Also known as “The Time I Saw That Spy Movie High As a Kite in July”.
The edible, which would unbeknownst to me at the time last for another twenty four hours, kicked in roughly around the time I pulled into the parking lot. Friend graciously ignored the fact that I had taken to stacking popcorn kernels on the armrest and gripping them in both hands in order to remind myself that I was real and the movie I was watching wasn’t something I was actively making up with the power of my own mind. I still had the faculties to write down the following notes during the trailers:
“Remind me to ask if Lake George was the worst trailer you’ve ever seen in your life. It has no stars, like two select quotes praising the film from random outlets and too many meandering plots, but also not enough music to cover the whole trailer? The quality of the video was weirdly bad.”
And, ladies and gentlemen, after looking up the trailer sober, I can say thatttttt yeah it’s not great, but it’s probably at least a little bit of a side effect of being emotionally blind and not being able to feel my face at the time. Some fun facts, Shea Wiggham’s costar in the film, Carrie Coon, is married to Tracy Letts (long live The Lovers, 2017). They have a fifteen year age gap and no one will probably end up seeing this movie, but that’s a cool thing to learn anyway!
I also wrote about the kid, Frankie Munoz, from the sitcom of my youth, coming back to do a movie about an AI assistant gone haywire!
Anyway, here’s what I remembered about Inheritance the morning after I watched it:
Phoebe Dynevor is a compulsive klepto (unexplained) who is dragged back into her tumultuous relationship with her estranged father who is kind of a information gatherer-for-hire in random locations. Phoebe ends up joining him on a job in India but at a crucial moment in the mission, he’s kidnapped and help for ransom in exchange for the Information she’s acquired from her dad on a hard drive. She takes a train from New Delhi to Mumbai to find him but in the middle of the trainride she receives a phone call from the kidnappers telling her her dad’s in South Korea–or maybe she sleuths that her dad is there from some note she remembers seeing in his home office?
Anyway, so she steals some nice person’s identity and zips over to South Korea but DUN DUN she’s been double crossed by a double crosser and she finds out her dad was using her all along to get stuff he couldn’t acquire on his own because it was Too Dangerous. So they have a conversation on a bridge in which she tricks him, then she gets on an airplane from Seoul and arrives in NYC, which, even high, seemed like a weird destination except maybe it was a Polar flight? And lo and behold, that’s actually pretty common, wow! Where she’s picked up by the authorities, who kind of neg her for being a dummy “just like her dad,” which is when we find out that she actually transferred some crypto off the hard drive amounting in the hundreds of thousands of dollars along with some sensitive info about US government secrets, and they sort of let her just go free and that’s when she tells her sister what happened. Cut to title card, credits.
Which is when I turned to Friend slowly, wondering if what I’d just watched was in fact the embroidered intro to a much longer movie, instead of a kind of aimless, unambitious anti-action spy movie where no one dies? or even really pulls out a gun? Most of the drama comes from how often people hang up on Phoebe without saying goodbye–and just leave her there to wait for more instructions for weirdly long periods of time? My recollection is that this happens on at least three separate occasions. I also am still kind of confused about why it is she’s pinned as being someone who’s constantly underestimated? Like the script at the end makes it seem like its central to her personality and history but it feels a little shoehorned in?
The director and co-writer of the script Neil Burger describes the style of filmmaking as a kind of gonzo one-take no-prep kind of deal in which there “was no wait time for camera set- ups, no makeup checks, or rehearsals. We’d arrive at the location and then immediately shoot as much as we could [on an iPhone] in the time that we had. It enabled us to travel with a small crew,” which sounds kind of cool until you figure out that the lack of choreography and blocking really gives the movie a kind of rambly, disconnected feel that’s akin to just doing so many drugs that you give yourself amnesia for an entire day.
