Safety Not Guaranteed

This unexpected little gem of a movie plays almost as if HG Wells came forward in time and decided to do a gender-reversed remake of Roman Holiday as a ultra-low-budget-semi-sci-fi-Sundance movie. The relaxed yet inventive and unpredictable nature of the narrative more than outweighs the quirky “indieness" of the approach. The premise was inspired by a classified ad from a guy looking for a time travel partner that was placed in a magazine as a joke to fill space. That's an auspicious jumping-off place for an original screenplay. But the film is not about time travel, it's about what fuels the desire to go back and fix the big mistakes we’ve made and how obsessing on the past hampers our future development.

Little digital movies like this one are not my favorite kind of films, but since they seem to be pretty much the only movies of any substance that get released for the first three quarters of the year when awards aren't being handed out, I can’t help but be grateful to have them. I also find I have grown to enjoy the actor Mark Duplass (who was in six features this year and is a filmmaker/director in his own right). His just-rolled-out-of-bed style of acting has a real honesty to it and Safety Not Guaranteed is my favorite thing he’s done so far.

When I first wandered into this movie at 1:30 in the afternoon, knowing nothing about it except for the names on the poster (Duplass was the only one I recognized), I was not expecting to be as delighted with the picture as I was. Despite my enjoyment of the movie, I assumed that it had coasted along on its light and breezy, homemade charm and that if I saw it again I’d start to find holes and weaknesses in it. Quite the opposite was true. I had occasion to see it twice more this year—once with friends in my screening room and once with hundreds of strangers at a 24-hour SciFi marathon (my first). With each viewing, my love of this picture grew and grew.

I think first-time feature writer Derek Connolly has written the best original screenplay of 2012. The story beats flow by in a deceptively casual way, never calling attention to what a perfectly structured script it is. All four central characters have their own subtle but discernible arc as they seamlessly shift from the movie caricatures they seem to be at the beginning into fully realized individuals by the end. Even more impressive is that the themes of the movie are conveyed through the subtle amalgamation of the subplot with the main storyline—though on the surface the plot and subplot seem to have nothing to do with each other. The seemingly silly adventure that the characters go on has a lot of resonance as a metaphor for life. The last few lines of the film are not only perfect for expressing the overarching theme of the movie but also pretty much sum up my whole philosophy of existence.

Colin Trevorrow, also making his feature debut, uses all the limitations of his low-budget to great advantage. We get treated to one of the funniest “heist” scenes in decades and possibly the slowest car chase in film history. Yet these sequences are never just played for laughs, they are well-grounded within the film’s reality and contain plenty of dramatic tension as well as humor. The film has been impeccably cast, exquisitely designed, and executed in such a style that nothing gets in the way of the seeming simplicity of the script. This movie represents exactly what I want to see in a low-budget indie movie. It is smart storytelling and fun filmmaking.