Please read PART ONE and PART TWO if you have yet to as I try and better articulate my questions over this Columbus, Ohio indie and its confounding creative decision-making. Dear reader, I am going to take you live through this very intellectual and artistic assessment as I continue to watch Constraint.
The main plot revolves around Oracabessa (Brooklyn Sabino Smith), a young cellist, who becomes entangled in a web of human traffickers, led by Tuco (Ralph Scott).
I’m now heading into Act Three with a half-hour left of movie to go with Constraint. Oracabessa mumbles the address from Tuco’s I.D. and wanders into the woods rather than call for help or use her moped or one of the cars at the scene of the accident. Magically, she finds the location. Her sense of direction must be superb while suffering from a concussion. Why would she think Tucco was holding the trafficking victims at his registered home address? I feel like the first step of human trafficking, after giving away one’s moral whole, is not to keep your victims at your home.
Dear reader, I am all about climaxes where our protagonist wreaks havoc among some very bad people who deserve some very bad justice dealt to them in hopefully poetic and painful ways. It’s a natural storytelling formula rife with catharsis and payoffs. But like other formulas, you need to still put in the work to reap the rewards. Just because our heroine is stumbling to a compound to free the victims and bring down their tormentors does not mean it works. It’s skipping to a climax the movie doesn’t really deserve because we spent so much precious time on side characters that didn’t matter and dawdled. Just in case if you mistook the good faith of the production, there’s also a gratuitous rape scene used as a setting device for one of the heretofore unknown bad men (at least she was clothed). One of the women from the beginning is found in the basement, she mistakes Oracabessa’s intentions, and runs to her to be saved, and she then gets gunned down in the back by the traffickers. She was let down twice by our heroine.
Our leading lady wanders the compound and comes across two children, one white and one non-white, both of them trafficking victims, but she only addresses the white kid and says, “I’ve come to take you home.” They ask if she is the police, again a reminder that perhaps alerting the police to the whereabouts of this site might have been a higher priority than going alone. She is only here, it would seem, for these two children. Sorry the women she found in the confusingly oriented basement. I was already having a hard time liking this protagonist as is but this sealed it.
A lot of shots of running through the woods happen without much to connect a sense of spacing and geography, and then Oracabessa is saved when Derick drives up and they get inside his car and drive away to safety. The following then happens in our bulrush of a resolution:
1) Oracabessa is in a hospital bed. A nurse is asking her about medications.
2) Nicolas quickly rides a motorcycle to the hospital entrance outside.
3) The nurse says she “just got your blood tests back” (a certain The Room line echoed in my head) and then imparts, “Have you ever been pregnant before?” Why is this even being asked except to imply that she is currently pregnant or never had a son like she confessed before. We get no clear indication on either of these being true, so, again, why include it?
4) Cut to Nicolas running down the hospital corridor while SUDDEN electronica music begins blaring like we just dropped into an action set piece from Blade.
5) Nicolas comes into Oracabessa’s room and pulls up a blanket on her in a manner that seems less “tucking in” and more “pulling sheet over a corpse on a slab.”
6) We reveal in the same hospital is Oracabessa’s brother who was indeed the drug carrier that Tuco stabbed far earlier and has not been referenced since. The doctor says he lost a lung.
7) Nicolas thanks Derick for saving Oracabessa and they seem to part on good terms. In the same camera setup, with Derick in the same outfit, thus implying that same day, Oracabessa leaves on crutches, meaning she was discharged in hours. The ADR-ed line “Think you cracked the skull” occurs without Derick moving his mouth.
8) We jump to a new scene where Oracabessa has her hands around Derick’s face and she says, “I’m going to kiss you now, and it’s going to be the last time. I’ll never kiss you again.” It’s a repetitious line that screamed Neil Breen to me.
9) We jump to a new scene where Oracabessa is hobbling to the ballet class teacher who shows no sympathy and literally tells her that her last performance “was an abortion.” Yikes! This is then immediately followed by Derick saying, “A woman has a right to choose” to Nicolas.
10) While talking to the creeper from before with the French accent who heads a music school, Oracabessa SUDDENLY remembers a time she saw him sitting in the passenger seat of Tuco’s car while it passed her on the street. Who else will she arbitrarily remember next? And how often did she see this one car drive around her entire town that she committed to memory? She, at long long LONG last, finally calls the police and has the human trafficker creeper arrested.
11) She then flies to Jamaica and visits her father, asking him about the little boy he ran over. Did this man serve jail time? Oracabessa blames herself for the kid’s death and now I feel like this should have been dealt with more if we’re going this route. It doesn’t feel like catharsis because it doesn’t feel like it was on her mind too often. Did I confuse the earlier scene of her talking about a son as this kid?
12) Nicolas surprises her in Jamaica. “Whatever happened to that Derick fellow?” asks dad at a dinner with the three of them. We’ve been told Nicolas was engaged to Oracabessa, so it seems peculiar that of the two men in his daughter’s life, this is the one he is unfamiliar with. Dad threatens Nicolas with great harm if he does anything to hurt his daughter. Is this comedy?
13) The voiceover overlaps and we jump to a wedding party dinner with the use of split screens. Why split screens? With how quickly we are rushing through plot content, I feel like this is the series finale of HBO’s Six Feet Under and I’ll see the next hundred years of these people’s lives.
14) The various characters mingle and dance in, what else, a wide angle that lasts an astounding FOUR MINUTES without cuts, as if the movie didn’t know it was over. It’s just lingering with no real purpose of why the audience needs to see any of this for four minutes. There is no dramatic change. Just people hugging. If the movie already wasn’t nearly two hours long, I would have accused the filmmakers of dragging this thing to a feature-length running time. Then the end credits just appear, which they could have done four minutes ago too.
Finally, now I can derive my critical conclusions on this truly bizarre Ohio indie movie. Constraint feels overwhelmingly like Ohio’s own Neil Breen movie, plotted so loosely, so archaically, with characters behaving so randomly and nonsensically, and with a story that never seems to have traction, bouncing from one character to another and going on strange tangents and flashbacks, like it’s trying to pack in some half-formed Armistead Maupin ensemble piece. Constraint is just as much about a girl walking around town with her cello on her back (possibly one quarter of all shots) as it is about sex trafficking and finding the victims (when it’s not squeezing in some nudity from them). The pacing seems overstuffed and insufficient, with so many things happening but little connection to make those actions feel important even with life and death stakes. Perhaps having our main trafficker just wandering around town at all hours takes away from his mystery and danger. This is a movie where anything might happen at a moment’s notice because it doesn’t feel like much of what you’re watching builds off what came before. Being redundant at 110 minutes is just inexcusable. The scenes in a movie should matter, as should their placement, and the characters should learn, grow, progress, or at least present an interesting viewpoint for an audience to follow.
From a production standpoint, Constraint has some positive qualities but they are routinely hobbled by the exasperating creative choices of the man in charge, writer and director and editor and cinematographer Richard A. Nelson (The Endangered). The man likely should have only had one job on this project as director. He needed other creative supports that could better concentrate on seeing a vision through, a better writer to make a better story with fleshed-out characters, a better cinematographer to ensure more seamless camera arrangements for the edit, a better editor that wouldn’t sabotage the movie’s flow and literal comprehension with so many erratic edits. It’s not a bad looking movie despite some unfortunate edits and a heavy reliance on day-for-night filming. The acting is generally acceptable but I don’t hold the performances against the actors. The characters they are playing are very difficult to find a sustainable reality to inhabit. Smith (Indie Film School) has something about her that keeps you watching, which is good considering her cellist character doesn’t fulfill that same outcome. Scott (After) is dependably great. There are even moments, slivers, that give an idea of how good all these actors could be with better material, like the small scene between Alice and Tuco together. Constraint feels like a dozen movies that have been sloppily distilled together, with inorganic sections intruding upon one another. I don’t know if this approaches a so-bad-it’s-good quality but it’s flabbergasting to witness.
I cannot advise you to watch Constraint but I cannot not advise you to watch this. It’s Ohio’s own Neil Breen indie and I never thought I would discover something quite like that.
Nate’s Grade: D-
If you’re a big fan of 80s music and looking to congenially pass 90 minutes, I suppose you could watch the new musical Valley Girl as it whisks you away on a cloud of simple nostalgia. That’s the word for this movie. Everything is very simple, from the stock characterizations, to the boy-meets-girl romance, to even the performance of the dozens of popular 80s songs, which are reworked into being blander vanilla versions that reminded me of what Kids Bop does to music. We follow a titular valley girl (Jessica Rothe, so great in the Happy Death Day franchise) as she falls for a punk rocker (Josh Whitehouse, struggling in the singing department) from the wrong side of the tracks. The romance is very familiar as are their trials of stepping outside their individual comfort zones for the other person. The big problem with Valley Girl is that the first half feels like it’s at warp speed; nary a minute goes by without a song-and-dance number barreling onto the screen. The second half, in contrast, has only a handful of these numbers and tries to expand the characters but by that point it’s too late. I don’t care about them. Since it’s a jukebox musical, the songs should be selected to provide better insights into the characters’ emotional states, but too often they feel superfluous and clunky. “Hey Mickey” introduces our selfish jock (Logan Paul of YouTube infamy) at a pep rally. “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” is about having fun on the beach. “Boys Don’t Cry” about dealing with being sad. It’s that kind of application. There’s a frame device where an older mom (Alicia Silverstone) is recounting her 80s experiences to her teenage daughter, and this could have provided a satirical and clever development, allowing the recounted experiences to blend into fantasy and her hazy memory. Valley Girl isn’t a bad movie, just one lacking significant purpose outside nostalgia and cleaning out a big music clearance account. If watching watered down 80s hits sounds like your thing, then party to the max, man.
Originally released January 8, 2000:
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