There may not be a scientific definition of a “Sundance” movie, but Cole Webley’s debut feature Omaha could go some way to inscribing one into the collective consciousness. This road trip through 2008 recession-era Middle America is, by all measurements, terrible. But what’s terrible isn’t really its predictable emotional crests and falls, the admirable but unoriginal child’s perspective of a troubled parent’s crisis, the incessant lens flares that accompany yet another slow-motion montage of youthful pleasure-seeking, or even the shame-inflected checkout line arithmetics when food stamps won’t cover your family’s lunch. What sets Omaha apart, or perhaps what makes it a potential standard-bearer for the kind of American independent cinema that needs to die, is its placid insistence that those cinematic shorthands, presented as flatly as one could imagine, are enough to make a movie sing.
In the early morning, a single father (John Magaro) wakes his young children up from their sleep and puts them in a beat-up old station wagon. They’re going on a trip, he offers to their sleep-deprived ears, though a lurking cop across the street and posted signs on the front door with big red lettering suggest a more serious motivation for their departure than mere leisure travel. Nevertheless, the family trip takes the shape of something familiar: father, daughter, son, and dog, crammed into the car, jamming to the oldies on which he’s clearly raised them.
The narrative follows a predictable cadence of highs and lows. Fast food, play pens, kite flying, hotel pools, and a trip to the zoo are as common as scoldings, shamings, and abandonment. Webley gives them equal weight here, each of them part and parcel of a life of dire financial and emotional straits that still — the film obnoxiously insists as if it wasn’t a given — deserves levity. That we experience these extremes through the prematurely mature perspective of the eldest daughter, Ella (Molly Belle Wright), doesn’t contribute much to their impact, other than justifying the withholding nature of Robert Machoian’s script, which draws out the reason for the family’s sudden departure through partially heard scraps of Magaro’s dialogue until its foregone, thuddingly calibrated revelation.
Don’t look to the pre-credits on-screen text for narrative or emotional closure — they’re mere bits of contextualizing fluff, made all the more paradoxically decontextualized for their jarring rather than consoling effect, devoid of a call to action or, frankly, a point. In a movie of laughable signifiers and the laziest tools of storytelling, this last one somehow manages to stand out.
DIRECTOR: Cole Webley; CAST: John Magaro, Molly Belle Wright, Wyatt Solis, Rachel Alig; DISTRIBUTOR: Greenwich Entertainment; IN THEATERS: April 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 23 min.
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