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Easier with Practice
| Released |
7 January 2011 |
| Director |
Kyle Patrick Alvarez |
Starring
|
Brian Geraghty, Kel O'Neill, Marguerite Moreau, Jeanette Brox, Jenna Gavigan, Katie Aselton |
| Writer(s) |
Kyle Patrick Alvarez |
| Producer(s) |
Cookie Carosella |
| Origin |
United States |
| Running Time |
100 minutes |
| Genre |
Drama |
| Rating |
16 |
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Hang up.
To love a film you don’t need to love the central character, or even like them. They must provoke some feeling though; to make an impact for better or worse. Herein lies the fatal flaw of Easier with Practice -at its centre is a gaping personality void called Davy (Brian Geraghty).
An official synopsis of the film would go something like this. Davy is a struggling writer touring small book stores with his boorish younger brother Sean. A cripplingly shy intellectual, Davy finds it difficult to form relationships, especially with women. One night in a lonely motel, Davy gets a call from a mysterious woman called Nicole and the pair begin a strange love affair conducted entirely over the phone.
My own take on things is a little different. Davy, in fact has all the depth of a puddle. He wears the uniform of the shy intellectual with his sensible cardigans and school boy haircut but it is a costume worn by a deeply uninteresting man in an attempt to explain away his failures. We are also asked to accept that it is his crippling shyness that stands in the way of a normal relationship with a woman; that he only finds freedom to be intimate with someone when the relationship is removed from the physical with his lover on the other end of a phone. This is all rubbish; the reason Davy has had so little success with women is that he treats them horribly. We see this in the superior disgust with which he treats the girl that attempts to chat to him in a bar to the unspecified crime committed against Samantha -a vivacious and attractive woman who is unaccountably interested in Davy. The relationship with Nicole represents a fantasy both of himself and of his perfect woman and an excuse not to make an effort with anybody flesh and blood.
To summarise, spending time in Davy’s company was mostly dull with the occasional burst of irritation. This should have led to some schadenfreude at the ending but at that stage I had little interest in how Davy fared. I can’t go into details here but what was clearly pitched for maximum shock effect felt more like being hit around the face with wet bread. Though first time director Kyle Patrick Alvarez shows some promise here with a nice eye for framing, he cannot possibly lift the film from under the crushing weight of its protagonist.
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Linda O’Brien |
