Another film we were greatly looking forward to at the Woodstock Film Festival, was “Visioneers” starring Zach Galifianakis.
Now director Jared Drake seems like a very nice, well-intentioned young man, but “Visioneers” might have worked better as a twenty five minute short and we won’t be surprised if this film can’t find a distributor and doesn’t come out.
Not wholeheartedly terrible in any way (we liked it better than “The Great Buck Howard” if that gives you any WFF perspective), the pathologically deadpan and bizarre film (we mean that in the best way possible) started out pretty amusingly — and hell, we love the odd duck comedy of Galifianakis — but couldn’t coalesce into anything concrete or remain interesting past the halfway mark.
Shot on a super low budget, “Visioneers” looked surprisingly good, but suffered from half-hearted writing ideas, both random, disparate and unconnected to any of the themes of loneliness and existential unhappiness.
It’s dystopian opening is built around a wonderfully Kurt Vonnegut-like absurdist premise, but unfortunately, the film can’t help but fall far from that mark. Set in a bizarro future, where the Jeffers Corporation rules everything (including the sway of the President of the United States), “Visioneers” follows the flavorless and dull life of George Washington Winsterhammerman (Galifinakis), a level-three “tunt” in the corporation who is going nowhere fast both professionally and domestically (who is also inexplicably a descendent to the real George Washington).
The uber-mundane life of Jeffers Corp employees soon causes an epidemic of human combustion that effects the whole country and soon George himself when he starts to develop first-stage symptoms of banal/stress explosion – dreaming. His wife (the heavily underrated Judy Greer) tries to console him, but she too is immensely unhappy and fills her days watching terrible Oprah-like self-help daytime talk shows (Missi Pyle plays the hyper-actively chipper daytime host) and making batches of foodstuffs for her husband to binge eat at night on (yet another explosion symptom).
George’s brother (James LeGros) shows up to try and inspire happiness into the family via pole vaulting (yeah, it’s kinda random, we toldja), but his hippie, feel-good character feels severely underwritten and unnecessary.
And from there, the film just motors forward, there’s more explosions, more employees are replaced, Galifinakis and Greer’s marriage becomes more unhappy and nothing truly happens (OK, the Jeffers corp issues what are essentially mandatory happiness monitors to potentially explosive people, but by then we don’t really care).
While Galifinakis displays great acting promise with his silent, bottled-up angst and sad-eyed directionless character, “Visioneers” couldn’t help but feel like a lot of funny, but half-baked ideas jammed into a story about dejection via drone work, ennui and the banality that can be modern life. “Visioneers” has some good ideas, but they never really gel. But there is a promise from the Drake brothers (Bradon Drake) wrote it and we do hope they get a shot at making another film. [C+]
Music Note: While Tim DeLaughter from the Polyphonic Spree wrote the score to “Visioneers,” there really wasn’t a ton of noticeable music in the film and outside of a very celebratory and winning cue near the optimistic ending of the film, his score was largely unremarkable and unnoticeable. Here’s the trailer if you haven’t seen it. It’s quite winning and we wish the film was half as good.