‘Seriously Red’ Review: Rose Byrne, Bobby Cannavale & More Channel The Spirit of Dolly Parton [SXSW]

Taking inspiration from the Dolly Parton quote, “Find out who you are and do it on purpose,” the Australian comedy “Seriously Red” features the most Dolly Parton paraphernalia you’ll ever see outside of Dollywood itself. Directed by Gracie Otto (“Under The Volcano”) and written by its star Krew Boylan, the film is as bold, brash, and heartfelt as the icon herself, although not entirely as original as it could be.

An effervescent real estate appraiser with a major obsession with Dolly Parton, Boylan plays Raylene ‘Red ‘Delaney. Posters and books adorn her room. Framed portraits and a “cup of ambition” mug take up her entire desk. When Red mistakes a work event for a costume party and shows up dressed as Parton, complete with a blonde bouffant wig and orange polyester jumpsuit, her life changes forever. 

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Fired due to her continual incompetence, Red convinces Teeth (Celeste Barber) and her boss and one-time Neil Diamond impersonator Wilson (a genuinely hilarious yet subdued Bobby Cannavale) to let her audition to be the new Dolly for their Kenny Rogers (Daniel Webster) act. Soon Red’s obsession takes over her entire life as she falls deeper and deeper into the world of breathing, sleeping, and eating as Dolly Parton. Boylan plays Red with the kind of self-assurance that belies deep insecurity and shines as she becomes bolder beneath the artifice of Dolly. However, when the film needs something more profound from the actress, she comes up short. 

Structurally, Boylan’s script beats are mostly obvious, leaning too heavily on the quirk of the characters as well as Dolly quotes and songs to carry its emotional weight. Bizarre use of flashbacks to a drunken evening with an Elvis impersonator (played by a nearly unrecognizable Rose Byrne) are meant to serve as Red’s lowest point, and a catalyst for her emotional journey, but are employed so haphazardly they are ultimately clunky and distracting. The same goes for undeveloped flashbacks to a young Red, apparently teased as a child for her red hair and love of performing. These flashbacks feel like a crutch, overexplaining why Red is the way she is instead of just trusting the audience to understand and empathize with adult Red. 

As she falls deeper into self-loathing and the false comfort of her life as Dolly, Red begins living with Kenny. The two are never out of costume, existing in a sick symbiosis. I couldn’t help but think of Harmony Korine’s much sharper dark comedy “Mister Lonely” that explored similarly obsessive impersonators hiding from the pressures of real-life by living as someone else. Korine’s film found empathy for those obsessed with impersonation, while “Seriously Red” uses the lifestyle as a half-baked metaphor for self-acceptance.

Red’s emotional journey is played against her fracturing relationships with her lifelong best friend Francis (Thomas Campbell) and her eccentric mother Viv (Jean Kittson). Again relying on cliches, her mother never understood her and always belittles her attempts at expressing herself, while the devoted Francis appears to be standing in the wings waiting for Red to love him back. However, like much of the film, even these relationships are underdeveloped and when both fissures are resolved it’s hard to even care.  

While much of the film’s flaws are at the script level, Otto’s filmmaking does show promise. The mostly jewel tone set decoration allows Boylan’s red hair to pop in the frame, underscoring just how bizarre her self-hatred is. The hair and makeup transformations on the impersonators are spot-on, with close-ups utilized in the song numbers highlighting their brilliance. One surreal sequence while Red undergoes anesthesia before surgery results in a wonderfully Busby Berkeley-esque kaleidoscope swirling red and white mayhem. Unfortunately, showy filmmaking can’t overcome a shallow script. 

The material is clearly very personal for Boylan, who seems to be working through body image issues mainly rooted in her red hair, but even as cinematic therapy, “Seriously Red” leans too heavily on cliches and finally dares to answer the question: is there such a thing as too much Dolly Parton? I don’t even think Dolly Parton would want to spend nearly two hours with this many Dolly Parton quotes as a guide to life.

“The more unique a person you are, the harder it is to be someone else,” Wilson tells Red as she begins to question her life as Dolly. The best impersonators, he says, are blank slates, made better by living their lives as someone else. What the script thinks is unique about itself is all surface level, resulting in a film that feels like a copy of a copy of something that maybe once had been original but now feels as fake as a wax figurine. [C-]

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