The opening moments of Johnny Greyeyes remind us of why low-budget independent cinema can be so appealing. We see life as it happens to normal people that we rarely see in the movies, in a location that is not New York, L.A., or a California suburb. But as the picture goes on it begins to loose us in an over ambitious structure and underdeveloped characters. By the end the end, we see that the movie is really pointless. There’s just no reason to see it.
The director and co-writer Jorge Manzano, has made the decision to tell the story out of chronological sequence. This can sometimes be a worthwhile approach in pictures like Kill Bill or Memento, but here it just confuses the plotlines and makes the film at times incoherent. It takes an obscenely long time to figure out who everyone is and where we are in the timeline, and what the relevance of most of these scenes are.
As the title suggests, the central figure in the film is Johnny Greyeyes (Gail Maurice), a Native American woman who is getting out of prison after seven years. Although she has a lot of screen time in the picture the movie takes detours to show us the lives of her mother (Gloria May Eshkibok) and brother (Jonathan Fisher), which are sometimes interesting but don’t add up to much. There is also a lot of time showing Johnny in prison, where she begins a lesbian affair with Lana (Columpa Bobb), a lifer. Both are abused by male and female guards, much of which seems rather over the top.
The movie is very low budget, and the prison looks suspiciously like a high school (where I have a feeling it was really shot). Oddly enough, the budget doesn’t actually hurt the film that much, perhaps because we are willing to get into the low-fi spirit of the endeavor.
I think that in conceiving this picture, Manzano was overly influenced by Tarintino and thought that the fact his movie would have a weird structure would make it far more interesting than it is. The raw materials of this story could make a good indie- a kind of Canadian Sling Blade, but nothing is developed enough to bring us into the world of the characters.
Finally, I should state that the specific crime that brought Johnny to prison is not shown or discussed until the end of the film as surprise but is revealed on the back of the DVD cover. That is not a good strategy.
Johnny Greyeyes (2001)