Mary Holmes has a great life. She’s young, beautiful, lives in Los Angeles. She has a good job teaching at a private elementary school and four beautiful children. But things aren’t always what they seem. Mary has problems. She has a difficult time feeling things, and the fact that she eats twenty Vicodin a day doesn’t help.
She sees a psychiatrist for the disconnect daydreams she keeps having, and her younger sister with Tourettes hates her. And when she loses her job for sleeping with one of the fathers on Parent’s night, she decides to go home. And that’s when the fun really starts. The dreams which seemed so random now start to take real shape as we understand where she came from.
From young and in love, drug dealing on the road, to her father’s slow painful death, from questions of love and incest to her older sister’s descent into insanity, the secret that destroyed her entire family reveals itself on her journey back home, along with Mary’s ultimate responsibility for it. Busby Berkeley, Cirque de Soleil, Circus freaks, and human farm animals all make appearances in this hallucinogenic tale of love and comeuppance.
Film Review for Yellow
Nick Cassavetes takes an unsettling trip into a troubled woman’s mind in Yellow, an often funny character study full of scenes that left-turn into wild expressionism. A far cry from his mainstream-friendly films like The Notebook, the picture makes up for potentially alienating moments by stockpiling sensationalist ingredients like sex, drugs and family members who morph into farm animals at the dinner table.
Heather Wahlquist stars as Mary Holmes, a substitute schoolteacher addicted to pain meds. (Wahlquist and Cassavetes, who were once a couple but no longer are, co-wrote the film.) When she’s not sneaking out to her car to wash some pills down with an airline-sized bottle of whiskey, Mary’s spacing out in quasi-hallucinations: a rainstorm floods her classroom; a snippy interaction in the teacher’s lounge turns into an operetta, complete with a chorus of “Fuck You!”
Fired after some illicit janitor’s-closet sex with a dad on Parents’ Night (fallout with the school’s principal, in which the action becomes a stage play and Mary forgets her lines, is the best ofYellow’s altered-state moments), Mary heads home to Oklahoma to regroup. There, we piece together some of the family trauma that has contributed to her current state: Much of it traces back to Mary’s incestuous relationship with half-brother Nowell (Brendan Sexton), an affair her mother (Melanie Griffith) refuses to acknowledge despite the havoc it wreaked on the rest of the family.
Neither method of coping — denial or chemically-induced avoidance — seems satisfactory, but Yellow clearly sympathizes with Mary over those (including family members played by Gena Rowlands and Lucy Punch) who’ve spent years treating the affair like the end of the world.
The single point of sanity in the occasionally shrill action is a psychologist (David Morse) Mary visits. From the start, the generic furnishings in his office suggest this refuge may be imaginary; as things progress, he seems to be available whenever she needs him. Yellow isn’t the kind of film that would end with Mary’s tidy discovery that she’s been carrying the solutions to her problems in her head all along — if anything, it points her in the direction of her next trainwreck. But it does suggest those problems have more to do with the rest of the world, its prejudices and judgments, than with any flaw in Mary herself.
Yellow (2012)
Directed by: Nick Cassavetes
Starring: Lucy Punch, Riley Keough, Sienna Miller, Ray Liotta, Max Thieriot, Melanie Griffith, David Morse, Daveigh Chase, Elizabeth Daily, Gena Rowlands, Cassandra Jean Amell, Bella Dayne
Screenplay by: Nick Cassavetes, Heather Wahlquist
Production Design by: Patricio M. Farrell
Cinematography by: Jeff Cutter
Film Editing by: Jim Flynn
Costume Design by: Bonnie Stauch
Set Decoration by: Linda Louise Sheets
Art Direction by: Patricio M. Farrell
Music by: Aaron Zigman
Distributed by: Yellow Productions
Release Date: September 8, 2012
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