So continuously does New York-based unbiased filmmaker Simon (Tristan Turner) repeat the shaggy one-line pitch for the documentary he’s engaged on — it’s “a nostalgia-piece travelogue about past, present and future, a eulogy for lost history” — that he’s most likely lengthy stopped fascinated with what it truly means. If, certainly, it means something in any respect. Simon’s life, too, has taken on the identical unexamined shapelessness, because the early-thirtysomething retains ready for some undefined break, breakthrough or eureka second, whereas doing little or no to make it occur for himself. An unassuming however perceptive debut characteristic from writer-directors Travis Wood and Alex Mallis, “The Travel Companion” observes an artist’s supposedly roving spirit critically at odds along with his manchild dependencies.
Which isn’t to say it’s an unsympathetic portrait. Step by step rolling out throughout the U.S. in restricted launch following its premiere in final 12 months’s Tribeca pageant competitors, “The Travel Companion” definitely is aware of its protagonist’s inventive world: It opens and closes with the form of unpolished post-screening Q&A session that Wooden and Mallis have seemingly sat via a number of instances over. The movie is amusing because it satirizes the vagaries and hierarchies of the American indie-film rodeo (the place a said “1.5” finances is misunderstood by one dazzled, aspiring director as $150,000, not $1.5 million) however not cruelly so. Wooden and Mallis present a poignant understanding of the desperation driving still-young filmmakers anxious that they’ve missed their second, clinging to anybody carrying even a faint scent of success.
For Simon, that’s Beatrice (Naomi Asa), a plainly gifted go-getter who initially takes kindly — maybe too kindly — to his over-eagerness. On the works-in-progress showcase occasion that opens the movie, she makes an impression on the viewers, whereas time runs out earlier than he even will get to reply a query. After they go for drinks afterwards, Simon is as soon as extra the third wheel, as she hits it off along with his longtime bestie and roommate Bruce (Anthony Oberbeck).
Bruce, an airline employee, has hitherto handed off his plus-one flight privileges to Simon, who keenly exploits them to maintain filming his globe-trotting doc. However the cracks are exhibiting on this lopsided bromance. Bruce wants Simon significantly lower than Simon wants Bruce — who, as he and Beatrice settle right into a relationship, proves relatively extra able to take a dedicated step into maturity. “The Travel Companion” thus follows an extended line of triangulated male-crisis comedies wherein a girl disrupts an immature fraternal dynamic, however with the extra fascinating wrinkle that Beatrice (deftly performed by Asa with heat self-possession and visibly fraying persistence) is just about who Simon himself want to be.
As envy, insecurity and imposter syndrome jostle for pole place in Simon’s narcissistic headspace, the movie threatens a pivot into extra intriguingly black-comic territory, or right into a extra metatextual send-up of indie-movie tropes and aesthetics. However even because it dabbles in toe-curling cringe comedy, “The Travel Companion” is in the end too genial a piece for such tonal extremes. It likes its characters — even Simon, whose more and more aggravating conduct is counterbalanced by the hangdog earnestness of Turner’s efficiency — an excessive amount of to punish or humiliate any of them too severely, whereas even Simon’s movie improbably takes form by the top.
There may be, nevertheless, a delightful recognition right here that sure relationships and phases in life are finite. Shot with strolling ease and a casually burnished glow by DP Jason Chiu, “The Travel Companion” might discover most of its characters at an early, transitional stage of their skilled lives, however the cooling air of autumn round Simon and Bruce’s friendship — which, it appears, has lasted since childhood with out ever rooting itself soul-deep — is palpable, and fairly affecting. Whereas individuals like Simon wait for giant concepts to strike them, there are entire motion pictures in these little on a regular basis losses, and Wooden and Mallis have made one.
