They say "write what you know," but
there ought to be a moratorium on "dude" actors writing quirky road-trip
vehicles for themselves. In Backseat, writer-star Josh Alexander plays an out-of-work New York
actor who embarks on a quixotic quest to bump into Donald Sutherland in
Montreal. (Why Donald Sutherland? Don't ask.) Alexander drags along his
straitlaced friend Rob Bogue, hoping to help him get over his breakup with a
shrill feminist sexpot, who dumped Bogue because he wouldn't pretend to rape
her. As they motor north, Alexander and Bogue chatter inanely about women and
Greek myths, and they bicker over what they're going to do with the large bag
of cocaine that Alexander is carrying across the border as a favor to a friend.
By the end, guns are pulled, plans are waylaid, feelings are hurt, and everyone
learns some lessons about how to man up.
Backseat has a few assets. The upstate New
York locations are appropriately low-rent, and because the cast is made up of
professional actors instead of students and amateurs, the film has a better
sense of rhythm to the performances than the average indie. But director Bruce
Van Dusen makes distracting use of low-angle and handheld shots, while the
script piles on the pointless weirdness. There's a character who only
communicates via the Web, and another who's apparently pathologically incapable
of ordering food in a restaurant. And when Alexander tells a story about his
messed-up childhood, he caps it by saying that his mom wanted him to go to a
shrink, "But she didn't know any, so she took me to see an optometrist." Ha!
Anyone who's spent a lot of time at
independent-film festivals will feel a familiar sinking feeling within the
first 10 minutes of Backseat. This isn't really a movie made for audiences; it's for
casting agents and studio execs, to show off one man's acting chops and his skill
at writing dialogue. But what it actually shows is that Alexander apparently
has limited range. Everyone in Backseat seems like a combination of Alexander and all the
parts he's ever read for.