Maggie Siff | Through the Shattered Lens

There’s a great montage during the first half of A Woman, A Part.

An actress named Anna (Maggie Siff) wanders around her home, reading scripts for tv shows and movies. In between shots of her snorting cocaine, we listen as she reads dialogue aloud. One of the scripts features her as a dying mother who, with her last words, asks her children to look after their father. Another script is obviously from a Lifetime film and again, the role that Maggie reads is for a mother. In another script, she’s a love interest. And, in another, she’s just a bitchy authority figure. As becomes obvious from the dialogue, none of the scripts offer her the chance to play a leading or even a fully developed character. In each script, she’s either a plot device or a part of the scenery. She reads a script, she does a line. As she finishes each script, she tosses it into her pool until soon, the water is full of shallow characters and clichéd dialogue. Soon, Anna is floating in the pool, surrounded by the debris of her career.

Anna moved to Los Angeles from New York. In New York, she was all about theater and seeking truth through acting. In Los Angeles, she has a role on a sitcom and a certain amount of fame. People stare at her in restaurants. Some ask for autographs. Anna is exhausted, frustrated, and very aware that Hollywood has little to offer an actress in her 40s.

Anna escapes Los Angeles, heading back to New York. She hopes to reunite with her former friends but, when she arrives, she discovers that some have moved on and some have not. Her former acting partner, Kate (Cara Seymour), no longer considers herself to be an actress and resents Anna for having left their show to go to Los Angeles. Playwright Isaac (John Ortiz) has written a play, one that centers around a flawed character who Anna immediately recognizes as being based on herself.

A Woman, A Part is the first full-length feature film to be directed by the video artist, Elisabeth Subrin. It’s a flawed but promising debut. For every moment that runs the risk of falling into cliché, there’s a sequence like that pool scene or the scenes where Kate and Anna deal with their fractured friendship. It’s in those scenes between Maggie Siff and Cara Seymour that the film really comes alive. When a fan approaches Anna while she’s talking to Kate and Anna responds by saying that everyone should be asking for Kate’s autograph, Kate rightly calls Anna out for her condescending attempt at kindness. At the same time, the film is also honest enough in its characterizations to admit that much of Kate’s reaction is due to her own resentment that Anna found the success that Kate didn’t. This is a film that realizes that friendships are often the most complex of relationships. Maggie Siff and Cara Seymour both give honest and poignant performances.

As I said, A Woman, A Part is not without its flaws. To be honest, the character of Isaac never interested me as much as Anna and Kate. There are a few scenes which are just a little bit too on the nose. It’s not a perfect film but it is a promising one and I look forward to seeing what Elisabeth Subrin does next.

The 5th Wave, which came out in January of this year (and that really should be all you need to hear), is the epitome of a “Who cares?” type of film.

It’s another YA adaptation, taking place in a dystopian future and featuring way too many characters for its own good. Aliens have invaded the Earth and they’ve attacked in 4 waves. There was the 1st wave, which destroyed all of the electricity. There was the 2nd wave which involved a lot of earthquakes and natural disasters. I imagine California fell off the mainland during the 2nd wave. The 3rd wave involved bird flu. The 3rd wave is important because it killed the mother of our protagonist, teenager Cassie Sullivan (Chloe Grace Moretz). You can’t be a YA protagonist unless you have at least one dead parents. That’s the rules of the genre.

The 5th Wave deals with the … well, the fifth wave. As far as I can tell, the 5th Wave involves turning every human left into a stock character from a YA dystopian novel. Basically, if you’ve sat through Divergent or The Maze Runner or The Giver or countless other YA adaptations, you already know who everyone is in The 5th Wave. Cassie is our heroine, which means that she spends a lot of time wandering around in the forest, killing potential threats, and thinking about how different things were back in high school.

And that’s really all she does.

See, The 5th Wave last nearly two hours and not a damn thing happens in the entire film. That’s because the 5th Wave is all about setting up a sequel. We meet a lot of characters. We get a lot of backstory. Imagine if The Walking Dead did a half-season with 6 shows straight of people talking about doing things but never actually doing any of it. (Oh, wait, they did just do that…) That’s pretty much what sitting through The 5th Wave was like. We learn that there are aliens disguised as humans. We learns that what’s left of the government cannot be trusted and I was totally happy with that plot development because seriously, the government sucks. As we watch Moretz, Ron Livington, Liev Schriber, and Maria Bello struggle to make some of the most cliched dialogue ever sound compelling, we learn that being a talented actor doesn’t mean that you always get to appear in interesting films.

Things drag on and then they end. Why do they end? Because that’s the way YA adaptations works. Nothing can be resolved in just one movie. Instead, everything’s about setting things up for the next installment. At the very least, all YA films have to be a part of a trilogy. And the third part of the trilogy always requires at least two parts to tell the entire story. That’s just the way things works.

And really, I thought that Divergent was the most soulless YA adaptation that I had ever seen. But the 5th Wave makes a strong case that perhaps it deserves the title.

I guess we could wait to see what happens when part two comes out but seriously, who cares?