While a little rough around the edges, Wah Do Dem is the sort of film that makes you wonder why more micro-budget movies can’t be like this. By all rights it shouldn’t work, as not a huge amount seems to happen and it’s all very mumblecore, but the film has a real immediacy and is helped enormously by the unaffected performance of the lead character, played by Sean Bones.
Bones plays young New York musician Max, who’s pretty much drifting through life when he wins a cruise to Jamaica. Originally planning to take a girl along with him (Norah Jones in a tiny cameo), she dumps him two days before they’re supposed to go, leaving him alone on the big boat, surrounded by old people. Things don’t get much better when he reaches the Caribbean, as after befriending a local, his possessions get stolen and without a passport or transport, he can’t get back to the boat before it sails. This results in a bit of a slacker odyssey (and the parallels to Homer aren’t accidental), where Max, with only a pair of shorts to his name, must get across the island to the embassy in Kingston, meeting various people along the way, and trying to deal with the inevitable culture clash.
The movie came about because co-director Ben Chace did indeed win a cruise to Jamaica, so decided to take collaborator Sam Fleishner with him, as well as buy two more tickets, one for the lead actor Bones, and another for sound recordist/actor Kevin Brewersdorf (who has one of the most interesting roles, as a gay man who comes onto Max on the ship, resulting is some scenes that would actually have made the basis of a fairly interesting film on their own), so they could make a movie along the way.
Admittedly the plot is sometimes contrived and Max is occasionally naive to the point of stupidity, but Sean Bones gives him a lovable loser vibe that works very well. It’s also good that the movie has a sense of humour, as if it had taken itself too seriously it would undoubtedly have gone downhill fast. Equally its episodic nature, where Max meets one group of people before moving onto the next, does sometime result in dull patches, but luckily these are few and far between. Nevertheless Wah Do Dem works as a slacker character study, about a young man who seems unaware of who he is, or why he’s doing anything, but who is looking for some sort of connection (admittedly that’s mumblecore 101, so it’s not exactly original, but it works).
Max is undoubtedly naive, but that seems to come from needing to trust people because he hopes they’re going to give him some sense of belonging, whether that’s just an evening of fun and drinking, or weird mystical advice. Sometimes it works out for him, sometimes it doesn’t, but the sense of him trying to find a way out of his slacker isolation – even if he has no idea how – is nicely played (even if a scene involving him dropping his mobile phone down the toilet, is perhaps the world’s least subtle metaphor for his communication troubles).
Wah Do Dem is a movie that at first feels rather slight, but I have to say I kept thinking about it for days afterwards. The filmmakers have a lot of interesting ideas, whether it’s the underlying theme of Max taking a trip to the underworld in order to find his way home, or that every character Max meets must be a mix of light a dark, both welcoming and menacing in equal measure. Although it could perhaps have done with a little more direction and focus to really bring these things out (because like I say, at a first glance it’s just a rather naive guy wandering around for 75 minutes), if you’re willing to go with it and dig a little deeper, Wah Do Dem is far more rewarding, interesting and funny than it first appears.
Overall Verdict: Not for everyone, but this slacker’s odyssey has plenty of humour, interesting ideas and a great performance from Sean Bones, which ensures it’s far better than a glance at the surface would suggest.
Reviewer: Tim Isaac
