LAFF ‘09 Review: Wah Do Dem
Wah Do Dem (What They Do) – USA 2009
Directed by Sam Fleischner and Ben Chace. Starring Sean Bones, Norah Jones, Kevin Bewersdorf and Carl Bradshaw.
Narrative Competition – World Premiere
You’re a filmmaker and you’ve just won a cruise to Jamaica in a raffle. What do you do? You make a movie centering on a cruise to Jamaica, of course. That’s what Sam Fleischner has done anyway. Wah Do Dem tells the story of New Yorker Max (Sean Bones) who gets dumped by his girlfriend (Norah Jones in a cameo) a few days before the cruise they’ve won is scheduled to set sail. Depressed and unable to find anyone to go with him, he decides to go alone and ends up having an adventure beyond anything they write about in the guidebooks.
The first part of the story details young Max’s ennui aboard ship as he comes to terms with the fact he’s completely out of his element among the mostly elderly cruisers. There is a danger in these scenes that the film will descend into smug, ironic hipsterism that mocks the cruise lifestyle. Though there is a bit of that, Fleischner wisely avoids making the passengers his comic foils. Max takes a dim view of the experience, but the filmmaking is more observational and more concerned with Max’s state of mind than in openly criticizing how people spend their leisure time.
Once Max hits land, he’s eager to get away from the tourists and he makes a beeline for a more authentic Jamaican experience. There he meets a local who takes him to a lovely beach not on any of the tourist maps. They smoke some pot and Max takes a swim in the clear blue waters. He seems finally on the verge of clearing his head, only to emerge from his swim to find that all his belongings including his passport have been stolen. Alone, shoeless and broke, he must make his way to the US consulate in Kingston two hours away.
If the first half of Wah Do Dem neatly avoids a set of cliché’s, thankfully so does the second half. The tendency in movies sometimes is to overly idealize the local populations of foreign countries or to make them exaggeratedly menacing. There are hints of both types here, but mostly the story focuses on Max as he comes to realize in this environment he’s not all that much different from the tourists he’s left behind.
Interestingly, Max’s adventure plays out against the backdrop of the recent US presidential election. At one point he jubilantly celebrates right alongside the enthusiastic Jamaicans as the United States chooses its first black president.
Wah Do Dem is a micro-budgeted feature filmed with a tiny crew. Though the handheld camera is irritating at times, some of the digital photography is very good looking and the whole thing has a refreshing immediate quality.
Sean Bones isn’t necessarily an actor with great range, but he fills his hipster doofus character convincingly and after a while you genuinely start to root for the guy.
Filed under: Film Festivals, Reviews
Tags: Ben Chace, Carl Bradshaw, Kevin Bewersdorf, Norah Jones, Sam Fleischner, Sean Bones, Wah Do Dem
