For Ellen, 2012.
Written and Directed by So Yong Kim
Starring Paul Dano, Jon Heder, Margarita Levieva, Jena Malone, Shaylena Mandigo and Dakota Johnson.
SYNOPSIS:
Aspiring rock star Joby Taylor finally agrees to sign divorce papers with his estranged wife but discovers he is about to forfeit all custody of his six-year-old daughter Ellen. Even though he has never been in his daughter’s life, Joby suddenly realises he’s not ready to give up his right to fatherhood and aided by his good natured lawyer he sets across a wintry U.S landscape to try and see her before it is too late.
[Mr Hatch joined me again for For Ellen and has given a few words at the bottom of my review. Aren’t I kind?]
Watching this film made me release that my vision of divorcing and child custody battles were covered in a crispy saccharine Hollywood coating. What So Yong Kim (In Between Days, Treeless Mountain) did too that vision was smash it into jagged shards of loss and hurt.
We start with Joby Taylor (Paul Dano; There Will Be Blood, Looper) arriving at his family’s rather small town to finalise the remaining strands of his divorce with his estranged wife. Joby decided six years ago to follow his desire of becoming a rock star, leaving behind his life as a husband and father to live his dream. However, this dream is dragged with a huge emotional yank to the ground as he discovers that his daughter, who he has little to no involvement with, will be taken from him in the divorce proceedings. It dawns on him at that not everybody waits as you walk, alone, on your path. Throughout the film he battles to get time to be with his daughter, in the end using his only trump card to get two hours to be a father and no more. It’s then when the saying, “it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” is pulled into question when it is shown what his dream chasing has brought him and what it has left him with.
For Ellen is a beautiful and interesting film. I enjoyed it as a film, even though the subject matter was not something I like to think about. You realise how lonely the world could be with a wrong decision made. Shots are framed extremely close to the main character, to the point where you felt like you were perched on Joby’s shoulder watching his life slowly play out as his house of ‘rock star’ cards slowly begins to tumble around him. This is then aggressively off-set by the ‘snap to’ horizon shots of the surrounding landscape; you have spent so long being crammed into a small scene with the protagonist that your brain jumps. For the first hour however little happens, but this is not an overly bad thing, I constantly gripe about the force feeding of action that Hollywood crams down my throat at the cinema but here we spend empty moments looking at Paul Dano as he inwardly acts. Moments feel improvised or So Yong Kim has allowed a scene to be played out with a forgotten line. When the initial hour passes the film flows better and tighter and with more emotion.
There is humour in For Ellen too – the largest proportion of it coming when Joby has dealings with his Lawyer Fred Butler (Jon Heder; Napoleon Dynamite, Surfs Up) – but running through the film are small scenes of real life situations which make you laugh – not necessarily belly laughing, but laughing with a smile. As a father, one of the most humuorous moments for me was when Joby was taking Ellen (Shaylena Mandigo) around a toy shop and the pace Ellen walks took me straight back to taking my own girls shopping with a £10 “birthday money” note in their hand.
From the pen of Mr Hatch:
For the first hour or so For Ellen meanders along a little too much. It kind of felt like Fargo meets Kramer vs. Kramer, but once it focuses itself on the estranged father/daughter dynamic then the film clicks into gear. Paul Dano and Shaylena Mandigo’s performances really stuck a chord; Dano conveys a number of emotions with ease, the kind of actor you can’t take your eyes off and she had a natural vulnerability, which really helped him step up to the plate as Mandigo’s on screen father, who for her film debut was excellent. John Heder’s character adds a quirky humour to the scene he’s in and Dano’s dancing to Whitesnake is interesting to say the least! A great character driven film, which when it gets into its stride tugs at the heart strings.
Flickering Myth Rating: Film ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★ ★ ★
Villordsutch is married with kids and pets. He looks like a tubby Viking and enjoys science fiction. Follow him on Twitter.
Originally published June 3, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
