Review: Wait Up Harriet
The deus ex machina in “Wait Up Harriet” makes a near-literal appearance in the story of a depressed widower, a firefighter named Jake (Benfield), presented like Saul on the road to Damascus. The endlessly turning machine of grief, the monumentally dull grind of a grieving character, only shrieks to a stop when the screenwriters drag in religion. But not only religion. As Jake isn’t initially convinced by the bribe to believe in God to avoid everlasting hellfire and receive, instead, a happy and heavenly reunion with his dead wife, he is subjected to a mystical dream experience to drive home the epiphany. It’s theologically silly, convincing only to the already convinced, and it involves the inevitable angry-at-God cliché defined by a whiny “Why, God, why? You abandoned me! You suck!” But worse yet, it’s a cop-out for screenwriter Hanna Eichler, who struggles to pull Jake out of his deep, deep funk only to get mired in the quicksand of a drab character portrait and magical problem solving.
Jiggly and Lacking Dash
A lack of cinematic feeling is at work; Angus Benfield and Eichler’s utilitarian direction saps the drama out of an inherently dramatic premise. Surprise revelations, thankfully not involving infidelity but hardly any better, feel like too little, too late – the kind of information that, if revealed earlier in the story, would have jumpstarted much-need emotional fireworks. As it is, we get a mopey Jake, flashbacks to happier times with wife Harriet (Cannan), and more moodiness as he pushes his son away and resists the friendship of Harriet’s spiritual mentor. The cast is game for the potential drama, with Lynda Milligan standing out as a kind of Mary Poppins for the soul. Yet in a film that lacks visual and written panache – jiggly, compositionally boring cinematography is a particular nuisance – the actors feel underutilized.
Even with budget considerations in mind, one can ask, where is the melancholy of “The Hours?” Where is the passion, let alone metaphysical fantasy, of “What Dreams May Come?” “Wait Up Harriet” certainly expresses the restlessness of it all, but sorrow requires morbid rapture as well as rut, a certain amount of melodrama just to keep things from drying up. Lyricism, in other words. Cue Tennyson: “Something it is which thou hast lost,/Some pleasure from thine early years./Break thou deep vase of chilling tears,/That grief hath shaken into frost!” There are moments of interest, to be sure. A spark of something, tenderness. Unquestionably, “Wait Up Harriet” is very earnest, but that’s not enough to save the film from its flatness.
Entertainment Value: no stars
Technical Quality: * (out of two)
Wait Up Harriet. Written by Hanna Eichler. Directed by Angus Benfield and Hanna Eichler. Starring Angus Benfield, Melanie Canna, Lynda Milligan, Mitch Potts and Nick Prince. 113 minutes. Released to DVD on April 28. Visit Echelon Studios (www.echelonstudios.com) for information.