"Final" is a compelling though slightly flawed drama, produced as part of the InDigEnt project, a digital-filmmaking collective commissioned by the Independent Film Channel to make 10 features for roughly $100,000 apiece.
Its chief character, Bill (Denis Leary), awakens with impaired memory inside a concrete Connecticut asylum. He thinks he was cryogenically frozen in 1999 and thawed out 400 years later.
A patient and even-tempered therapist, Ann (Hope Davis), tries to gain his trust while fighting off her personal feelings for him. When asked to explain why nothing seems to have changed in four centuries, Bill claims the government has created an elaborate hoax designed specifically to deceive him.
What follows is a mental and emotional tug of war between two emotionally scarred people. Ann attempts to help or possibly force Bill to piece together the shards of his fractured memory (glimpsed in a series of flashbacks that hint at loss, heartbreak, and attempted suicide). Bill, on the other hand, wants nothing more than to escape. Both are hobbled by feelings that begin to grow between them.
Director Campbell Scott elicits nuanced, passionate performances from his tiny cast, particularly from Leary, who projects charm, vulnerability, and barbed sarcasm often at once. It's a sensitive and surprisingly restrained performance from the man who made a name for himself ranting about Dove Bars and Cindy Crawford in MTV promo spots.
The movie stumbles during its final act, as Scott and screenwriter Bruce McIntosh (adapting his play) try to have it both ways with a plot twist that results in a jarring narrative shift. This opens the film to broader issues about the rights of the few as opposed to the welfare of the many, but at the expense of the more intimate story that came before. In spite of this, and to some extent because of it, "Final" emerges as engrossing and thought-provoking.
No comments
Commenting is turned off for this story.