Anarchy, Chaos Suffocate the Dream in ‘Bellflower’

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Rating: 4.0/5.0

CHICAGO – A film about the American Dream returned to the sender is released, in its own way and time, through the youth of every generation. “Bellflower” feels like the anarchist statement of the current post college dreamers, stuck in a detached atmosphere with electronic time wasters, material glut and little income opportunity to pay for it all.

Evan Glodell wrote, directed and stars in this hallucinatory vision of the screw-it-all drifters who strive to kill their boredom through the building of extreme weaponry and motor vehicles. Part of it is a love story, but that is destined to fail when anticipating the end of the world, and the civilizing nature of love has no effect on men who were born to die.

Glodell is Woodrow, a midwesterner who moved to California with his best buddy Aiden (Tyler Dawson) to pursue the movies and their own fantasies associated with them. They are master inventors of custom cars and unique terminating implements. Fire is the devil’s only friend, and the two buddies relish in making more spectacular infernos through the building of bigger and better flame throwers, and dream of apocalypse so they can drive their Mad-Max type vehicle (named Medusa) into the middle of the ruination.

Groovy Kind of Love: Evan Glodell and Jessie Wiseman in ‘Bellflower’ Photo credit: Coatwolf Productions

This is all interrupted when a girl name Milly (Jessie Wiseman) comes along and Woodrow is smitten by her charms. They do spontaneous craziness like taking a road trip to a cheap Texas diner, and end up trading in their car for a motorcycle. They act, as new lovers do, as if other relationships around them do not exist, and this causes problems with Aiden and Milly’s friend Courtney (Rebekah Brandes). When Milly decides to move on, Woodrow takes it out on his bodily parts, and the real end game is not a big bang, but a psychological implosion.

This is a Glodell having fun, as he shot this film with friends and crew from his day job as an internet short feature filmmaker for $17,000. It is gleefully messed up, with the talent of the small ensemble cast locking into the edge-of-anarchy mindfulness in Glodell’s screenplay. They eat bugs at a local bar, produce flame balls the size of small houses and imbibe substances with no sense of future attentiveness. The generation raised with the VCR is now rolling out their own take on the “Easy Rider” style of the anti-American Dream.

Bad behavior is a characteristic of this type of nihilism and there is plenty to go around, including self-inflicted physical and emotional damage that is hard to look at. But it is all part of the outsider’s attitude in this movie, which gives the extremism a feeling of SNAFU. If it is violence, then the blood will flow in buckets and the wounds will gape. If it is sex, than it will all be extreme and empty, especially when cheating on a partner. Who needs civilization when there are flame throwers to build?

Whenever a film is made using “friends” as actors the results can vary, but it leans heavily toward amateurish. Bellflower has the luck of a solid ensemble, perfectly willing to go where Glodell was taking them. playing off his attitude with sparks of their own. Jessie Wiseman as Milly is particularly striking, exhibiting extreme carnality and provocative menace. She stands toe-to-toe with the flame throwing male actors and generates just as much heat. Tyler Dawson is strange and goofy as Aiden, displaying some appropriately weird jealousy when Woodrow gets a girlfriend.

On the Road: Evan Glodell in ‘Bellflower’ Photo credit: Coatwolf Productions

The ending is a bit vague, as Woodrow suffers a head injury and reality/fantasy becomes blurred. There are symbolic flashes of the pre-and-post apocalypse married with revenge visions that doesn’t feel as in synch with the rest of the film, yet ultimately is. Basically anything can happen in the universe of Glodell, and the attitude of the narrative gives him leeway to mess with the circumstantial reality. It’s the end of the world as he knows it and in that context all is fine.

It is exciting to know that filmmakers like this are breaking through the mush of typical storytelling and getting some face time. Bellflower is perfect midnight movie fare, but at the same time exposes itself in the extreme light of day.

By PATRICK McDONALD Senior Staff Writer HollywoodChicago.com pat@hollywoodchicago.com