..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

..Trailer ..Production Notes

Andrew Wagner’s The Talent Given Us may look like a doc, walk like a doc and quack like doc, but, its writer/director/producer/distributor insists, it’s neither fish nor fowl. Moreover, it would be a mistake for audiences to include his intriguing dramedy -- or, if you will, docu-dramedy -- in any list that also includes such studies of disturbingly dysfunctional families as Capturing the Friedmans, Crumb and My Architect: A Son's Journey and Stevie.

“It might feel life-like, but it is a scripted narrative from start to finish,” Wagner asserts, in anticipation of just such a presumption.

Like so many other low-budget freshman efforts by ambitious young filmmakers -- especially those willing to test their wings in the rarefied air of Sundance -- The Talent Given Us feels so intensely personal it seems to have been scripted from birth.

Wagner’s story requires a family not unlike his own to embark on an epic cross-country journey in search of their struggling artiste of a son. To confuse matters even further, the filmmaker -- himself a struggling screenwriter -- recruited his parents and both of his sisters to star as characters named after themselves.

Because these characters so often are drawn to resemble human gargoyles, it’s sometimes difficult to know where the real-life Wagners end and the fictional ones begin.

“It wasn’t meant to serve as a vehicle for personal catharsis or psychotherapeutic revenge,” Wagner emphasized, just hours before his film would expand to Los Angeles, and enter into a war of the box-office worlds with Steven Spielberg and the world’s most recognizable Scientologist. “I did all of my ‘working through’ of family issues in other ways.”

Surely, though, if The Talent Given Us was intended to be viewed as a work of fiction, might not a different choice of actors -- or, at least, screen names -- have been more helpful?

“Who better, though?,” Wagner responds. “I wanted to them to address imaginary circumstances with truthful behavior. It’s as if we’ve been in rehearsal for this for 40 years.

“I was continually impressed by the bravery of my actors.”

Judy (Judy Wagner) and Allen (Allen Wagner) are inspired to travel from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Los Angeles to inform their phone-phobic son, Andrew, about a job opportunity in New York. Mom has a problem with airplanes, of course, and this means a 3,000-mile road-trip. They’re joined by their two daughters, photographer Maggie (Maggie Wagner), and actress Emily (Emily Wagner, a.k.a. Doris Pickman on E.R.), who no sooner arrives at JFK for a visit, when she’s forced to hop in the family van, headed back to southern California.

Not surprisingly, the trip is alternately hellish and hilarious.

Each has a lifetime’s worth of issues to work out, and it would take a van the size of a Greyhound bus to contain their hostilities and neuroses. Wagner compounds their misery by forcing them to share tiny motel rooms, subsist on middle-American cuisine, come face to face with alien creatures (cows) and make room for an unexpected guest (Emily’s publicist friend, Bumby, who finds herself unemployed and stranded in the middle of a cornfield). Somewhere around New Mexico, Wagner strikes a strategic balance between angst and humor, thereby cutting his characters and audience enough slack to approach the film’s unexpected ending with hopeful anticipation, rather than fear and loathing.

More out of budgetary necessity than any desire to make a theoretical point, The Talent Given Us has more in common with films from the Dogme 95 movement than those indies that typically emerge from AFI or the Sundance Institute. The tight confines of the van and motel rooms required Wagner to employ a hand-held digital camera, natural lighting and ambient sound. The result of this technological mandate is an intimacy that is, at once, consistently engrossing and occasionally repellant.

In an odd way, The Talent Given Us manages to combine the raw intensity of Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme standard-bearer, The Celebration, with the comic-claustrophobia of National Lampoon's Vacation and any number of Henry Jaglom gab-fests. The individual physical and emotional tics of his characters/family, though, do put a decidedly Wagnerian stamp on the film.

“I was aware of the Dogme filmmakers, but any similarities were inadvertent,” said Wagner, who counts among his influences films by John Cassavetes, Mike Leigh, Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. “The Dogme aesthetics suited the style of the film, as well as the budgetary limitations we had to confront. We worked with a two-man crew and spent more to market the film in its New York opening than it cost to make it … which was around $30,000, not counting the print we had to make for Sundance.”

The film’s journey from inception, to its debut last month at the Angelika was nearly as tortuous as that embarked upon by his characters.

After max-ing out his credit cards to afford production costs, Wagner introduced The Talent Given Us at last summer’s CineVegas. Trevor Groth, director of programming at CineVegas, had originally seen the film after it was submitted to Sundance, his other professional venue. After rejecting the original cut, Groth recommended to Wagner that he keep working on it, and, that done, the film was put into competition in Las Vegas, where it won the Grand Jury Award.

Groth also allowed the re-edited version of The Talent Given Us to be entered into competition at this year’s Sundance. Although it received several fine notices from the horde of critics gathered in Park City, the picture -- along with many other popular entries -- failed to find a distributor willing to risk marketing dollars against an uncertain box-office fate.

“When I got back to New York, I didn’t feel as if the story of this film was over,” Wagner recalled. “One day, when I found myself across the street from the Angelika, I walked over to the box office and asked who to see about getting my film shown there. I showed it to the manager, who gave me 3½ weeks to find enough money for a new print, an ad in the Times and a press agent.

“I was able to borrow against a cable deal, and got more from a New England restaurateur who wanted to be involved in the movie business. We never actually met, but, sight unseen, he gave me $50,000.”

In its first engagement, The Talent Given Us -- for which Wagner also wears a distributor’s cap -- averaged around $13,000 a week, per screen. That response from audiences, along with some very positive reviews from New York critics, sufficiently impressed the Landmark Theater chain to book into several of its houses across the country.

In addition to its run at the Laemmle Sunset 5, in Hollywood, the film has moved to two different Manhattan theaters, a pair in southern Florida, and it will be shown at San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, later this month.

The Talent Given Us recorded a large enough gross -- $8,500, on its single screen in L.A. -- to be extended another week. Through the July 4 holiday, it's made over $50,000 in limited release, and soon will expand to theaters in 50 cities.

Although not nearly as warm and fuzzy as My Big Fat Greek Wedding, The Talent Given Us shares with that film a distinct ethnic identity -- the Jewish community in New York City -- and characters who are built out of something more formidable than cardboard and plastic. Wagner hopes that his freshman feature will follow Vardalos’ lead and turn word-of-mouth support into a commercial juggernaut.

The movie Wagners, like the movie Portokaloses, may start out loud, unruly and argumentative, but, eventually, like relatives, they grow on you.

“My wife, who’s blond, not Jewish and from Seattle, had a pretty hard time with them,“ Wagner allowed, with a laugh. “She actually cried the first six times we sat down to dinner with them. She got mad at me for yelling at my parents, and, then, was surprised when they defended me.

“In the Q&A sessions we held after the screenings, the response was incredibly dynamic. The audiences greeted the characters with identification and fascination.“

No one, he added, has seen them as negative stereotypes, or felt the film was “confessional.”

“I was pulling from historical and emotional truth. Maybe that’s why they come across as uniquely real and individually idiosyncratic.”

Wagner doesn’t expect that his father, a retired stockbroker, will find a second career as an actor. Characters like Allen Wagner don’t come around all that often, and, when they do, they’re usually reserved for sitcoms in need of grumpy old men. Phil Foster, Peter Boyle and Redd Foxx come immediately to mind.

Headshots of Judy Wagner, a theatrical sort who could easily pass for Dr. Ruth, probably already are making the rounds of Hollywood casting directors, though.

“I think she found her inner artist … the one she gave up to raise three children,” her son bragged. “We awakened the sleeping actor in her.”

July 6 , 2005
- Gary Dretzka