[Rating: Minor Rock Fist Down]
In Theaters and on VOD Friday, February 9
A patchy collection of road trip horror stories buttressed by a vaguely coherent emotional thru-line, Willie and Me feels less like a fully realized movie and more like a hazy first draft. Devoid of any humor, character growth, or relatable conflict, the movie is aided in no small part by the earnest and committed performance of its lead, Eva Hassmann. Watching this thing makes a person wonder what the film is going for, though, and whether Hassmann might have served the project better if she’d remained as just the star rather than tacking on the addition responsibilities of writer/director/producer.
Opening in Germany 1989, Willie and Me wastes no time getting out of the blocks. Greta Weingarten (Hassmann) narrates the details of her childhood over a flashback, explaining how Willie Nelson was a beacon of happiness in an otherwise tragic upbringing. Her alcoholic mother died when she was a pre-teen, at which point she stopped listening to Willie and gave up on the source of her happiness. That all changes when Greta, now an adult, learns about Willie’s farewell concert in Las Vegas, which is enough to inspire her to sell her husband’s sports car for the funds needed to travel to America and attend.
This all takes less than 5 minutes and is one of the few boons to a movie that (sadly) never captures this crisp and efficient rhythm again. When Greta gets to the U.S., she has a layover in an unidentified city (later clocked as L.A.), where she stays at a dingy hotel run by a drunk but kindly manager (Peter Bogdanovich). While there she meets an Elvis impersonator named Nick (Blaine Gray), who takes pity on her after a robbery and lends her a truck so she can get to Willie’s farewell concert.
The movie unfolds from here as a continuation of Greta’s misfortunes as she runs into nothing but thieves and perverts on her way to Las Vegas. A trainwreck of PG-rated tragedy with no real purpose or inspiration, certainly not for any growth or introspection, the movie seems to exist just to put Greta through the ringer. And while Wassmann has enough charisma, charm, and screen presence to keep the audience interested, her script and direction regularly pull against her and in the other direction.
Worse still, the visuals of Willie and Me betray its low budget roots, and rarely place the audience in any kind of space that is readily identifiable. The scenes early in the movie take place in Los Angeles, yet this isn’t made clear until an establishing shot identifies the skyline right as Greta is leaving that city. Nick’s presence there as an Elvis impersonator only further confuses this setting dilemma, and the curtains thrown up to hide the badly lit interiors do Willie and Me no additional favors in this regard.
The same level of nuance and thought seems to have been applied to the characters, too, as all come off as laughable cartoons with a singular function, attitude, or purpose. With the exception of the movie’s white knight, Nick, almost every American that Greta comes across on her quest to see Willie Nelson is either a thief, pervert, or a drunk. And while the movie doesn’t need to be any more complex than one woman’s struggle to see her childhood hero one last time, one would hope that the script would allow for something more to happen than the world just punishing this hopelessly naive woman for 80+ minutes.
The subplot about Greta’s abandoned and obnoxious husband, August (Thure Riefenstein), provides a little levity (and maybe the movie’s most enjoyable performance), yet like pretty much everything else in Willie and Me except the central quest, it leads to nothing. The movie exists for the sake of its basic conceit and nothing else, making one wonder what a more fleshed out script might have added to things. Were this a movie about Greta using her forgotten love of Willie Nelson to figure something (anything) out about herself or the world or even Willie, it might feel less like the extended comedy skit than it is.
Except that it isn’t all that funny, it looks low-rent, the acting varies from decent to terrible, and the writing is one step above the community theater level. Hassmann does a decent job selling the character and the central premise of Willie and Me, yet in all other areas she comes up woefully short. And while the message of the movie proves that the writer/director/producer/star had her heart in the right place with all of this, it just doesn’t amount to much. So yeah, while some things might always be on Willie’s mind, here’s hoping this movie and Hassmann’s script isn’t.
“Obvious Child” is the debut novel of Warren Cantrell, a film and music critic based out of Seattle, Washington. Mr. Cantrell has covered the Sundance and Seattle International Film Festivals, and provides regular dispatches for Scene-Stealers and The Playlist. Warren holds a B.A. and M.A. in History, and his hobbies include bourbon drinking, novel writing, and full-contact kickboxing.
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