Fourteen (2019)

This story of the codependent relationship of 20-something best friends (since they were 14) veers wildly from wonderful to maddening. The acting and plot are good but the pacing frustrated me so much that I started catcalling at the television and Jack joined me. We watched it because its festival accolades include director Dan Sallitt's winning Best Screenplay at the Gotham Awards, tied with Radha Blank for The Forty-Year-Old Version (the latter movie had no such problems).

Tallie Medel plays Mara, the level-headed one, who takes care of her unstable friend Jo (Norma Kuhling). When the credits rolled, I realized that Sallitt also edited it, which could explain the tedious real-time scenes that do not advance the story. When the camera lingers on a wide shot of the Katonah, New York train station, it seems interminable, you should forgive the expression, as we see the train arrive at the station, come slowly to a halt, discharge dozens of passengers, and finally we see Mara (with longer hair, I might add, than the rest of the movie) walk to the parking lot and head up the street. If I could stand it, I'd load it again just to see how many minutes long that sequence is. But I'm not going to do it.

The whole movie is only one hour 34 minutes long, and we suspect that it might have started as a short film and was padded to make it feature length but I have no evidence. Then again, editor Sallit might have been in love with every shot and could not "kill his darlings."

No composer nor soundtrack listing is on imdb, and, though it's been only eight days since we saw it (paying a rental fee on iTunes), I must have blocked any memory of the music. I think we liked seeing the Brooklyn locations, maybe?

Sallitt directed, wrote, and edited two features before this and wrote and directed another. Medel and Kuhling are also new to me, though Medel has dozens of credits and Kuhling has a few.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics are way more patient than we are, averaging 98%, while its audiences seem to agree with us at 53.