I Melt With You (Mark Pellington, 2011): USA

Reviewed by Jim Burns. Viewed at the AFI Fest 2011.

I Melt With You is a film about four college friends that get together once a year to indulge in insane amounts of alcohol and drugs. Now in their forties, the guys are struggling with what their lives have become and all four are dealing with their own personal demons. The driving force behind this very dark story is a letter the guys signed as a pact some twenty years earlier.

For me, this film was the biggest disappointment of the film festival. The premise  of this story, as well as the cast, had my expectations very high. Rob Lowe and Thomas Jane gave very strong performances but the performance of Jeremy Piven was predictable at best. Piven’s iconic performance as Ari Gould in the HBO hit series Entourage seems to overshadow all of his works since.

The biggest missing element of this film is the story. Its actually non-existent. The film is filled with really long montages of party scenes but very little dialogue. At times, it felt like I was watching a never ending music video, which makes sense since the director Mark Pellington is best known for directing Pearl Jam’s controversial music video ‘Jeremy’.

This film is filled with  loud 80’s punk music that helps set a very dark and chaotic tone to the movie. If you are interested in watching middle-aged men do unrealistic amounts of drugs and then jump around like a group of misled school kids then this film is a must see, but if you are looking for any kind of story, you might want to save your money.

Aesthetically, the film looked great. The California central coast serves as a beautiful back-drop and a lot of the camera work was masterfully done. Pellington does do a very good job of creating a very chaotic, out of control vibe to this film that creates a very punk rock atmosphere. He was able to do this while filming the movie by keeping the cast in the home used in the film with a very small crew and playing blaring music non-stop in between takes. The film was shot in 18 days as well as being shot in sequence, which is rare. Shooting in sequence  really added to the authenticity of the actors performance. By the time the film ended, Thomas Jane and Rob Lowe looked like they really had been doing drugs for at least a week straight and Jane’s performance was probably the most convincing of all the actors.

I Melt With You targets an audience that has been ignored by Hollywood filmmakers for quite some time. There a lot of forty-somethings out there, myself included, that are forever trapped at  the age of 25, who refuse to grow up and are looking for a film that is made for them. While this film missed it’s opportunity to represent this  lost generation, it might spark enough interest by Hollywood to target this untapped market in the near future.