FOR ELLEN
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Chicago premiere!
- FOR ELLEN
- 2012, So Yong Kim, USA, 87 min.
- With Paul Dano, Jon Heder, Jena Malone
“Kim takes what could have been routine story elements and transforms them into something deeply sad and touching...Paul Dano delivers a beautifully wrought performance.”
—Robert Koehler, Variety
“Nobody else could fit the role of a crestfallen rocker that Paul Dano embodies in Kim's remarkable FOR ELLEN...It's a role he was born to play and the movie sustains it.”
—Eric Kohn, IndieWIRE
Award-winning filmmaker and SAIC graduate Kim expands her reach with this piercing, perceptive portrait of an American maverick, anchored by Paul Dano’s superb performance. Like Kim’s previous two films (IN BETWEEN DAYS, TREELESS MOUNTAIN), FOR ELLEN focuses on family matters, but this time the story centers on a more complex, adult character, and Kim uses a supple widescreen camera style to draw a more vivid sense of place. Dano plays Joby Taylor, a self-destructive, unsuccessful rock musician who returns to a snow-swept town in upstate New York to finalize his divorce. He hopes to share custody of his six-year-old daughter, but all he can salvage is a final outing with her--a beautifully realized 30-minute sequence that forms the heart of this unsentimental yet deeply moving drama of missed chances and tenuous emotional connections. HDCAM video. (MR)
