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‘The Unidentified’
At the movies
October 14, 2008 | Comment on this article
In 2001, at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, I met a young filmmaker named Kevan Tucker. He’d already directed a few amateur feature-length movies on shoestring budgets, and helped produce a short film that I directed the next year.
In the interest of full disclosure, Tucker taught me as much about being a filmmaker in college as any single professor I had. Thus, it is with great pride that I review Tucker’s first professional, full-length feature, “The Unidentified.”
A raw and philosophical drama, “The Unidentified” takes on the aimlessness of his and my generation, a generation that’s been largely spoiled and rarely been asked to sacrifice.
The protagonist, for I won’t call him a hero, is Estlin, a fresh graduate in New York City working his way up as a reporter at a local Brooklyn newspaper. Like many of my generation, his primary concern is saving the world. He’s egotistical enough to think he can do it, but he has no plan, just the big ideas and the ego. It doesn’t help matters when his best friend Brooke moves back to Ohio after feeling displaced in the city.
Estlin’s mind is taken off such matters once he meets the free-spirited Sophie, but where Estlin’s a boy obsessed with ‘truth’ -- a goal which he can’t define -- she’s a girl recovering from a past trauma who needs to rely on the make-believe in order to function emotionally. In a way, she’s dealing with reality in a more straightforward way than he is. Because Estlin questions everything, he believes little of what she says, whether it is or isn’t the truth, and presses her to be angry at the world, at him, at anything, because his own simmering anger is the only way he can understand the world.
To explain further would be to ruin what becomes an emotional horror story that takes advantage of some uniquely designed locations and intimate performances; the well-chosen cast runs with Tucker’s layered screenplay.
Jay Sullivan plays Estlin as a quiet, second-guessing man, not constantly likeable, but certainly interesting and redeemable. The film’s two great strengths are the two female leads, however. Lauren Shannon brings a hard-nosed nature to the straightforward Brooke, who seems to be the most even match-up against Estlin’s moody ego. Erin Ecklund shines as Sophie, and can’t help but remind of Evan Rachel Wood in such films as “Across the Universe.”
“The Unidentified” does run a little long. The problem isn’t at the end, a powerful segment in which Estlin wanders through an anti-war rally in Washington, D.C., as if through a fever dream, but at the beginning, when “The Unidentified” hasn’t quite sold its characters to us yet and treads into music video territory with its quick cuts and “mumblecore” territory with its party scenes and overlapped dialogue. A later sideplot involving a job search also seems extraneous to Estlin’s story.
You will not agree with Estlin’s actions throughout the entire course of the story. You don’t have to agree with his politics in order to understand his struggle to find himself in the world. Estlin instead embodies that fear many in my generation have that, despite our best intentions, we will never realize what success in the world feels like. We’re an aimless generation, obsessed with making the world a better place, but rarely wanting to take the first step forward and lead the crowd, because even the simplest of choices in our lives can paralyze us into abject fear.
Very few films have addressed in a serious manner the generation that’s coming into its own right now. Tucker’s “The Unidentified” does, and it’s both a scary and an uplifting thing.
For adults, a 3 out of 5.
For kids, a 1 out of 5.
For 18-29 year olds, a 4.5 out of 5.
This film is not yet rated. |
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