Remember, the Logline Showdown deadline is this Thursday! Details below!
Genre: Drama
Premise: A doctor coming off a divorce must learn to understand his anxiety-ridden teenage daughter while exploring a romance with an old flame.
About: This is the last script from the 2023 Black List that I was interested in reading. Screenwriter and director, Rachel Lambert, is best known for a film she made recently with Daisy Ridley titled, “Sometimes I Think About Dying.”
Writer: Rachel Lambert
Details: 116 pages
The character of Rebecca feels like an adult Jennifer Lawrence role.
A quick reminder of how to enter Logline Showdown this week.
What: 5 Loglines Showdown
When: Friday, January 31st
Deadline: Thursday, January 30th, 11pm Pacific Time
Submit: 5 loglines, each with a title and a genre
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
This may be the most ironic review I’ve ever posted considering I’m promoting a logline competition in the same post. This is, obviously, one of the weakest loglines you could enter in a logline competition.
To that end, Carousel is a great example of a script that a Hollywood agent would read and say, “This writer has talent,” while simultaneously knowing the script would never go anywhere.
UNLESS the writer was also the director. Which today’s screenwriter is. So she’s figured out a way to circumvent the obstacle. But let this be a lesson to non-writer-directors that trying to get traction with a script like this is like trying to get traction as a tennis pro while playing with a hockey stick.
The script takes place in Cleveland, Ohio, where Noah, the head doctor at a local medical clinic, is dealing with the fallout from his divorce and his deteriorating relationship with his 14 year old daughter, Maya, who’s battling crippling anxiety.
If the recent divorce isn’t bad enough, Noah’s also dealing with the death of his father, who used to run the medical clinic. Noah’s brother, Sam, stepped in to help during the transition but is now eager to move on, leaving Noah unsure of how to move forward.
The one bright light in Noah’s life occurs when Maya falls in love with Debate Team at school. However, Noah will later learn that his former lover, Rebecca, who’s moved back from a high-level political job in D.C., is coaching the debate team.
Noah attempts to weave his way back into Rebecca’s life even if she’s reluctant to reciprocate. Then the two run into each other so much that she figures, ‘why not give it a go,’ and the relationship reignites.
I wish I could give you some splashy exciting plot that develops after this but the above synopsis is pretty much it. That’s all that happens in the script. Which should give you an indication of where this analysis is going.
This is the problem a lot of writer-directors have.
They hide their writing behind their directing. They can make something look like a movie. But there’s nothing underneath it. That’s because writer-directors, except for the superstars we all know, rarely put as much effort into learning writing as they do directing.
Literally nothing happens in this script.
It’s so devoid of any plot points that you might as well have had us follow 5 real people around for a week. Just have us experience life. Cause that’s what this script is. It is trying to mimic real life.
Well, I’ve got news for you.
REAL LIFE IS BORING.
Movies are meant to highlight the most important and exciting moments from life. That’s what makes us want to see them. Cause they feel larger than life. Even writers who like to explore grounded real-life stories know this. Your biggest plot point in a movie cannot be drunk texts on page 103, which is what actually happens in Carousel.
You can probably feel my frustration here because this is one of my pet peeves – writers who place the burden on the reader to be entertained rather than on themselves to entertain. It’s your job, as the writer, to inject DRAMA into your story consistently enough that we stay invested.
That’s not taking anything away from the character development or the dialogue here, both of which I found strong. The attention to detail, particularly in relation to Cleveland, was also strong: “This storied institution of Cleveland is a menagerie of ethnic cuisine and legacy food stalls the size of multiple city blocks. There’s pierogi, kimchee, paczki, salted and cured fish, kraut, sausages served on hard homemade rolls with krauts. Noah, Rebecca, and Maya browse and sample.”
But that’s not storytelling.
Storytelling requires a plot. It requires you to periodically advance the story in dramatically compelling ways.
I don’t think I encountered a single plot point here. I’m not asking for 16,000 plot points, like Deadpool & Wolverine. But can you give me one? Even though I liked the Maya character, as we trudged towards the midpoint, I was hoping she was going to die so, at least the story could have some plot to deal with.
It just makes things so much harder on you, as the writer, if you’re only writing a character study. When characters are only going through internal emotions, that exploration needs to be perfect for the script to work. You have no wiggle room for error like you do when you’re hitting us with a new plot point every 10 pages.
Take Rebecca and Noah. A pretty good exploration of a relationship. But was it good enough to carry the movie all by itself? Not even close. I just finished the script and I still don’t understand why these two have such a complicated relationship with one another. This line from the script explains it best: “She looks up. And there, standing right there in her backyard, is Noah. He is the last person she wants in that moment. And he is the only person she’d ever want.”
Uhhhhh… what?
I don’t care as much about that confusion if I’m enjoying the plot. But if that character stuff is the only source of entertainment in the screenplay, I’m going to demand perfection.
It’s too bad because there is talent on display here.
In particular, there is a sophistication on the character side that you don’t usually see in a lot of screenplays. “When you’ve convinced someone it’s safe for them to love you, you have immense power.” “They talk about whatever topics allow them to feel connected to another man without doing any emotional labor.” “This is Ian all over again. He builds the maze, you run through it, hoping there’s an “I love you” at the end.”
If you love drama and character studies, I would not write feature scripts. I would write for TV. I would write a novel. Both of those give you more space to explore character and neither requires the stakes and urgency movies do.
I’ll leave you with a page from the script which demonstrates just how slow the read was designed.
Script link: Carousel
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: To all the writers who prefer grounded drama, I beg of you to keep this in mind – You’re not trying to win over your college English professor. You’re trying to win over hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of moviegoers. Never forget that when you’re coming up with a story.
