THE ROAD WITHIN
DIRECTOR: Gren Wells
CAST: Dev Patel, Robert Sheehan, Zoe Kravitz, Robert Patrick, Kyra Sedgwick
CLASSIFICATION: 16 DLS
RUNNING TIME: 101 minutes
RATING: 3 stars (out of 5)
Stephen Farber
Talented young performers can help to make a spotty story watchable. The Road Within derives from a 2010 German film called Vincent Wants to Sea, about a young man with Tourette’s syndrome who wants to travel to the ocean to spread his mother’s ashes.
The road-trip format has been overworked and doesn’t really get any revitalisation here, but the three leading actors – Robert Sheehan, Dev Patel and Zoe Kravitz – are so skillful that they keep us engaged, at least until the formulaic nature of the piece wears us down.
Writer-director, Gren Wells, has been an actress as well as a screenwriter, and shows more gifts at working with the cast than propelling a rather disjoined story.
Vincent’s (Sheehan) primary caregiver was his mother, but after her death, his politician father (Patrick) has little time to deal with his special needs and sends him off to an institution. There, Vincent is assigned to a roommate, Alex (Patel), who wears rubber gloves because of his obsessive compulsive disorder. Vincent also strikes up a friendship with Marie (Kravitz), who seems better adjusted at first, but suffers from anorexia.
The clinic’s director, Dr Rose (Sedgwick), does not seem very helpful, so Vincent decides to steal her car to drive from Nevada to the California coast. Marie comes along, and they end up including Alex. Vincent’s father joins forces with Dr Rose to try to find them.
Sheehan, who is British, does an amazing job, not just with the American accent, but with capturing the physical manifestations of the ailment. (It is a slight flaw, however, that his Tourette’s seems to vanish for extended periods of time when Vincent needs to be involved in more emotional scenes.)
Kravitz, best known for her roles in Divergent and X-Men: First Class, manages to be abrasive and compassionate at the same time; she delivers a vibrant performance.
But it may be that Patel is most impressive of all. The star of Slumdog Millionaire and the HBO series, The Newsroom, has never had a role this demanding, and he does astonishing work that reveals a new side of his talent.
The two adult actors also have significant roles. A budding romance between them is not one of the script’s happiest inventions, and Sedgwick is a mite too cutesy in playing the flawed healer. But Patrick gives one of the strongest performances of his career; he is convincingly self-centred in the first part of the film, but reveals surprising depths as the story continues.
It’s the story itself that undoes the movie. Road pictures are by definition episodic, but this one is particularly weak in finding strong or compelling incidents that might complicate the simple narrative line of Vincent’s journey to the sea.
There are nice images of Yosemite and the central California coast, but the film seems too distended. Fortunately, the actors find enough fresh and vivid moments to keep us interested in watching their odyssey even when the storytelling flounders. – The Hollywood Reporter
If you liked The Skeleton Twins or Vincent Wants to Sea, you will like this.