A&E Articles

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.

All too often, doe-eyes from across a room stand in for a credible romantic spark, and it’s only because we have to accept that two characters are in love that we indulge shallow characterizations. For plot’s sake, of course. But the cleverness of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day lies in its being both romantic and comic without obviously falling into the romantic comedy genre trap.

Denmark isn’t Denmark in this adaptation of Hamlet, directed by Alexander Fodor and co-written with Emeke Nwokedi. It’s a child of low-budget necessity set in a room above a pub, door-lined corridors and the odd outdoor settings. The film could have been a theatrical production filmed in someone’s apartment complex or basement. But low-budget isn’t a liability to Fodor, who does the only sensible thing: he makes an art film. Denmark, through Diego Indraccolo overexposed (occasionally unstable) cinematography, inverted colours, and other avant-garde rock-video tricks, takes the ordinary and makes it hallucinatory. It’s as if we’re watching the drama unfold in a kind of timeless, spaceless limbo, a purgatory in which mundane places become haunted spaces with the characters serving as ghosts enacting tragedy in a kind of eternal recurrence. Recalling, at least in the broad strokes, Lars Von Trier’s “Dogville” experiment in which the sets consisted of lines on the floor, the lack of conventionally identifiable locations in Fodor’s Hamlet creates a tingly feeling of claustrophobia and otherworldliness. The drama’s the thing; everything else is supernatural.

Writer/director Ruvin Orbach lands a solid punch in thirty minutes, despite the undefined feeling of deja-vu that comes with circumstances surrounding the moral quandary faced by two brothers entangled with the mob.

Imagine the genie from Disney’s Aladdin as an elephant voiced by Jim Carrey, and that pretty much says it all about the kind of pop-culture humour that laces the film.