Ellie Parker (2005)

The indie Hollywood satire may be nothing new, but through digital video and the dedication of Naomi Watts and Scott Coffey, it finds welcome new life in Ellie Parker. With its unique format and scathing insights into the industry's workaday grind, the film feels like a stylistic and thematic cousin of Time Code, Mike Figgis' daring quad-screen experiment in real-time cinema. But instead of interweaving narratives, it offers a series of potentially non-sequential peeks into Ellie's life, which gather into a satisfying whole. It's almost unnerving how Watts' acting equals the exacting standards of digital video, which tends to weed out false performances because it's such a hyper-real medium. The fact that she's an actress who works tirelessly at perfecting her craft -- and plays that same character -- makes it all the more delicious. But her reactions to the succession of humbling setbacks wouldn't tell the story without Coffey's brilliantly absurdist set pieces. In one, after finishing a too-weird-to-be-fake acting class, Ellie and her friend Sam (Rebecca Rigg) get into a spat about who's the better actor -- to be determined by which one can produce tears first. Their efforts inspire gales of laughter from the audience, yet it's a sadder moment than that, one that reduces them to Pavlovian dogs, willing to drool for whoever will guide them toward the prize. This veteran intelligence doesn't prevent Coffey from occasionally behaving like a recent film-school grad enamored with his new toys. At one point, Ellie eats a bright blue sherbet ice cream cone, for no apparent purpose beyond the aesthetic value of her vomiting it up in the next scene. And the film's overly bitter denouement seems likely to mystify some of its previously contented audience. Still, for a project cobbled together on the cheap over five years, Ellie Parker is rich with bittersweet ruminations on the failure to become somebody. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide