TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL 2015 // A FILM REVIEW OF "THE ADDERALL DIARIES"
The 2015 Tribeca Film Festival, presented by AT&T, runs April 15th-26th and features hundreds of features, documentaries, short films, and special events all throughout downtown New York City. The ArtsWire Weekly's three featured reviewers Mateo, Derek, & Chrisena are hitting the festival and bringing the reviews right to you! What you should see and what you should skip...
Stephen Elliott's 2010 memoir THE ADDERALL DIARIES relies on a clever notion: that the narrator is an unreliable one. The man telling you the story may not exactly remember the story correctly. Such a tale can become a gripping and pulsating narrative. However, Pamela Romanowsky's film version, starring James Franco as an unreliable author, hits only a few of the right notes. The rest are clunky, gloomy, and unintentionally funny.
Franco plays Elliott, as the film opens, is a well known author. He's a hot property after having a best seller about his childhood abuse reach tremendous heights. His agent (Cynthia Nixon) has angled him a great deal for a new book from Random House. However, he soon gets a new idea for the novel after the new of a successful man (Christian Slater) being tried for the murder of his wife starts making the rounds. He becomes obsessed with the case and starts attending the trial. While watching the case one day he also notices a very attractive reporter (Amber Heard) doing the same. Well, almost the same. She took pages of notes and he wrote the equivalent of a short sentence. Almost immediately they head off to have some sex and engage in Elliott's twisted fantasies but in between a couple hook ups she comes to a book reading of his still massively successful first book and there is humiliated when his father Neil (Ed Harris) shows up. Elliott claims in the book that his father's dead, so this appearance put a damper on that instantly and Neil claims that the rest of the novel is horseshit too. Elliott's career collapses almost within moments.
Throughout the film we are hit with short, hyper edited flashbacks of an unhappy childhood and an abusive father. However, he soon realizes that he may be remembering them differently than it actually happened. True, Neil still won't be winning any father of the year awards, but Stephen won't be receiving any "World's Greatest Son" trophies as well. The biggest problem with the story is how unrelentingly moody it is without giving any catharsis or reason to root for anyone. The script often leaps into unintentional laughter and eye rolls (such as the sex scene between Franco and Heard where he asks her to choke him and then immediately says "I love you"). Franco isn't terrible in the role; in fact he has several scenes that showcase a better film. And Ed Harris, for the most part, delivers as he always does a solid performance. But the lackluster script, too hip for its own good editing, and grand reaches of plausibility makes it a trial that you really don't want to be a part of.
VERDICT: SKIP IT
SCREENPLAY BY Pamela Romanowsky BASED ON THE NOVEL BY Stephen Elliott DIRECTED BY Pamela Romanowsky STARRING James Franco, Ed Harris, Amber Heard, Christian Slater, Cynthia Nixon
Playing as part of The 2015 Tribeca International Film Festival. For tickets & schedules: http://www.tribecafilm.com
MATEO MORENO recently won a bet on who could hold their breath the longest underwater. He won the bet, having beat local loudmouth Jimmy "Thunderbird" Thomas with a record breaking "fourteen minutes." True, part of that time was him unconscious and the other part was him being revived, but he still counts it, and is now $20 richer. Take THAT Thunderbird! He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.