Review of Keir O’Donnell’s film “Marmalade”

The directorial debut of actor Keir O’Donnell, Marmalade, has been released, which until about halfway through pretends to be a moderately funny crime comedy, and then suddenly turns into a moderately challenging thriller with numerous plot twists. According to Yulia Shagelman, This transition was not entirely successful for the novice author.

Although the Australian himself, Keir O’Donnell, who played supporting, third and fifth roles in numerous TV series (for example, Fargo, Legion, Ray Donovan and others) and films (of which the most notable is Clint Eastwood’s Sniper ), 45 years old, his first directorial experience is clearly aimed at a younger audience. It’s not for nothing that the handsome guy from the TV series “Stranger Things” Joe Keery starred here, and the pink-haired heroine of his dreams was played by Camila Morrone, who is currently better known as a party girl, social media star and ex-girlfriend of Leonardo DiCaprio, than as a serious actress. It may also be easier for their younger fans to buy into O’Donnell’s trickery, which several times turns the script he wrote inside out.

Kiri plays the Baron – to put it mildly, a provincial boy who does not sparkle with intelligence, whom we meet at the moment when he is arrested for bank robbery. His cellmate turns out to be an experienced black prisoner, Otis (Aldis Hodge), who, among other things, is credited with several escapes from prison. Having learned about this specialization of his, the Baron asks Otis to help him escape, and urgently: after all, at exactly half past four tomorrow, his beloved with the sweet name Marmalade, with whom they, in fact, robbed the bank, will be waiting for him at the appointed place. The young man is even ready to give his entire share, $250 thousand, to a new acquaintance, because for him money is not the most important thing, just to be together with his Marmalade.

Slightly surprised by this proposal, Otis asks the Baron how he came to live like this, and so, from the words of the young man and from flashbacks, we learn his woeful tale. It features a small town in the American South, dying from the economic crisis, a sick mother who requires very expensive medications, dismissal from her job at the post office and Marmalade, who burst into the Baron’s dull existence like a lawless comet and immediately turned his life upside down. Of course, the robbery was her idea – after all, our hero himself is too innocent and naive for this, and also, in the words of the prison warden, “dumb as a balsa tree.”

If what is happening on the screen seems like a set of the most shabby cliches, Marmalade seems like a completely clichéd version of the outdated role of the “crazy dream girl” (manic pixie dream girl), and the clarity of the Baron is dangerously approaching the clinical mark, then these feelings should not be absolutized. O’Donnell drops quite clear hints that the Baron’s narrator is rather unreliable, and even in the most touching moments maintains an ironic tone, suggesting that none of this is serious, and then pulls out his first “what a twist” from his sleeve, which, perhaps truly surprising.

But then they begin to pour in one after another, and then the director makes a mistake – being carried away by his own wit, he forgets about logic, and most importantly, he misses the audience’s attention. When the tenacity of the plot disappears, unpleasant questions begin to creep into your head, like why the characters do this and that, why they do not notice the obvious, and how it happened that we all got from point A to point E, passing B, C and D. The ever-louder social notes (oh, it turns out that the real criminals are not bank robbers, but greedy capitalists, especially the owners of pharmaceutical companies!) also do not really benefit the picture, introducing some imbalance into its light entertaining intonation. However, the charm of the cast and the cheerful rhythm still help to endure until the finale, even if it turns out to be slightly disappointing.