Featuring actors mainly performing from their own homes, this multistory drama clumsily wrestles with the struggles of everyday people during the first months of the pandemic.
Do you remember the cringey “Imagine” video that Gal Gadot and her league of naïve celebrities devised and posted on social media at the start of the pandemic, in March 2020? “The Same Storm,” written and directed by Peter Hedges (“Dan in Real Life”), and shot using iPhones and laptops around the same time as Gadot’s much-derided lockdown anthem, isn’t all that different. It’s a well-intentioned gesture of solidarity that tries so desperately to be relatable, it feels alienating.
The film — a series of vignettes staged as video-chat conversations between two parties, with each segment introducing a new lockdown-specific dilemma — features a cast of 24 actors, most of them performing in their own homes.
There’s Mary-Louise Parker as a cam girl who tries and fails to turn on her latest client, a nurse in Queens who is scarred from witnessing too many Covid-related deaths. We see Elaine May as a woman in denial of her Covid symptoms, and in the next scene there’s a group Zoom funeral held in her honor. Later, a recovering alcoholic (Sandra Oh) attends a virtual support group when she relapses following her son’s attempted suicide. And so on and so forth.
Hedges’s script is wildly uneven, and it especially fails whenever issues of racial injustice are broached, with those mini-stories — such as one in which a young protester (Moses Ingram) argues with her policeman father (K. Todd Freeman) over attending a Black Lives Matter rally — often resembling some kind of corporate diversity and inclusion training.
At the beginning of the film, the conditions of the shoot are revealed — May fumbles with her camera, and other members of the cast sheepishly grin as they prepare to enact the dramas of regular people. Some stories are more convincing than others, but most are simply boring — especially now, when the surrealism of lockdown has lost much of its edge.
The film proves one thing, at least: Like many of us, Hedges and his actors clearly had too much time on their hands.
The Same Storm
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
