OK, Good (2012)

A series of demoralizing auditions and an intense movement workshop push a struggling actor towards the edge.

IMDB 7.1/10 from 28 users

Director: Daniel Martinico
Writer: Hugo Armstrong, Daniel Martinico
Actors: Hugo Armstrong, Jonney Ahmanson, Carolyn Almos, Jon Beauregard
Rated: N/A
Runtime: 79 min

Guided by motivational affirmations and encouraged by an intense physical-movement workshop, actor Paul Kaplan struggles through a series of demoralizing auditions that push him towards the edge. OK, Good mixes vérité technique with confining formalism to build a hypnotic and tweaked-out meditation on performance, identity, anxiety, and one man's personal apocalypse.

Reviews:

Richard Kuipers of the Sydney Film Festival wrote:
Director and co-writer Daniel Martinico constructs a riveting and suspenseful portrait of a performer whose growing inability to communicate in situations where there's no script is turning him into a ticking time bomb of inner rage. With a powerhouse central performance from actor and co-writer Hugo Armstrong, this slow-burn portrait of isolation and alienation achieves maximum results from its minimalist structure.

Through the slow, steady accumulation of seemingly random but increasingly portentous details, helmer Daniel Martinico fashions a riveting portrait of an actor on the verge of a nervous breakdown — or, quite possibly, something worse — in “OK, Good,” a teasingly elliptical bare-bones drama that could spark interest at fests and on VOD. Often reminiscent of austere works by Robert Bresson and Chantal Akerman, the pic has minimal commercial potential. Even so, it might help elevate the profile of co-scripter and co-producer Hugo Armstrong if the right people view his subtly unsettling lead performance.

Armstrong plays Paul Kaplan, a balding, bland-looking, thirtysomething L.A. actor who divides his time between demoralizing (and often humiliating) auditions for TV commercials — at which, evidently, he’s rarely if ever hired — and attending intense sessions of a physical-movement workshop.

While alone at home or in his car, he constantly listens to motivational CDs that encourage forceful expression and relentless drive. But whenever he attempts to speak without a script — even to a voice-mail prompt — he comes off as unassuming, if not downright timid, and tongue-tied.

From the start, Martinico and Armstrong indicate Kaplan is fully alive and comfortable in his skin only when he is pretending to be someone else. As he delivers the cheery banalities of a pottery-soil pitchman at a commercial audition, the underemployed actor appears far more animated, and much happier, than he ever does during the drudgery of his daily life. When an off-camera director says, “Make your eyes sparkle,” he readily complies.

But there’s never much doubt that Kaplan is struggling to tamp down a mounting inner rage as he continually deals with rejections and frustrations. In one scene, the camera remains outside while he enters a printing shop to complain about the processing of his headshots. As the scene progresses, some viewers may actually half-expect to hear gunshots.

There are sporadic snatches of dialogue spoken by fleetingly glimpsed supporting players (many of them culled from the ranks of the L.A. theater scene) and much screaming and shouting by fellow students at the physical-movement workshop. For all practical purposes, however, “OK, Good” is a one-man show — until the final scene, at least — and Armstrong rises to the challenge with a rigorously controlled performance that suggests the human equivalent of a ticking time bomb.

Pic proceeds at a purposefully measured pace, stealthily building suspense without resorting to obvious effects. Production values indicate pinched pennies were spent wisely.



It opens abruptly with casting footage—four regular-guy types being put through the motions. Right profile, left profile, hands, hands—it looks a lot like getting booked into jail. This is the first of a series of auditions in which unseen casting agents make the kind of cryptic demands that casting agents make; the actors are seen complying in crummy lighting, through the artless zooms and pans of casting cameras.

Director/writer Daniel Martinico and writer/lead actor Hugo Armstrong build OK, Good out of largely wordless, unadorned chunks of the daily existence of Paul Kaplan, a struggling Los Angeles actor. There are echoes of mid-century isolation/alienation films—the souls-stranded-in-cold-modernist-architecture tragedies of Antonioni, the visual irony of Jacques Tati—but Martinico and Armstrong bring into horrific focus the specific poverty of human existence today.

The look of the film is suitably brutal: now we see Paul framed against the generic vertical blinds of his boxy apartment; now a hideous piece of department store art juts into the frame as he paces back and forth. A massive, solid-beige wall rug dwarfs him as he waits to go into an audition. Martinico has a painter’s eye for telling his story and conveying emotion with colors and textures, dropping in close-ups of angrily bubbling yellow eggs or quivering ramen in a pan, or a dreamy, low-angle traveling shot through the tunnels on the Pasadena freeway.

Paul’s commitment and drive (echoed by the motivational tapes he plays in the car) are somewhat comical as applied to the uber-banal lines of the TV ads he practices and auditions for. In a sense his guileless ability to sell a better potting soil, or “an experience, an adventure… memories that’ll last a lifetime,” make him seem like an anachronism from a time before the Great American Cynicism. But he’s so earnest, his desire is so palpable, that you’re helplessly drawn to his cause. Armstrong’s performance is a thing of beauty—both muscular and delicate, specific and frighteningly real.

Paul’s ambition seems connected to a desire to be seen, to have his existence acknowledged. Early on he sits on the floor surrounded by hundreds of his smiling headshot selves; later, he practices looking into the mirror repeating, “Hi, I’m Paul Kaplan.” A series of workshop scenes—an extreme example of the “getting in touch with your primal feelings” exercises typical of acting classes—introduce an element of savage ballet, a sense of tortured souls trying to escape their pain. They also provide a kind of wordless commentary on Paul’s evolving story.

Gradually, Paul’s confidence erodes. He struggles to explain and assert himself in a running dispute about his headshots, getting nowhere with the expressionless drones at Noho Copy. He starts flubbing his lines in auditions.

The film pivots on a scene where he’s given an opportunity, by one of the mysterious people behind the camera, to show what he can do on his own terms. He launches into a stirringly heartfelt monologue from Conan the Barbarian (!), which seems to fatally connect him with his own sense of loss and anger and sorrow, and propel him into the film’s grueling/cathartic final act—which is as much about struggling to find something, anything below the surfaces of things as it is to express his rage.

Throughout, seemingly random and incidental images, sounds, and snippets of dialogue all contribute to create a story and a world. OK, Good is ultimately about one man’s effort to succeed on his own, through sheer dedication and willpower, and how he crashes on the rocks of his own vulnerability. It’s also a film about the state of the American Dream, and our collective impotence as we confront a system that seems to have been thoroughly taken over by dark, unseen forces.



















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