Director: Eric Priestley
MPAA Rating: NR
Film Pulse Score: 4/10
Eric Priestley’s Don’t Pass Me By is a meandering and mediocre drama centering on four separate women in crisis. These interwoven stories run the gamut of life obstacles, dealing with love, pregnancy, family, and death. While not all bad, much of the film plays out like a Lifetime movie, with the drama being laid on thick, and the overall quality being marginal at best.
The film takes a look at the things that can make us reassess our lives. Although each of the four women in this story have very different backgrounds and are each dealing with a very separate issue, they’re all finding themselves at a crossroads. Hannah, played by the film’s co-writer Rachel Noll, is diagnosed with cancer, Danielle (Katy Kvalvik) is struggling with her new found fame, Jill (Nancy Karr) is feeling neglected by her workaholic boyfriend, and Brooke (Elizabeth Izzo) finds out she’s become pregnant by a drug dealing friend.
Rather than focusing on these intimate and personal moments in these individual’s lives, Priestley takes a kitchen sink approach and throws as much drama at you as he can for 100 or so minutes. It’s understandable that even though these women are going through different life events, they all learn the same thing- don’t let life pass you by. Unfortunately, the camera jumps between the characters so much that it’s difficult to really be attached to any of them. At first, they all felt so generic that I had a hard time even telling them apart. Trying to cram four storylines into a standard length film is not something easily done without having some plot and character development fall by the wayside and that’s exactly what happens here.
The characters and the actors portraying them prove to be flat and uninteresting with the exception of the odd cameos by Jeremy London (Mallrats not Dazed and Confused), Jake Busey, and C. Thomas Howell. While the performances weren’t outright horrible, everyone seemed inexperienced and stilted. Better than soap opera acting, but nothing to garner much praise.
This manila folder quality can be said about nearly every aspect of Pass Me By. The cinematography mostly works, with the exception of some truly bad slow motion effects, and the music cues occur at odd times and range from feeling just right to completely generic.
As most films told in this vignette style do, the stories converge during the climax, but it feels much more underwhelming than it should. Maybe it’s because we didn’t stick with the scene for long enough or maybe it was just that we simply didn’t know the characters enough to form any sort of attachment to them. Either way, the finale evoked no emotion from me other than a slight sense of relief that this is nearly over.
Don’t Pass Me By is an ambitious film that tackles some serious subjects but fails to deliver anything more than a by the numbers drama we’ve seen many times before. Everything about it screams generic Hollywood indie, and while there may certainly be an audience for this, it may be better suited for an afternoon cable channel than a movie theater.
