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Eric Shapiro reviews a film that bucks the dark and aggressive history of films about LA, and instead features a gentle lead male character and a subtle love story.
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I tend to think of Los Angeles as a disturbing place. I’ve lived here for 14 years and have never felt 100 percent centered or oriented, despite having been in a loving relationship the entire time, and in the same stable profession since two years into the adventure. It’s a city so filled with strivers, dreamers, and egomaniacs that I’ve long sensed a thin yet perceptible layer of chaotic yearning blanketing the place. Too many people seem to want too much here. Any sense of the serene or the flowing tends to get strangulated by the prevailing air of need.
Numerous filmmakers seem to sense the chaos. Observe movies like Short Cuts (1993), Hurlyburly (1998), Magnolia (1999), The Anniversary Party (2001), and Laurel Canyon (2002), where L.A. is served up with jarring accuracy as a hotbed of dysfunction and confusion. It’s indeed unusual for a movie that seeks to be about L.A. to not curve into darkness. Yet now we have Echo Park (2014) in the L.A. movie pantheon, and I daresay this gentle, sun-kissed daydream of a film turned my head around on the matter of its setting.
Echo Park (2014) isn’t interested in bothering with darkness. Early on in this indie romantic comedy, Alex (Tony Okungbowa) tells Sophie (Mamie Gummer) that he’s abandoned his Hollywood dream, and the most striking aspect of the admission is that he seems to be entirely okay with it. Then again, Alex’s abandonment of the dream means he’s moving back to his native England just as Sophie, who’s edging away from a suffocating relationship with Simon (a half-smarmy control freak played to perfection by Gale Harold, who would be right at home in any of the unsettling films listed above), is getting oriented in his current neighborhood in Echo Park.
Naturally, Alex and Sophie’s respective forms of transit make for a mutual inconvenience, as the pair is falling in…well, if not love, then something close. This film’s bloodstream does not quite flow at the pulse of love. It’s a chill movie, like its hipster-friendly East L.A. backdrop, and not unlike the character of Alex, played with such tangible gentleness by Okungbowa that you kind of want to put your arm around him. As Alex and Sophie, Okungbowa and Gummer become rapidly absorbed in buttery rhythms of improv-like naturalism, so much so that for much of the film I felt like I was watching a documentary. Credit is due to director Amanda Marsalis and screenwriter Catalina Aguilar Mastretta for not dialing up a single instant of the story; this isn’t an aggressively engineered Hollywood rom-com with a pop-eyed color scheme and a hurdling plot line; it’s a sweet, soft smile aimed in L.A.’s direction, filled head-to-toe with the belief that this city — yes! — has goodness deep within its mad, strange heart.
Note that Echo Park’s metabolism is calibrated to Okungbowa’s — which is to say the movie breathes and takes its time. Whether one views this as a breath of fresh air or a slog of tedium depends upon the design of one’s central nervous system. I for one remained centered in the film’s loving palm, marveling at its lightness and then — in something of a twist — becoming haunted by the nature of its ending. Since its characters are both in motion — one moving in, the other moving out, both of them figuring out who they are in the process — we’re never quite sure that we’ve gotten to know them. This is among the film’s strengths, a rather European ambiguity, a sense that complexity indeed exists right beneath the prevailing simplicity.
When the film concludes, complexity stands to be noticed, and this story which had been so gentle for so long becomes, if not dark, then rather candid. Echo Park at last settled down, and managed to figure out what it was. I smiled in the rays of its subtlety, and its city.
by Eric Shapiro June 18, 2014
