This year’s Grand Jury Prize winner for best narrative feature proves (if it needed to be proved again) that it’s possible to create a fully-realized movie world on a minimal budget. Wellness brings us into a salesman’s bleak reality of crappy motel rooms, slush-covered sidewalks and 99-cent gas station hot dogs. By the end, that world has become so vivid and all-consuming, it may take hours to fully recalibrate to your own reality. That’s a compliment, by the way, to director Jake Mahaffy and his star Jeff Clark.
Clark plays Thomas Lindsey, a hard-luck sad sack who thinks he has found redemption through Wellness, a new health product that is short on particulars and long on marketing lingo. It is being prepared for a global release, but for now there is a media blackout and Lindsey is having a hard time getting his product samples shipped from the main office. Lindsey has invested all of his own money to become a regional distributor, and he must now recruit additional distributors in order to get his big payoff.
Of course it’s a scam, a pyramid scheme perpetuated by Lindsey’s supervisor Paul (Paul Mahaffy), a gruff Laurence Tierney type who isn’t impressed with Lindsey’s sales acumen. Indeed, as we watch him make his rounds from cramped living rooms to harshly-lit offices, it seems very possible that Lindsey is the worst salesman who ever lived. He fumbles and bumbles his way through his pitches with no real grasp of what sort of product or service he’s selling – which is because, as we know and he doesn’t, Wellness doesn’t exist.
Mostly improvised, with non-actors in supporting roles, the verite-style Wellness gets its biggest boost from its central performance. Clark generates enormous empathy and quite a bit of uneasy humor, as when Lindsey practices weaving a story about his hobby of collecting hornet’s nests into his sales pitch. It’s heartbreaking to watch him spray cheese whiz onto crackers in a sad little conference room, sparsely populated by potential clients. With Wellness, Jake Mahaffy has created a world well worth visiting, although you sure wouldn’t want to live there.
