For those just tuning in, Crossing Shaky Ground was a small independent film made by Paul Bright, an acquaintance of mine in the Portland theatre scene. I was invited to give the film an advance review a couple years back, and the movie has since been published on Amazon Prime. Alas, I’m sorry that my review was less than positive, but Paul was a great sport about the whole thing and graciously invited me to another advance review of his latest work.
Pocket Mouse Protector was billed as a queer screwball sex comedy, and my interest was immediately piqued. I know Paul as an openly gay artist with a long history of LGBTQ+ activism, and I was excited to see him tackle something in this lane. More importantly, my biggest complaint about Crossing Shaky Ground was in how loose and unwieldy the whole thing was. No way was that going to fly in a screwball comedy, a genre that demands the utmost precision. So, what have we got?
Paul himself stars as Larry, an environmental activist obsessed with protecting the “pocket mouse”, an animal that somehow predates humanity and has now been reduced to near-extinction. The pocket mouse’s last known natural habitat is a small patch of land in the fictional Seaside, CA (an obvious stand-in for Seaside, OR, though the film is primarily shot in locations throughout Portland). Trouble is, wealthy asshole Thierry (Jonas Israel) has cleared that same patch of land for development into a massive beachside resort. We’ve also got Barry (James Sharinghousen) on hand as Theirry’s project manager for the hotel’s development.
Got all that? Good, because this is where things get confusing.
Meanwhile, Larry has been running into problems with his wife (Mary, played by Eleanor O’Brien), who’s on the brink of divorcing him because of his environmental obsessions and his impotence in bed. Thus Mary has been sleeping around with Barry, keeping both men completely in the dark. While that’s going on, Larry’s dealing with sexual overtures from Carrie (newcomer Yelena King), who just happens to be Thierry’s wife.
Things get even crazier when Carrie pioneers a new male sexual enhancement drug. At Mary’s behest, both Larry and Barry take the new treatment, only to find that it came with an unexpected side effect: The drug has turned them gay. Of course the two meet and fall madly in lust with each other, cue the sexual shenanigans.
Right off the bat, we’ve got a problem with the environmental angle. See, the pocket mouse is special because it’s actually a misnomer and the pocket mouse is indeed some other type of mammal with a name I can’t spell… it’s this whole recurring comedy bit. The point is, Larry is comically incapable of explaining exactly what the pocket mouse is and why its preservation is so important, much less explaining in terms that would get a layperson (or the audience) to know or care.
Granted, this might have worked as a commentary on the lethal disconnect between professional environmental scientists and mainstream society, as with Don’t Look Up. The difference is that Larry — and the filmmakers — are tragically incapable of selling anyone on the importance of these fictional rodents. Without those tangible stakes, there’s no urgency in the environmental angle and the whole theme falls apart.
What might be even worse, Larry’s whole deal is that he’s single-mindedly obsessed with the pocket mouse, he knows everything there is to know about the pocket mouse, yet he’s still so impracticed at discussing the topic that he trips over his own tongue with every attempt. That premise might have made for effective comedy (we’ll come back to that later), but more than anything else, the character’s supposed expertise clashes with his demonstrated bumbling. Thus the characterization of our protagonist is irreparably crippled out of the gate.
The good news is that while the environmental angle fails, the film more than makes up for it with the sexuality angle. After all, it’s not every day we see a film that so clearly portrays characters over 50 as sexually viable and active. We’ve also got significant male (and female) nudity, in addition to an explicit sex scene between two gay men. All of this is stuff we don’t often see in mainstream cinema, and we could definitely stand to see it more often.
More importantly, we’ve got a screwball sex comedy predicated on a drug that turns straight men gay. How would this be even remotely possible for anyone to prove? How do we know that the men in question weren’t always gay and only just now came to grips with it? How do we square this with the established notion that sexuality isn’t a choice? What would such a massive transition be like for someone who’s built his whole identity around being a straight man, and how could he learn to adapt his definition of masculinity in the shift to gay culture?
All of these (and others posited by the film) are deeply relevant questions. The process of exploring them puts our characters in a vulnerable place, thus priming them for comedy, drama, poignant romance, or anywhere else the filmmakers care to take them. These issues are deftly handled, and tackling them by way of a sex comedy was a bold stroke of genius.
But for all of that, the film still didn’t work for me. And it took me a while to put my finger on why.
Yes, we’ve got some issues with the shoddy VFX, the uneven sound mixing, the cheap-sounding score, the spotty production design and so on, but I’m not going to hold any of that against an indie film on a shoestring budget and neither should anyone else.
Speaking of which, I feel compelled to issue a word of warning to any aspiring filmmakers out there: DO NOT openly reference another filmmaker in your own project. Birdemic did it with Alfred Hitchcock, and it only made the film look more pathetically godawful for comparing itself to an iconic work from a cinematic grandmaster. Pocket Mouse Protector does it with Ed Wood, leading me to wonder if the filmmakers actively wanted comparisons to some haphazard work from the patron saint of no-budget schlock. In both cases, it’s a bad look to be so blatant about it.
Even so, that wasn’t necessarily a deal-breaker. And yes, the characters are all shrill and one-dimensional and overly heightened (You did notice how everyone’s names just happened to rhyme, didn’t you?), but that’s par for the course with a screwball comedy. In fact, the script as a whole was… well, the script wasn’t great, but it was certainly passable. On paper, the dialogue is perfectly fine and the jokes are serviceable. Give the exact same script to actors on a stage and they could’ve made it work at least as well.
And I absolutely had no problem with the cast. Paul Bright and James Sharinghousen are both acting their asses off here, Eleanor O’Brien and Jonas Israel are always reliable talents, and Yelena King is a laugh riot. That’s not even getting started on all the delightful bit performances from Blake Stone, Samson Syharath, Matthew Sepeda, Devon Roberts, Jonathan Hernandez, Christie Quinn, Alec Lugo (sweet mercy, Alec Lugo — guy only had one scene, but it was freaking hilarious), and so many wonderful others. Everyone here understood the assignment, and they all turned in marvelous comedic work.
(DISCLOSURE: Yes, I do claim the privilege to count pretty much everyone listed above among my personal friends and acquaintances. In particular, Christie Quinn and Jonathan Hernandez are two of my longest-running and most trusted theatrical collaborators.)
The problem here isn’t with the script or the actors, or even the characters. It’s with the editing.
At the halfway point of the movie, we get a scene in which Larry and Barry are both on the screen at the same time. They’re arguing with each other, going back and forth screaming at each other until they finally start making out. I wish I knew why in the nine hells we didn’t get this kind of energy through the entire film.
Practically everywhere else in the movie, the conversations are presented in a standard shot/reverse-shot setup, with every character shot either in close-up or extreme close-up. This means that with very few exceptions, the characters are never sharing the screen together. This means in turn that through most of the comedic arguments and misunderstandings, we hardly ever see the characters reacting to each other or bouncing off each other, an indispensable aspect of screwball comedy.
Another crucial aspect of the genre is speed. In any good screwball comedy, the characters are talking and acting like idiots because they don’t have time to process what’s happening. The very instant somebody has enough to take a breath and think things through, the conceit falls apart. Timing is always a crucial part of comedy, but especially with screwball comedy. And when the extreme close-ups in shot/reverse-shot means a cut after literally every line of dialogue, that timing is dead on arrival. It slows everything down just enough that a breakneck pace is no longer possible and the screwball conceit is broken beyond repair.
We’ve got other problems with the editing as well. Late in the third act, we’ve got four people talking on the phone, all taking part in different conversations, all going on at the same time. It’s incoherent. But my personal favorite has to be the CGI balloon that obstructs the camera for the sake of a hidden cut. That’s just… brazenly awful.
On a final miscellaneous note, I have to address those bizarre few instances when the film tries to go for a tone that doesn’t remotely match the rest of the film. The instant replay with audience applause after a cumshot comes to mind, ditto for a bizarre musical number with a local drag queen only credited as “Marge”.
To be clear, it’s not like musical numbers don’t have a place in screwball comedy — the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre was loaded with them. Even a one-off musical number in the middle of a non-musical screwball comedy can work, just look at What’s Up, Doc?. So why did the “As Time Goes By” number in What’s Up, Doc? work while this one breaks the movie? Well…
- The light piano number helped to give the audience a breather after the destruction of the hotel room in the previous scene.
- It made sense in the context of the characters’ motivations, as Barbara Streisand’s character was trying to charm her way back into the male lead’s good graces.
- Barbara Streisand opened the movie with a musical number over the opening credits, so the audience was primed for a cinematic tone that could accommodate a musical number.
- It’s Barbara Streisand, so the audience likely would’ve demanded refunds (and rightly so) if she didn’t get a musical number in there somewhere.
I might add that Barbara Streisand’s character could get away with breaking the fourth wall and winking to the audience because she was supposed to be this unique embodiment of chaos not beholden to everyone else’s rules. By comparison, the music number and the audience applause don’t make any kind of sense within the narrative, they don’t work with the characters’ motivations, they don’t fit within the tone or the established rules of the movie… they just don’t work. Even as jokes, they left me more confused than amused.
Once again, I’m put in the position where I respect Paul’s work more than I like it, and I desperately wanted to like Pocket Mouse Protector more than I did. And there is a lot to like here. The actors are all delightful, a few of the jokes got me laughing, and the LGBTQ+ subject matter is handled in such a bold way that it could only really be done in a shoestring indie feature.
But ultimately, the movie falls short for the same reason nobody does screwball comedies anymore: Because it’s really fucking hard. The shot/reverse-shot is a tried and true cinematic standard in large part because it’s so simple and effective, but it’s anathema to a genre that depends on lightning speeds and precision timing. This movie so badly needed more scenes of the characters interacting with each other and reacting against each other in a single long extended take, with joke on top of joke and each line coming immediately after the one before. Getting a scene to where this movie needed would likely have taken days of rehearsal and dozens of takes, exhausting more time and money than this little indie movie likely had.
The film doesn’t accomplish what it set out to do, but I remain grateful that at least somebody had the guts to try. And if nothing else, this is definitely a step up from Crossing Shaky Ground.