Review: alleyball

alleyball, which just won the premiere slot at the Independent Features Film Festival, stars relative newcomer Johnny Ray Meeks (who also co-wrote the script) as Stuart, a middle-aged guy in Chicago who -- like the pack of friends he runs with -- doesn't want to grow up. Stuart's pals -- Stencke (According to Jim's Larry Joe Campbell), Nick (Danny McCarthy) and Cecil (Joel Spence), are a lot like him, spending their free time guzzling beer and playing whiffle ball, which seems to be their one passion in life.

All this is fine and dandy --hey, as long as you can pay the rent and buy your beer and groceries, I guess you can play at being frat boys indefinitely -- until Stuart's long-time girlfriend Alison (Kellyn Jones) drops a bomb on him: She's going to Portland on a two-month assignment, but she's decided she might really want to live there permanently. She gives Stuart two months to grow up and decide what he wants to do -- lose his adolescent ways, grow up, get a real job, give up his beloved whiffle ball and move to Portland, or lose her for good. Stuart, in his defense, does have a pretty good idea for a line of sarcastic greeting cards, but lacks the motivation and belief in himself to get it off the ground; having a girlfriend who thinks your big idea is dumb doesn't help much.

We've seen a lot of comedies with this "man-who-won't-grow-up" theme. Judd Apatow is very good at making this kind of film; both 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up performed well because they had very solid, sympathetic lead characters and had the perfect leads in those roles, but they were also really well written, with excellent dialogue that flowed well from start-to-finish. Indie charmers the Duplass brothers took the same general theme (with, no doubt, a much lower budget than Apatow's had to work with) layered with a complex relationship between two brothers and between father and son, and pulled of a quirky, nicely done comedy with fest fave The Puffy Chair. The Duplass brothers proved that you can pull off a decent indie comedy on a low budget -- it's all about the writing, the charisma of your leads, and sharp decisions around the direction and editing of the film. Arin Crumley and Susan Buice also pulled of the quirky, low-budget relationship comedy with Four Eyed Monsters, which has developed sort of a cult following thanks to Crumley and Buice's bottomless energy for promoting their baby -- but it's succeeding also because the film, although obviously pretty low-budget, it quite artfully shot and written.

First-time director Dan Consiglio, wearing multiple hats in alleyball as co-writer and exec director as well, seems to be shooting for a Puffy Chair/Four Eyed Monsters level, and he comes close -- which, for a first effort on a low budget, is not a bad thing. The good things: We have in Stuart and his friends an interesting group of guys to get to know; they have diverse personalities, and, for middle-aged guys who still get excited about going to a "kegger" and who spend their free time obsessing about whiffle ball, they're charming in their way. Not the kind of guys I'd hang out with if I were single, perhaps -- when women reach a certain age, they tend to prefer their men to at least be on an upward track to grown-up land, but the guys connect with each other and support each other, even if it's in kind of a mutually co-dependent way.

There are moments when the dialogue connects well, and in those moments the film, and Consiglio's potential as a writer and director, shine through. Second City's Keegan-Michael Key has a plum role as "The Dick," Stuart's annoying co-worker who narrowly manages to avoid seeming like a similar character in Office Space by putting his own spin of desperate longing to be liked into the character. Meeks, whose bio shows experience on stage and doing improv, makes for a suitably sympathetic lead. In fact, a lot of the cast have improv backgrounds, and it's in those bits where the film feels more improvisational that the flow feels more natural and less forced, and things click together. Heather Landry turns in a solid performance as Amanda, who likes Stuart, beer and whiffleball, and thinks Stuart's cards are actually funny.

alleyball's low budget peeks through from time-to-time, and this happens a lot in ways in which it doesn't have to -- and shouldn't, even for a microbudget film. For instance, the writing could be a lot tighter, and there are times when the banter just doesn't flow -- a film that relies heavily on the relationship among a pack of guys has to invest us with feeling that these guys are an inseperable group, so tight that the talk between them just sort of flows fluidly (see the dialogue in both 40-Year-Old Virgin and The Puffy Chair for films that do this very well) -- it shouldn't feel forced or that it exists for the sake of creating "quirky" moments, and it definitely shouldn't weigh the film down or drag the flow.

There are also some odd lighting issues going on at points throughout the film -- scenes where the lighting is too bright, and the faces look washed out (not talking about the dream sequence when it's supposed to look like that) and one scene in particular where the camera angle catches light filtered through a tree that turns the light -- and, consequently, the lead's face -- a disturbing shade of green every time the shot is on him. Things like that are just distracting and pull your attention away from the movie, and they're mistakes that would have been easy to correct.

Overall, though, you can see throughout alleyball what Meeks and Consiglio are shooting for, and they manage to hit enough right notes for the film to charm in spite of its flaws. What I'd really like to see, now that the film has played a couple of minor fests and won the Independent Feature Film Fest's coveted red-carpet premiere slot, is for Consiglio and Meeks to get a deal working with a more established indie prodco (maybe Jason Reitman's Hard C...?), so that their next film works through some of the kinks of their first effort. I'd like to see what the pair could accomplish given the guidance of someone like Reitman, who would've caught mistakes like the lighting problems and wooden dialogue moments and fixed them. If Meeks and Consiglio learn from their bumps and grow from where they are, they could develop a brand of improvisational rom-coms that could take their careers to a new level.