Road trip skirts cliches, hits heights
If I were Jonathan Tropper, who wrote the “Kodachrome” screenplay, I know what I’d be doing. I’d be watching Ed Harris’ monologue over and over and marveling at the miracle of it. I’d feel great that I wrote something so good that an actor was able to turn it into a masterpiece.
The scene comes about 15 minutes before the finish, in a situation that easily could have been corny and cliched. The father (Ed Harris) is sick in the hospital, and he’s talking to his estranged adult son (Jason Sudeikis) about the mistakes he made as a father. The lines are good. So the first hurdle is cleared. And then Harris takes it from there.
The first thing Harris does is he doesn’t launch into a “monologue.” The character doesn’t know he has all these lines to speak. He’s just talking and finding that he has more to say than he thought. And those line readings: They are inspired and unexpected — he goes small when you expect he’ll go big, and he stops and starts and registers even more on his face than the words that he’s saying.
Of course, this is all possible because director Mark Raso doesn’t commit the crime of the century. He doesn’t cut away from Harris — at least for no more than a split second here and there — because he has the good sense to know what he’s got.
“Kodachrome,” in general, is like this; that is, more full, more true, and better than one might reasonably expect. This is important to say up front, because when you hear what the movie is about, you will probably think, “Oh no, not again.” Basically, the grown son hates his father, because his father, a world-famous photographer, neglected him. But now — guess what? — the old man is dying, and the two have to go on a road trip together.
The occasion for the trip is that the last photo lab in the country that processes Kodachrome film is about to stop offering that service. This is based on a reallife situation that was written about in the New York Times in 2010, when Kodak ceased making the chemicals used in Kodachrome processing. In “Kodachrome,” it just so happens that Dad has four rolls of Kodachrome slides, and he won’t put them in the mail, and he won’t get on a plane. Hence, the road trip with his son, accompanied by a nurse (Elizabeth Olsen), who happens to be very pretty and thus a potential love interest.
So there we are with this half-baked situation, which seems like an amalgam of plot strains from a hundred other movies, and none of them any good. But “Kodachrome” mostly avoids cliche, thanks to something a little extra in the writing and a lot extra in the acting. Harris benefits from not having to play a lovable curmudgeon, or a misunderstood grouch. The father, instead, is a hard guy, a mean guy with an evil streak that he can’t contain. He might be disgusted with himself for being that way — and that self-disgust gives him dimension — but that is his true self.
The writing of the father gives stature to the son, in that Sudeikis isn’t playing a whining child in an adult’s body. He has the dignity of a legitimate grievance. And, just in case it must be said, when we’re talking about good acting across the board — a movie in which all the characters, even minor ones, seem to have a past that they carry with them, some dimensional existence that they bring to their scenes — we’re talking about the direction, too.