Frownland 1 1/2 stars
Dore Mann, Mary Wall, Paul Grimstad, David Sandholm, Paul Grant
Directed by Ronald Bronstein
There are those who swim against the current, those who drift aimlessly through life, and then there's Keith (Mann), a hapless slacker who has resigned himself to an existence spent firmly entrenched on a dark sea floor of his own creation. He's unable to connect with anyone or commit to anything—he can't even ensure his electricity doesn't get shut off—and his life consists solely of stammering through conversations and lighting cigarette upon cigarette. Before hipsters and the modern "starving artist," Keith exemplified the true sad sack: one foot in the gutter, lacking all ambition and suffering from crippling social retardation.
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Bronstein's gritty detailing of Keith's every twitch and grimace likewise fails to connect or commit, moving at a glacial pace and revealing next to nothing about what makes the protagonist and his aquaintances tick. Not much happens between the quiet moments and the even quieter moments, and there are few life lessons to learn from this ponderous mortality play.
Frownland's not uncomfortable because it hits too close to home. It's uncomfortable because there's nothing breathed back into the film's final, chokehold-like release—not that the steady stream of walk-outs gave it much of a chance to.