He
wrote “Space Oddity” and starred in The Man Who Fell to Earth. David
Bowie brought science fiction into rock & roll better than anyone, so he
probably would have been amused by the fanciful notion his death could so
unbalance the universe, it tears a wormhole into the space-time continuum. That
is exactly what happens in director-screenwriter Liz Manashil’s Speed of
Life, which releases today on VOD platforms.
January
10, 2016 is a particularly fateful day for June Hoffman. First, her favorite
recording artist, David Bowie, passes on to the great glitter club in the sky.
Next, her boyfriend Edward Karp is ripped through the wormhole caused by his
passing. Rather awkwardly, they were having a “we need to have a talk” sort of
argument when he disappeared. For the next three decades, she lives in a state
of limbo hoping he will re-materialize, as indeed he does, just when she is due
to move into a dystopian state-mandated retirement home on her 60th
birthday.
Karp
has not aged a second, but society is now a watered-down version of Logan’s
Run, requiring communal early bird dinners at sixty, rather than death at thirty.
She had intended to run away with her torch-carrying friend Samuel, but Karp’s
arrival complicates everything.
Speed
of Life is
a heartfelt film that features several nicely turned performances, so there is
definitely stuff there to like. With that stipulation, it must be noted Manashil
does not have a strong grasp on the mechanics of time-travel narratives. Ultimately,
she sort of tries to have her temporal cake and eat it too, resulting in an ending
that makes no sense whatsoever. She also seems to be uncomfortable handling
dystopian themes, because the nearly sixty-year old Hoffman appears to live in
a bizarrely sunny and laidback Brave New World. Frankly, it is never clear just
how much urgency there is to the countdown to 60. On top of all that, the brief
75-minute feature feels conspicuously padded with a subplot involving Samuel’s
daughter Laura and her new neighbor Phillip, which never pays off to any
meaningful degree.
Still,
Ann Dowd and Jeff Perry give remarkably subtle and mature performances as the
older Hoffman and Samuel. Their comfortable chemistry is really quite sweet and
poignant. Ray Santiago also has some nice moments as Karp, especially when he
realizes the errors of his insensitive ways, three decades into the future.
