Laggies (2014, Lynn Shelton) (Patreon)

51/100

Watched this hours after learning of Lynn Shelton's death—it was the only one of her eight features that I hadn't seen. (Couldn't fit it into my TIFF '14 schedule, and then mixed-to-negative reactions from friends scared me off.) It's also the only one she had no hand in writing/devising, which conveniently enables me to speak no ill of the dead while noting that the film's already highly uneven script pretty much plunges off a cliff around the end of act two. In fact, it often feels as if Shelton, who wasn't temperamentally inclined to dismiss or disparage anyone, is subtly counteracting the story's conventional dictates, seeking to humanize characters who were conceived as hissable. Doesn't really work with Ellie Kemper's inexplicably hostile best friend, but it arguably works too well in the case of Laggies' Baxter/Bellamy (i.e., the too-nice guy destined to be rejected in favor of someone more charismatic), played with such an open heart by Mark Webber that the climactic airport dumping scene comes across as wantonly cruel rather than necessary. On the flip side, both Knightley and Rockwell exhibit the special loosey-goosey quality that Shelton reliably encouraged in her actors, and I guess it's not Moretz's fault that Kaitlyn Dever's often around making me wish that she were playing the third lead instead. Good stuff outweighs the bad for a while, and I think I'd have really liked the film that I suspect Shelton would have preferred to fashion from this intriguing premise—one in which all of the key relationships remain platonic, thereby avoiding the actual film's late-breaking onslaught of cheesy romcom contrivances. Special pleading borne of grief? Probably. But I'm okay with that. RIP.