This is a tiresome and aggravating movie. It takes the idea for a decent 25 minute film festival entry and stretches it out for almost another 70 minutes until you feel like hitting yourself in the head with a blunt object because it just
won't
end.
Roman (Lucky McKee) is a socially retarded misfit who, went he isn't at work welding or getting razzed by the other workers in the break room, sits in his crappy apartment staring out his front window and waiting for the pretty girl who lives across the way to walk by. One day the girl (Kristen Bell) sees Roman drinking beer on the roof of their apartment complex. She strikes up a conversation with him, probably because she just wants some of his beer, and she mistakes his stunted emotional state for simple shyness. Attracted to his weakness, the girl even ends up kissing Roman. And then he inadvertently smothers her to death on the floor of his crappy apartment. Well, I think Roman is supposed to have smothered her. The truth is he just sort of lies on top of her with his hand over her mouth for about 30 seconds, so the only way she could have actually died is by having a heart attack or a brain aneurysm. Her dying, however, doesn't put an end to Roman's pathetic affection for the girl.
Then, because the story has to keep trudging on like the Bataan Death March, Roman encounters a crazy, death-obsessed girl whose preferred style of dress is a combination toga/salad bar. Eva (Nectar Rose) throws herself at the non-responsive Roman like a nymphomaniac who just got back from 10 years alone on a desert island. The story then, with stultifying slowness, asks us to care if Roman can end his "relationship" with the dead girl in order to fully embrace Eva, or if Eva is offering him an even more twisted affair.
Let me start with the short list of good things about this film. The Kristen Bell in it is the Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars and Heroes and she's the best thing in Roman. She doesn't have much to do, but she's completely natural and convincing when she does it. Nectar Rose is pretty and charming but she clearly doesn't have the acting chops of Bell. Whereas Bell's nameless girl always seems like a real person on the screen, Rose's Eva is always and obviously a performance. It's not an awful performance, but it's consistently contrived. Angela Bettis also does a fair to middling job directing a movie that appears to have had a budget roughly the equivalent of three Happy Meals from McDonalds. Bettis and cinematographer Kevin Ford demonstrate a nice eye for an image that can fill up the screen and put together a couple of interesting dream sequences.
Now for the bad. Lucky McKee is excruciatingly bad as an actor. Though this script requires the character of Roman to say relatively little and blankly stare a whole lot, McKee can't even do that well. If you didn't know that McKee wrote this script, you'd swear he was just some guy grabbed off the street and given the role of Roman after the real actor went on a drug binge and didn't show up on set.
As for the writing, if you took everything in this movie and scrunched it down into a 25 minute film festival short, the audience might have seen it and thought "Well, that was sort of interesting". As a 90 minute film it becomes an uncomfortable slog where any reasonable person would just give up before the halfway point. McKee tries to cover up for the thinness of his plot by throwing some "funny" characters and weird stuff into the story. It doesn't help.
Roman also demonstrates that no matter how awful a scene may be, if there's a lame folk-rock song playing on the soundtrack it becomes exponentially worse. Seriously, if a filmmaker can't afford to have decent songs in a movie they shouldn't just slap in some tunes that were recorded in a friend's basement and sound like they were written and performed by Phoebe from Friends. The music in this movie is so bad it becomes its own irritating character where you sit and dread the moment it shows up again in the story.
Let's be honest. The only reason this vexing piece of cinema got a DVD release is because Kristin Bell is in it. Unlike many famous actors in their early work, Bell doesn't embarrass herself in Roman. But her presence in it has inflicted this elongated rumination of pretension on the DVD-renting public. Unless you're stalking Kristen Bell and need everything she's ever done for the little shrine you're building to her in your medicine cabinet, don't bother with Roman.
Roman (Lucky McKee) is a socially retarded misfit who, went he isn't at work welding or getting razzed by the other workers in the break room, sits in his crappy apartment staring out his front window and waiting for the pretty girl who lives across the way to walk by. One day the girl (Kristen Bell) sees Roman drinking beer on the roof of their apartment complex. She strikes up a conversation with him, probably because she just wants some of his beer, and she mistakes his stunted emotional state for simple shyness. Attracted to his weakness, the girl even ends up kissing Roman. And then he inadvertently smothers her to death on the floor of his crappy apartment. Well, I think Roman is supposed to have smothered her. The truth is he just sort of lies on top of her with his hand over her mouth for about 30 seconds, so the only way she could have actually died is by having a heart attack or a brain aneurysm. Her dying, however, doesn't put an end to Roman's pathetic affection for the girl.
Then, because the story has to keep trudging on like the Bataan Death March, Roman encounters a crazy, death-obsessed girl whose preferred style of dress is a combination toga/salad bar. Eva (Nectar Rose) throws herself at the non-responsive Roman like a nymphomaniac who just got back from 10 years alone on a desert island. The story then, with stultifying slowness, asks us to care if Roman can end his "relationship" with the dead girl in order to fully embrace Eva, or if Eva is offering him an even more twisted affair.
Let me start with the short list of good things about this film. The Kristen Bell in it is the Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars and Heroes and she's the best thing in Roman. She doesn't have much to do, but she's completely natural and convincing when she does it. Nectar Rose is pretty and charming but she clearly doesn't have the acting chops of Bell. Whereas Bell's nameless girl always seems like a real person on the screen, Rose's Eva is always and obviously a performance. It's not an awful performance, but it's consistently contrived. Angela Bettis also does a fair to middling job directing a movie that appears to have had a budget roughly the equivalent of three Happy Meals from McDonalds. Bettis and cinematographer Kevin Ford demonstrate a nice eye for an image that can fill up the screen and put together a couple of interesting dream sequences.
Now for the bad. Lucky McKee is excruciatingly bad as an actor. Though this script requires the character of Roman to say relatively little and blankly stare a whole lot, McKee can't even do that well. If you didn't know that McKee wrote this script, you'd swear he was just some guy grabbed off the street and given the role of Roman after the real actor went on a drug binge and didn't show up on set.
As for the writing, if you took everything in this movie and scrunched it down into a 25 minute film festival short, the audience might have seen it and thought "Well, that was sort of interesting". As a 90 minute film it becomes an uncomfortable slog where any reasonable person would just give up before the halfway point. McKee tries to cover up for the thinness of his plot by throwing some "funny" characters and weird stuff into the story. It doesn't help.
Roman also demonstrates that no matter how awful a scene may be, if there's a lame folk-rock song playing on the soundtrack it becomes exponentially worse. Seriously, if a filmmaker can't afford to have decent songs in a movie they shouldn't just slap in some tunes that were recorded in a friend's basement and sound like they were written and performed by Phoebe from Friends. The music in this movie is so bad it becomes its own irritating character where you sit and dread the moment it shows up again in the story.
Let's be honest. The only reason this vexing piece of cinema got a DVD release is because Kristin Bell is in it. Unlike many famous actors in their early work, Bell doesn't embarrass herself in Roman. But her presence in it has inflicted this elongated rumination of pretension on the DVD-renting public. Unless you're stalking Kristen Bell and need everything she's ever done for the little shrine you're building to her in your medicine cabinet, don't bother with Roman.