Personal Velocity: Three Portraits (2002) Reviews

• An Intimate Thread

  uberchick2002-05-10

  I saw this film tonight at the First Annual Tribeca Film Festival and understood its success at Sundance. In short, this film is about the awakening of three different women in very different lives and circle around a news report of a shooting in Manhattan and an ensuing car accident. With the telling of each woman's tale, Miller uses a brilliant 'degree of relation' to the accident in order to develop an engaging and powerful film. Delia casually watches the news report of the accident while waiting for the cook to bring up her next order in a small-town diner in upstate New York. Though the audience does not see a particularly unusual response that she has to it, we can imagine that her difficult circumstances allow her to relate to it on a level of shared human suffering. Greta, who's story is told in a series of flashbacks, watches it on the morning news minutes before she has her epiphany about her failing marriage and the new turn that her life is taking as a prominent editor for a large Manhattan publishing house. Because it is the only scene in her story that takes place in the present time, the audience is left to wonder what sort of pivotal role the news report has played in her epiphany. Finally, Paula's story brings the accident close to home as she is a witness to it. Her epiphany was a direct result of the accident since it was a near-death experience for her. She's not only shocked from the impact of it, but her struggle to explain it with cosmic signs allows her to transcend the accident and the events following it. The performances were real, the direction was brilliant, and the common thread that ran through the intimate details of the women's awakenings flowed easily, despite the segmented telling of their tales. Miller's work in this film has inspired me to seek out her feature debut, _Angela_ as well.

• Personal triumph

  jotix1002003-01-07

  This film, directed and written by Rebecca Miller, is a very satisfying experience for a new director who, here, is adapting her own material with a lot of relish and savoir-faire. There's a certain elegance in the way she treats her characters, always respectful, yet incisive. The only complain we could raise is the fact that each story is very short, so when we are still savoring each one, individually, Ms Miller, for reasons of timing, pulls them from under us. The first story, Delia, shows a woman's worst fears in being married to a wife beater of the worst kind. She might have had dreams of making a happy home for her family, but her man has another thing in mind. This woman is a step above white trash. She tries hard to get herself together but everything keeps interfering with her independence. Played with gusto by Kyra Sedwick, Delia ends up as a waitress in order to support herself and the children. Her encounter with the bully from the restaurant is an exercise in how low they want her to go, but she comes out a winner. The second story, Greta, is the best of the three. With the help of the great Parker Posey, this Greta comes out as the tough woman she wants everyone to think of her, but deep down, inside her, she's a vulnerable and frightened and unfulfilled over achiever. Ms Posey has never shown so many nuances in a performance that is so economic in the terms that are dictated by the length of the story. We get to know more about her than the narrator ever tells us. Every expression on this actress face is true. It's surprising what has been achieved here with the collaboration of the director and the player. The last story, Paula, is the weakest. It's all about a very confused young woman who's out on the road to see her parents. She has very deep problems. Along the way she picks up a hitchhiker who stays with her through the trip. Paula is in a voyage of discovering, but little does she know that what she needs is what she has left at home: her Haitian man, who obviously cares a lot about her. As played by Fairuza Balk, she shows the turmoil in her head that only she can resolve. We hope Miss Miller's next time out will be very soon because she's got a feel for getting inside her characters and finding angles they didn't even suspect of having.

• Three intriguing stories,three potentially unsatisfying conclusions

  KUAlum262006-05-02

  Writer and director Rebecca Miller(daughter of legendary playwright Arthur) patches together three stories of three different women for this film and the movie itself is quite an intriguing curiosity for it. Delia(Kyra Sedgwick,familiar yet still distinctive here)is an abused housewife and mother who's only known really one thing about herself-her sexuality-and has to find a way out of her sad,low-esteemed predicament,while wondering if she should use her sexuality or not; Greta(Parker Posey,for whom the type of roles she could inhabit are practically limitless) is a career-driven woman whose marriage is peaceful but uninspiring; and Paula(Fairuza Balk,whose angry eyes and wild visage is an ironic contrast to the scared character she's playing),has escaped a horrifying accident and now aids a runaway teen,all the while mindful of the fact that she's just learned she's pregnant. I must say I was quite pleased with elements of the movie:the narration,the anthology of it and,of course,the actors,who all are very fine here. But I suppose what left me dry here was the way these stories played out. I will not go into any detail so as to inadvertently throw out spoilers,but it to me felt like these stories were resolved in ways that seemed only evident to the writer herself. I read one reviewer describe these tales as sorts of "Women's lib" stories,and that may be true,and not being a woman myself and certainly not a feminist,I suppose if these endings seemed lost on me,well,that's my problem I suppose. Not a movie for those who absolutely NEED their films to have a sort of set,rising-plot/climax/denouement model in order to digest their usage of 90 min to 2 hours of time,but I suspect that the film's creator doesn't really care about that. She set out to portray three ordinary yet intriguing characters and,for the most part,I feel like she succeeded.

• A film that defines what independent means.

  Chris Knipp2003-01-06

  Personal Velocity' is a kind of omnibus film, three stories, each quite distinct, but all by the same author, Rebecca Miller, who has adapted them and directed them for her own movie, directing three different women in the main roles in each. Kyra Sedgwick is Delia, a slut, or a reformed high school slut who married a wife beater and finally wakes up, escapes to a haven for battered women, and then takes off with her kids upstate to stay with a school friend and work as a waitress. At the story's end, she's back to satisfying young men, but now very, very perfunctorily, and with the boundaries clearly established. Ms. Sedgewick has the sexiness and grandeur of Jessica Lange but not quite the strength: this is a wonderful role for her. The only trouble with this movie is that each segment is so short. Parker Posey in the next one is Greta, a sophisticated, driven woman with a powerful famous lawyer father and a prime Eastern establishment education married to a nice guy who's a New Yorker fact checker and whose family of origin look grain fed and wholesome. As the story begins, she pulls ahead when a hot Asian novelist picks her to move away from her cookbook editing to thin out the `fat' ruthlessly from his new MS. Before long, the novel is out, and she's a huge success, dumping her original publishing house and taking the hot author (now a beau) with her---and about to dump her husband. She admits she has always had a weakness in the area of fidelity. The third segment some people have told me they think is the weakest. I guess that's because it's about an unformed girl, Paula, a runaway, played by the talented, odd Fairuza Balk, who has settled down in New York with a nice Haitian man, but runs away again when a freak accident causes another man she's walking down the street with to get hit by a car and killed. She spins off in her car going toward the country, and picks up a teenage boy, himself a runaway, who is sweet and cute but turns out to have been horribly abused. They drop by her mom's house (her step dad is very cold), and then she takes the boy to a motel, where she treats his wounds. Next day, he steals her car from her at lunchtime, and she heads back to her boyfriend, chastened and apparently eager to keep the child beginning to grow in her womb. What makes these stories so good is that they're raw and not easy to take, but they still manage a lightness and detachment, partly through a male voiceover narration for each character. Each story creates a vivid picture of something you can hardly avoid calling `life' as risky and malleable, dangerous but full of exciting highs and lows. Each character is ruthlessly and incisively delineated, including the minor ones; indeed, no one is `minor,' as the presence of people like Wallace Shawn (as Greta's boss) and Ron Leibman (as her father) in mere cameos makes clear. Is the author the best person to direct a film of her own tales? We'd have to decide that on a case-by-case basis; but Rebecca Miller has achieved a happy balance here, and this tough but unassuming movie belongs with the absolute cream of the year's American independent crop. If there is such a thing as an essential independent film, this is what that means and why the distinction from more `mainstream' films is worthwhile.

• DV masterpiece

  mbucky2005-03-04

  Personal Velocity is one of the most beautifully shot digital films I have ever seen. The story is uniquely touching and develops a woman's perspective on life and love into a series of lives and events. The cinematography by Ellen Kuras defies the documentary roughness of the digital experience. Often the insert shots in the film are the most enthralling, focusing on small objects to extract the film's delicate beauty. Defying the need to connect the narratives, the film manages to create thematic connections, and forces the viewer to think more about the images and the characters' emotional journeys. One major drawback, the narrator is distracting, but if you can dismiss the intriguing insertion of a male voice over a female narrative, you can enjoy the interesting perspective on a woman's film. Wonderfully shot, well-written, worth-watching.