Uma Thurman and Michael Anganaro in Ceremony.
By John Thomason
I’m always taken aback when unequivocally bad movies like Ceremony somehow pass the same art-house muster as films by renowned artists.
A snarky, misogynistic and intellectually vapid Indiewood feature, Ceremony belongs in Blockbuster’s direct-to-video dustbin, not sharing real estate with the likes of Certified Copy and Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
In his feature debut, writer-director Max Winkler offers a flat imitation of what Noah Baumbach’s Wedding Crashers might look like – an oppositional clash of subtle and broad comic textures, neither of which Winkler conveys with any degree of success. It stars Michael Angarano as Sam, a floundering, 23-year-old children’s book author who reunites with his meek friend Marshall (Reece Thompson, looking like a chalky character in a Smiths video) for a weekend retreat.
The vacation is ostensibly an opportunity for the estranged buddies to bond and bromanticize, but Sam has designs for the excursion: Their squalid hotel happens to be situated next to a palatial beachside estate owned by affluent documentary filmmaker Whit Coutell (Lee Pace) who, over the next two days, will be marrying the love of Sam’s life: Uma Thurman’s Zoe.
Aside from Marshall, who gets the short end of all of the film’s sticks, Ceremony provides us with a dearth of sympathetic characters. Sam is supposedly our relatable conduit into the world of high society, but he’s essentially a shameless ass.
Whit is a self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing and remarkably transparent blowhard who makes movies about starving children in Africa that feature his bulbous ego more than his subjects – a character seemingly crafted, with Xeroxed inspiration, after Winkler saw Russell Brand in Get Him to the Greek. Zoe appears fidgety and embarrassed by Whit’s every utterance; watching the interactions of the soon-to-be-betrothed, their nuptials are inexplicable.
Only in Movieland do artificial straw characters like Whit – in this case, the callous jerk we’re supposed to scorn while the working-class hero steals back the damsel’s trapped heart – get to bed and wed Uma Thurman.
Not that Zoe, as scripted by Winkler, is necessarily a catch worth desiring. She’s too underwritten to feel anything about her. She’s little more than a trophy fiancée who apparently selects suitors with the indiscriminate direction of a broken GPS. For a star of Thurman’s stature, it’s a thankless role, and one obviously written by a man (Thurman has also, to my knowledge, never been photographed as unflatteringly as she comes across under Winkler’s camera).
If this ensemble of archetypes only exists in the movies, it’s only appropriate that their actions are ones that only occur on celluloid – particularly celluloid from 20 years ago. Modern technology is entirely absent from this picture: Zoe, who is a good 15 years older than Sam, apparently met him when the two became pen pals. How quaint.
And there’s actually a scene where Sam takes a break from the road trip to call Zoe from a pay phone. One antique cliché begets another in this scene, as Sam clutches the receiver and rehearses different conversational points of entry, only to slam the phone back into its cradle and exit the booth. Sam is quite the mercurial misanthrope, and in a better movie, he might come off as mysterious.
Here, the overwhelming stench of déjà vu trumps everything.
CEREMONY. Director: Max Winkler; Cast: Michael Angarano, Uma Thurman, Lee Pace, Jake M. Johnson, Reece Thompson; Distributor: Magnolia; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at Living Room Theaters, Florida Atlantic University