One of many nice secret weapons of American movie and TV in recent times, solid-gold supporting actor Bill Camp will get a uncommon and engaging main showcase in “Ponderosa” — although in committing to Rob Rice’s quietly sinister and wildly peculiar black comedy, nobody might accuse him of chasing the highlight. A defiant oddity that deserves to search out its personal choose and equally eccentric cult, the movie fixes its gaze on two unusual, unhappy male archetypes of recent suburbia — the purposeless, woefully outmoded boomer and the shiftless, willfully remoted zoomer — solely to tease out but stranger, sadder dynamics between them, in that particular American surroundings of strip malls and infinite parking heaps the place human connection goes to die.
A current premiere in Tribeca’s U.S. narrative competitors, “Ponderosa” might be destined for area of interest exhibition, and can doubtless divide normal audiences: For each viewer compelled by its deadpan air of on a regular basis liminality, at the least one different will discover it too alienating, or simply too alien, to bear, and one suspects that’s the best way Rice needs it. But when the movie often threatens to drift away into its personal inaccessible realm, Camp’s witty, doleful efficiency grounds it with a human dimension, albeit not a really heat one. Properly matched with a passive, completely cautious Jack Dylan Grazer because the gormless younger man taken inexplicably below his wing, and given ample room to play by the movie’s personal curiosities, he’s a deal with.
Zeke (Grazer) is a directionless twentysomething in a colorless middle-American city, who spends his days both idly scrolling his telephone, or idly driving round in circles — actions with no clear endpoint, which equally goes for the structureless suburban sprawl round him. He’s nonetheless extremely depending on his mom Sandra (Alexis Bledel), who works on the bland buffet restaurant that offers the movie its title; that job offers him a each day discounted lunch, however with the restaurant dealing with closure, he’s much more adrift. At first Zeke appears the very embodiment of older generations’ complaints about GenZ ennui, however Rice isn’t taking low cost photographs — not least since since his elders-but-not-wisers get no extra flattering a portrait as soon as George (Camp) enters the scene.
First accosting Zeke within the Ponderosa car parking zone with a very unsolicited provide of mentorship, George appears decided, for no obvious motive, to mould the younger man in his picture. However what picture? A property developer at present spearheading the development of a glum cookie-cutter housing property named — with an virtually admirable absence of irony — Walden Colonies, George is a uncharismatic schlub with cash however no different property which may mark a profitable life, together with associate, youngsters or mates. Few would see him as one thing to aspire to: Zeke actually doesn’t, however he’s additionally aimless sufficient to say sure when George presents him a vaguely outlined job on the venture, and the older man locations altogether an excessive amount of inventory in that acceptance.
There’s a dry, droll seam of generation-gap humor in George’s continued, failed makes an attempt to insert himself as a father determine into the life of somebody who by no means requested for one, and Zeke’s blankly bemused resistance to his efforts. However there’s additionally one thing extra disquieting at work right here, and never simply when George’s advances start to really feel very very like, nicely, advances. Or when a hangout at a suburban home frequented by George and his fellow dreary older males of enterprise reveals a locked wing of dead-eyed, gym-built teenagers seemingly being educated to succeed them.
That menace, in the meantime, is amplified by the banality of “Ponderosa’s” setting, with its haphazard assortment of highways and featureless new builds, all blocked and framed to look as unpeopled as potential, and captured by DP Barton Cortright with simply the appropriate diploma of uninviting digital flatness: a really odd and absurd America, with the humanity sapped out of it from below everybody’s noses. George’s narcissistic imaginative and prescient of the long run is one basically frozen in time, the place all youthful males finally come round to his imaginative and prescient and his values; Zeke might not be very engaged, and he’s actually not very participating, however he’s sensible sufficient to know progress when he doesn’t see it.
And so “Ponderosa” emerges as a darkish, well timed examination of the prevalence of conservative manosphere-style psychology — exterior the extra aggressive on-line spheres the place such pondering is mostly seen to fester. Camp’s cleverly double-sided efficiency leads with what’s lonely and weak and tragic, generally hilariously so, about George, however it will be too straightforward to play him as a loopy previous coot: The actor additionally outlines a grinning social hazard in these bluff, blustery males who’re most desirous to impart information they don’t essential have.
