carter.
When producer/director Princeton Holt sent me his own “Cookies & Cream” for review, I was also surprised to receive two other films made under his One Way or Another banner. Watching the second film I received in that package today- “carter.”- I’ve begun to see a pattern in the types of films he and his collaborators are interested in making.
Like “Cookies & Cream,” “carter.” is about idiosyncrasies in human behavior. In the first film, it was how the main character struggled with relationships when she ran an adult website to make end’s meat. In “carter.,” by writer-director Ryan Andrew Balas, the main character- Jebadiah (Mark Robert Ryan)- has a good job, good friends, and a great girl (Julia Porter Howe, who plays Carter). He couldn’t be happier. And yet, he remains compelled to carry out a decision to kill himself.
The film doesn’t explain what led to this decision, and why Jebadiah looks to carry it out, taking the same point of view of Carter and Jebadiah’s work friend Donald (Richard Buonagurio) in trying to get down to the bottom of this inexplicable choice. A sequence where we see Jebadiah walking around New York- stopping off at a kid’s jungle gym in the park- illuminates some of the bruised psyche the character carries through life (aided by a score by Nathan Sandberg that captures that melancholy), but doesn’t quite get to the heart of the decision.
In a way, this only works to the film’s advantage. It makes the story more in keeping with true human nature and real life, where no one really knows what the other one is thinking. Admittedly, the ambiguity in the story is hard to get into at times, but by the end, you feel a genuine connection with these characters that’s hard to ignore. I look forward to watching the third film Holt sent me- “Uptown”- in the coming days.
