Cast: Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey, Fairuza Balk, David Warshofsky, Leo Fitzpatrick, Tim Guinee, Wallace Shawn, Lou Taylor Pucci
Director: Rebecca Miller
Producer: Alexis Alexanian
Screenplay: Rebecca Miller
Cinematography: Ellen Kuras
Music: Michael Rohatyn
U.S. Distributor: United Artists
The concept of "personal velocity" is an intriguing one. Essentially, it implies that everyone lives his or her life at a particular pace, and only those who are going at roughly the same speed can hope to stay together. Personal velocity is not necessarily constant (by definition, this would mean there are such things as personal acceleration and deceleration); events (both expected and unexpected) can result in changes. Such is the premise underlying Rebecca (daughter of Arthur) Miller's Personal Velocity, a film that made its way from Sundance to Toronto to theaters on a road paved with good word-of-mouth.
Personal Velocity is divided into three sections. Each is a separate short story of equal length (30 minutes), and, aside from a minor thread, they are not narratively connected. In the first segment, Kyra Sedgwick plays Delia, a woman who is the victim of spousal abuse at the hands of a volatile husband. She is caught in stasis (personal velocity = zero) until she fears that her husband's violence could impact her children. Then, in a flash, she and her kids are out of the house and on the road. The middle episode introduces us to Greta (Parker Posey), a happily married cookbook editor at a New York publishing firm. She feels safe and comfortable with her husband, because she recognizes that he will never leave her. But, when a series of unexpected developments pushes her career into overdrive, she comes to the tragic realization that she will leave him. In the final segment, Fairuza Balk is Paula, a young woman who has escaped a brush with death and is running away from her life. In the midst of a driving rainstorm, she picks up a lonely, drenched hitchhiker, and his presence enables her to make some decisions about her pregnancy and her failing relationship with her current lover.
The film's greatest strength is its key weakness. Although the format allows Miller to illustrate her thesis by comparing and contrasting the lives of three women, it also limits the screen time of the characters, preventing us from identifying with any of them as fully as we might have if they were accorded the length of a feature. Certainly, all of the stories are interesting enough to warrant greater exploration. On the other hand, Miller's concise strategy is preferable to the approach of padding out the running length. (Note: Miller's book, upon which the movie is based, has seven stories - only three of these were adapted.)
Although the only plot link between the trio of segments is a minor one, there are thematic relationships. All three stories focus on women with serious parental issues. Each story also concentrates on themes of empowerment (how Delia, Geta, and Paula find it and what it means to them) and the widening gulf that dominates many long-term relationships. Broadly viewed, Personal Velocity can be seen as a triptych about women who discover something that's broken in their lives and seek, with varying degrees of success, to fix it.
One of the most frequently used clichés for independent films is that they look like they were made on a much higher budget than the one announced by the director. That's not the case here. Personal Velocity was made on the cheap using digital video, and it often looks less than impressive. The images are grainy, and the lack of clarity is a distraction. This problem, which will bother some viewers more than others, illustrates the primary drawback of filming in digital video then transferring the final product to celluloid. (The transfer and blow-up are what cause the grain.) On the other hand, without DV, Miller probably wouldn't have been able to come up with the money to make Personal Velocity, so the film wouldn't have existed.
The acting is uniformly excellent, with Kyra Sedgwick and Fairuza Balk in particular deserving to be singled out for praise. In my opinion, the middle segment is the strongest, primarily because of the underlying poignancy of the subject matter. This is also the episode that most clearly highlights what Miller intends by the concept of "personal velocity" and how it can have meaning in day-to-day situations.
© 2002 James Berardinelli