SXSW Review: Wellness

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

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.

SXSW Film Awards Roundup

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The SXSW Film Festival Awards were handed out last night. I’d love to tell you how worthy all of the winners are, but as fate would have it, I have yet to see any of them. While I try to rectify that situation, here are the big winners:

The Grand Jury Award for Narrative Feature went to Wellness, Jake Mahaffy’s independent feature “about a man trying to succeed in a business that doesn't exist.” (There’s a lot of that going around Austin this week.) Two Special Jury Awards were also given out, one for Cinematography (Explicit Ills) and one for Best Ensemble Cast (Up With Me).

In the Documentary category, the Grand Jury Award went to They Killed Sister Dorothy, about the murder of a Catholic nun in the Amazon and the subsequent trial of her killers. The Special Jury Award went to Full Battle Rattle, a look at urban warfare simulations in a “virtual Iraq” built in the Mojave Desert.

Mark Webber’s Explicit Ills, in which “young love, drugs and poverty collide in the city of Philadelphia,” won the Audience Award for Narrative Feature. The audience agreed with the jury when it came to documentaries, bestowing their award on They Killed Sister Dorothy.

Look for reviews of some of these award winners later in the week.

The Screengrab : jake mahaffy

SXSW Review: Wellness

SXSW Film Awards Roundup