Upstate Story (2018)
dir. Shaun Rose
Rated: N/A
image: ©2018 West Side Outsiders Film Group
Ellis Martin hates his job. He hates his roommate’s girlfriend. He hates almost everything about his life. Sunday afternoons for Ellis are spent getting wasted as a way to cushion the blow of another work-week on the horizon. His dull 9-to-5 consists of dusting, vacuuming, and scrubbing toilets for a cleaning service. Ellis applies for other jobs in the hopes of finding something better – something he can live with – but even this seems futile.
That might be a good opening act for a story, but the description above is essentially the whole of independent filmmaker Shaun Rose’s hour-long film Upstate Story. There are no subplots, beyond a flashback sequence about one of Ellis’s ex-girlfriends. The movie suffers from solipsism, with no meaningful dialog coming from any character other than Ellis. Defying a cardinal rule of cinema – show, don’t tell – the entirety of Ellis’s dialog is delivered in voice over, making Upstate Story a kind of visual novel.
There is somewhat of a twist in the last act that I won’t spoil here, because it serves as the movie’s one significant plot development. It’s a moment in the movie that’s well realized. It gave me hope for Ellis. The revelation would serve as a fine reveal in a five- or ten-minute long short, but Ellis’s daily drudgery – the film shows us one week in our hero’s life, with a title card marking off each day – isn’t interesting enough on its own when stretched to almost feature length.
I got the sense that Upstate Story is an intensely personal project for Rose. In addition to directing, he also wrote and produced the film, and serves as actor in the lead role. His performance as Ellis is dour and on the edge. More than once, I was reminded of Travis Bickle’s “God’s lonely man” speech from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. I waited for Ellis to pour the rum he’s drinking into his Cream of Wheat, à la Bickle’s penchant for pouring whisky over his corn flakes.
Ellis also shares that iconic character’s misogyny, with none of the nuance and ambiguity present in Paul Schrader’s script for Taxi Driver. Ellis tells us early in the film that it’s hard living in middle-of-nowhere New York state, because those around him don’t share his “left-wing ideals.” We never get a sense what those ideals might be, though. One thing is sure: feminism isn’t one of them. Every woman Ellis describes in his voice over is a bitch.
His roommate’s girlfriend is a bitch who has her boyfriend “pussy-whipped.” We never meet these two characters, but in one scene Ellis laments their audible love-making in the next room. He tells us he can’t wait until his roommate “shoves her head down into the pillow,” so he doesn’t have to hear her voice. Ellis’s ex-girlfriend, the one we see in the flashback, is also a bitch.
Rose – who served as cinematographer alongside Kendra Mosher – made a smart move in shooting his film in the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio. This gives Upstate Story a constricted feel, putting us in Ellis’s headspace, who feels trapped by his circumstances. Rose and Mosher also opted to shoot the picture in black-and-white. When coupled with attempts at humor like “The transition from winter to spring is a strange one…It’s up and down like a yo-yo… Kind of like a porn star’s career, actually. A lot less semen, I must say, though,” I was reminded of Kevin Smith’s terminally overrated debut feature, Clerks.
Those two films, Taxi Driver and Clerks, evoke earlier cycles of storytelling and filmmaking in which straight white men’s issues and problems were at the center of the vast majority of American cinema. (And let’s be honest, that’s basically still the case.)
I don’t want to belittle Ellis’s problems. No one should be dismissed because of who they are. Nor do I want to ignore class issues; Ellis is stuck in a low-wage job. The movie doesn’t emphasize this, though. Ellis seems to have his basic needs met, aside from his struggles with depression and substance abuse. But Ellis’s biggest issue is that he has a shitty job. One fleeting moment toward the end of the movie aside, Upstate Story doesn’t frame that issue in an ultimately satisfying or compelling way.
Why it got 2.5 stars:
- Upstate Story would work well as a short film, but there isn’t enough to sustain it at almost feature length. The drudgery of the work day can only carry a movie so far.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Upstate Story is available to view for free on YouTube here.
- Rose’s film is steeped in a kind of dangerous nostalgia. At several points in the film, Ellis laments how perfect life was when he was a kid. Looking back fondly on the past is fine, but obsession with and romanticizing of the past is a sure-fire way to stay stuck in life and always unhappy in the present.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I stopped counting the weeks since theaters shut down back in June. This is week 26, but it’s not really relevant anymore, since many chains have reopened. I’m still not ready to go back regularly, but I might be prepared to take my first trip back to see Tenet. I’ll be looking at safety protocols, and making sure (if I do decide to go) that I’m in as empty a screening as possible.