2014’s Only One Way tells the story of Paul (Josiah David Warren), who is 20 years old and who lives with his parents in Texas. Paul was home-schooled and now he’s a college student. He goes to church every Sunday and he and his parents have regular Bible study.
Paul is a bit easily led. We discover this when he starts dating Melanie (Erika Alaspa), who is still in high school and who insists that Paul tell her that she’s beautiful whenever he picks her up from her dance class. Melanie’s father has a devilish beard and a condescending attitude and, when he hears that Paul still lives at home, he says that’s fine except that Paul won’t be a real man until he moves out. Later Paul gets a text from Melanie telling him that her parents loved meeting him but that they all agree that he needs to become “A REAL MAN” and find a new place to live.
Paul gets his own apartment and soon, he’s struggling in both school and life. Melanie and her wild friends are always coming over to party. They introduce Paul to smoking weed. Paul goes from hacking up a lung to making an apple pipe in record time. Uh-oh! His parents stop by the apartment to drop off some groceries and they catch Paul with an apple.
No longer welcome at his parents’s house, Paul tries to make it in the world on his own. He gets a job delivering fried chicken but he’s not good at it. You may wonder how any twenty year-old could manage to screw up something as simple a delivering fried chicken. Well, Paul drops a bucket of KFC on somebody’s lawn and his response it just to brush the grass off the chicken. Then he drops the bucket for a second time when trying to hand it off to the people who ordered it.
“That’ll be fifteen,” Paul says.
No, Paul, that’ll be free!
To be honest, what Paul is going through is not that unusual. I think everyone struggles a bit making the transition from being a teenager to being an adult. The job of a parent is to help the kid prepare for that transition but still, it’s not easy going from living a life with no consequences to living a life where everything has a consequence. Everyone probably parties too much when they first leave home. It’s just human nature.
The thing that sets Paul apart is that he really does just seem to be a complete idiot. Even before he starts dating Melanie, he’s talking about how he’s struggling in college. The film puts most of the blame on Melanie but Melanie isn’t the one who told Paul to put the chicken back in that bucket. Melanie may smoke weed but Paul is the one who decides to smoke with her. Believe me, most people will not be offended if you don’t smoke their weed. That just means more for them.
Anyway, this film was shot on video with a largely amateur class and it shows. This is one of those films where you really have to strain to make out the dialogue because the sound recording is so bad. On the plus side, Paul does own a really cute dog and, by the end of the film he’s found a girlfriend who isn’t trying to destroy his soul. Good for him!
