Release Date: July 5th, 2013
Currently Available on iTunes
Director: Brea Grant
MPAA Rating: R
Film Pulse Score: 4/10
Best Friends Forever begins with a going-away party for Harriet (Brea Grant) who is off to graduate school in Austin, Texas. Her best friend Reba (Vera Miao) is going to go with Harriet and so we have yet another buddy road-trip movie. We know that Harriet has been in an institution – we assume a mental institution but otherwise she seems quite normal. It is her friend Reba who may be more the wild-child of the two. And so we have the characters defined in the first ten minutes; they are not quite clichés but they are close. The slight colorization of the characters helps: there is a straight arrow who has secret and her carefree friend is perhaps stronger and more vulnerable than she appears.
They leave Los Angeles on the “first day of the apocalypse” – at least that what is playing on the radio. Indeed, the screen pops up now and then with “Hours to Disaster:” and then some number. It is not long before their on the road that we see a mushroom cloud behind them far in the distance. The atomic bombs that go off across America and the impending doom could be, I suppose, and interesting element to the film. The fact that the heroines do not know what is happening until quite far into the film is a curious choice and probably better than the women proceeding to Austin with the knowledge. It is perhaps the film’s most original element – that the women are ignorant of what is happening even well into a journey where they meet other people who know (though this also seems too ridiculous to be true – that they could not know as long as they did).
Their conversations are fairly mundane and I was unfortunately unable to really get into them or their relationship. It is not until they meet up with three men that we get a dramatic moment as the men steal their car. They will run into these three men again and get revenge for the carjacking. The original act forces them to hitchhike which leads to a harrowing ride with a strange guy who is obviously aware of the world’s end and proceeds to rant about it. The ride is arguably the most gripping scene in the movie.
Halfway through the film, Harriet sees a television report about the four atomic bombs that have detonated across the country. But Harriet does not tell Reba about this, even though one of the bombs has destroyed Los Angeles where they are from and Reba’s mother (who we saw in the film’s beginning) lived. So Harriet begins cajoling Reba into staying with Harriet in Austin and just as she is about to tell her why she cannot go back to Los Angeles, they run into the three carjackers.
Eventually, Harriet and Reba end up at Harriet’s sister’s house. It is here that everything comes to the surface and Reba finds out about the bombs as well as about Harriet not telling her about them. Reba brings up the fact that Harriet was not accepted into graduate school after all. The film’s ending is anticlimactic for sure and tarnishes the film’s more intriguing moments that had come before. Unfortunately, I found that I did not really care whether Harriet and Reba remained friends after a nuclear holocaust.
The film was written by Brea Grant and Vera Miao and directed by Grant and it is not a bad film at all. There are a few things to admire including Grant’s soft yet strong performance, the film’s pacing, and Michelle Lawler’s often-incredible cinematography (all done in 16mm). I think there is potential in the Harriet and Reba characters, but I am unsure there is anything here that seems organically honest when it comes to them, their relationship, or the situation in which they find themselves. I was left wondering what the film’s “point” was. It is a road-trip movie with the clichéd problems faced on a road trip. It is a female-friendship movie but with two women whom I never fully believed were that close to begin with. And it is an end-of-the-world movie but one that never quite grasps what that means and how it truly affects people and their relationships.
