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  • Dialogue, Nuance, and Subtlety Everyone’s Depressed
  • Robert Fyne

As a cinematic anomaly, the low-cost, bare-to-the-bones independent motion pictures—those shoestring screenplays generally put together with unknown actors and limited financial support—offer a wonderful respite from their high-powered, the sky's the limit, Hollywood cousins because these meager productions never contain elaborate automobile chases through narrow streets, screeching railroad collisions at major intersections, or pyrotechnic aircraft crashes just feet away from public monuments. Instead of raucous special effects depicting body parts soaring in every direction or unknown prehistoric mammls gorging on hapless picnickers, these frugal photodramas, as a rule, stick to the basics: exposition, plot development, falling action, and, then, denouement. Because these movies tell their stories through dialogue, nuance, and subtlety rather then computerized images or slick editing room legerdemain, box office sales suffer, virtually guaranteeing a limited run or, in most cases, a quick deal with a cable television network. Indeed the life cycle of an independent motion picture, like a male butterfly, is tenuous.

But, of course, a well-made film always attracts a following. In every large city, offbeat movie houses continue to find enthusiastic crowds who enjoy a nonviolent photodrama imbrued with a linear storyline that, basically, mirrors the human condition. Here, in former warehouses, urban entrepreneurs gamble that a sizeable audience will show up for their latest screening hoping that this week's independent special will find its way into the public domain either by word of mouth, a quick blurb on a radio program or, maybe, a capsule review in some weekly newspaper.

Why wouldn't they? All good filmmakers set high goals for new photoplays hoping that tomorrow, as the anthem promises, the sun will come out. Most of the time, producers—seeking elaborate distribution rights for the perfect screenplay—stare at their cellular telephones, wondering when the moguls from Time-Warner or Miramax will call.

So it comes as no surprise that a recent independent picture, a bittersweet comedy, pokes around the academic halls of an east coast university taking delicate potshots at higher education's numerous foibles. Here in Yanna Kroyt Brandt's oddball mixture of fun and pathos, Everyone's Depressed, a thirty-one-year-old, plain-Jane instructor (Ariane Brandt), straight from a Yale Ph.D., begins her first teaching assignment in a large, New Jersey commuter's school where she soon runs into a pompous chairwoman, diversified students, and—as the pièce de résistance—a disarrayed social life. Clearly, these early days of classroom work could not be more debilitating for an Armenian-American potential old maid, hoping to find her Prince Charming, while in the background, a talkative mother proffers numerous shibboleths in a silly attempt to push her daughter to the altar. [End Page 82]

But every cloud has a silver lining. After a series of inept flirtations with a drop-dead, handsome psychiatrist, a discursive classroom analysis of the threats Odysseus confronted with Scylla and Charybdis, a disastrous dinner with a dentist who insists his girlfriends sport immaculately-clean teeth, a running spoof about the perils of blind dating, numerous swipes about mental health practitioners, an unexpected crush by a male student, a hilarious discussion with her mother about the comfort a large-size bed provides for a thirty-something, unmarried woman, and, finally, a send-up of beauty salons, a wonderful resolution ties everything together—love, career, fulfillment, and independence—in the most unlikely of places, on the George Washington Bridge promenade.

Overall, Everyone's Depressed contains a nice hint of those zany1940s screwball comedies and screenwriter Jan Balakian's crisp dialogue keeps the ball rolling with its fast-paced humor and waggish character predicaments as the affected world of Prozac, Lithium, and Depacote is raked over the coals, suggesting that maybe there is some truth, as the title suggests, most adults walk around wearing their own brand of mental health on their sleeve. Certainly, there are many chuckle-laden ideas in this photodrama as different characters—hoping for their niche in the 2001 American dream—stumble, fall, and, then, as the popular song hearkens, try all over again.

Robert Fyne
Kean University

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