at the site of a horrible accident. Take that, rom-com-meet-cute.

Look Both Ways is a study in sudden change and how people deal with it. For Nick, this means obsessively going over everything he's ever done that may have lead to his cancer. While Meryl Lee is besieged by images of impending doom: sharks in the community pool, careless drivers that run her over and masked intruders who attack her at home with knives and guns.

Writer/director Sarah Watt has filled her film with simple characters in the midst of life-changing events that stick with you. It also strikes a perfect balance between moments of real-life comedy and pain. Watt realizes that personal experience can turn a character's anguish into the audience's amusement.

Clarke and McInnes are perfect as the mix-matched leads who meet at the perfect time in their lives. Clarke's Meryl Lee is believably lonely and dissatisfied. So often when Hollywood films pick actresses to portray women like her, they are unrealistically gorgeous. Clarke is perfectly pretty, but we have no trouble seeing her as someone with a small, solitary life.

McInnes is ideal as a man with a once exciting, globe-trotting life. He's all rugged-handsomeness and new-found vulnerability. Someone who wouldn't have given Meryl Lee the time of day before the exact time they crossed paths.

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