Within the first minute of “Before You Know It,” protagonist Rachel’s date jokingly accuses her of being a manic pixie dream girl. It’s not unwarranted – Rachel (played by the film’s director and co-writer Hannah Pearl Utt) is a be-turtlenecked, mousy stage manager who lives in an apartment-slash-independent theater with her eccentric family. Despite being the younger sibling, Rachel has taken on the mantle of matriarch after her mother died young. She sacrifices her personal life to ensure her playwright father, Mel (Mandy Patinkin) and actor sister, Jackie (co-writer Jen Tullock) produce the play they’re counting on to keep the theater up and running.
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Her plan quickly goes awry when tragedy strikes in the film’s first act, leaving the family in financial straits and reeling from the discovery that, actually, the girls’ mother isn’t dead at all – she’s a soap opera star lounging in a millennial-pink trailer uptown. Rachel and Jackie begin to reunite with their mother, Sherrell (Judith Light), and leave Jackie’s daughter, Dodge (Oona Yaffe) in the hands of their unwitting accountant (Mike Colter). Two parallel tales of adolescence thus unfold: Dodge gets her first period and makes a new friend, and the sisters rapid-fire regress to their basest ids in the face of their mother’s abandonment.
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“Before You Know It” packs a lot of character development into 98 minutes. By the film’s end, tears are shed (perhaps including yours, the audience member’s), jealousies uncorked, and secrets aired – but while each player has their disparate arc, they defy contrivance. This is no doubt due to a fortuitous marriage of script and performance. Yaffe, for instance, brings a refreshing frankness to preteen Dodge that goes beyond mere precociousness. She’s terrified of tampons, but she also tells Jackie, point blank, “I think you can be a good mom, if you apply yourself.” Sherrell’s flighty drama queen, Rachel’s repressed straight man, and Mel’s deadbeat dad are likewise not quite as they seem. As these roles unravel along Tullock and Utt’s masterfully quippy, tender script, that entropy gives way to a startlingly human drama.
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Though character is what elevates this offbeat family story from typical Sundance fare to something truly special, it’s got many other winning elements. Jeunet-esque cinematography and production design (from Jon Keng and Katie Hickman, respectively) coalesce into niches as quirky as the characters that inhabit them. Ryan Tullock offers a simplistically charming score. But perhaps the film’s greatest boon is triple-threat Hannah Pearl Utt, who is a force of nature in the role of Rachel alone. It takes a lot of balls to cast yourself against Mandy Patinkin and Judith Light, but Utt goes toe-to-toe with these dramatic greats with admirable gusto. Equal parts winsome and buttoned-up, Rachel (thus, Utt) is impossible not to root for. You’ll feel your eyes itching when she cries and your heart swelling with the same fond exasperation she shows all her family members.
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I’d be remiss if I ended this review without also mentioning the film’s casual-yet-groundbreaking contributions to diverse on-screen representation. Rachel is a lesbian. Dodge is a half-Asian tomboy. Mike Colter charms as Charles, a black, ridiculously handsome accountant. These little subversions aren’t the story of the film – they’re traits that are as natural to their respective characters as their gaits or patterns of speech.
While “Before You Know It” sets a high bar for first-time feature filmmaking, it’s not without its shagginess. The script, while excellent, could use some pruning (Alec Baldwin has a befuddlingly superfluous cameo) and its pacing occasionally runs amok. All things considered, though, “Before You Know It” is a surefooted debut that promises writing partners Utt and Tullock, who have previously collaborated on their web series “Disengaged” and the Sundance short “Partners,” are as dramatically competent as they are sweetly sardonic. If there’s any justice in the world of festivals, this will open a lot of doors for its creators, who have eccentric chops worthy of a place among indie comedy greats like Noël Wells, Jenny Slate, and Natasha Lyonne. [B+]
Check out all our coverage from the 2019 Sundance Film Festival here.