Themes: Actor's Life, Filmmaking, Success is the Best Revenge
Main Cast: Naomi Watts, Rebecca Rigg, Scott Coffey, Mark Pellegrino, Blair Mastbaum
Release Year: 2005
Country: US
Run Time: 95 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
Naomi Watts produces and stars in Ellie Parker, a semi-autobiographical story of an Australian actress struggling to make it in Hollywood. Ellie is young enough to still schlep to auditions back and forth across L.A., changing wardrobes and slapping on makeup en route, but just old enough that the future feels "more like a threat than a promise." She lives with her vacant musician boyfriend (Mark Pellegrino), who leaves her just about as dissatisfied as any other part of her life, and has a loose definition of the word "fidelity." Helping make sense of their surreal and humiliating Hollywood existence is her best friend Sam (Rebecca Rigg), another out-of-work actress trying her hand at design, who attends acting classes with Ellie to stay sharp. When Ellie gets into a fender bender with a guy who claims he's a cinematographer (Scott Coffey), her perspective on her work and the dating world starts to change. Chevy Chase also makes an appearance in this series of Hollywood vignettes, playing Ellie's agent. Watts, Coffey, and Pellegrino all worked together on David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, where Watts had her breakout performance, and Ellie Parker grew out of the friendship forged between Watts and director/screenwriter Coffey. It was shot on digital video over the course of five years, having begun its life as a series of shorts featuring Watts' character. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide
Review
The indie Hollywood satire may be nothing new, but through digital video and the dedication of Naomi Watts and Scott Coffey, it finds welcome new life in Ellie Parker. With its unique format and scathing insights into the industry's workaday grind, the film feels like a stylistic and thematic cousin of Time Code, Mike Figgis' daring quad-screen experiment in real-time cinema. But instead of interweaving narratives, it offers a series of potentially non-sequential peeks into Ellie's life, which gather into a satisfying whole. It's almost unnerving how Watts' acting equals the exacting standards of digital video, which tends to weed out false performances because it's such a hyper-real medium. The fact that she's an actress who works tirelessly at perfecting her craft -- and plays that same character -- makes it all the more delicious. But her reactions to the succession of humbling setbacks wouldn't tell the story without Coffey's brilliantly absurdist set pieces. In one, after finishing a too-weird-to-be-fake acting class, Ellie and her friend Sam (Rebecca Rigg) get into a spat about who's the better actor -- to be determined by which one can produce tears first. Their efforts inspire gales of laughter from the audience, yet it's a sadder moment than that, one that reduces them to Pavlovian dogs, willing to drool for whoever will guide them toward the prize. This veteran intelligence doesn't prevent Coffey from occasionally behaving like a recent film-school grad enamored with his new toys. At one point, Ellie eats a bright blue sherbet ice cream cone, for no apparent purpose beyond the aesthetic value of her vomiting it up in the next scene. And the film's overly bitter denouement seems likely to mystify some of its previously contented audience. Still, for a project cobbled together on the cheap over five years, Ellie Parker is rich with bittersweet ruminations on the failure to become somebody. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide
Ellie Parker is a movie written and directed by Scott Coffey. The title character, played by Naomi Watts, is a young woman struggling as an actress in Los Angeles. The movie centers on a quote from the prologue to Shakespeare's Henry V:
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Ellie Parker began as a short that was screened at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. Using a handheld digital camera, writer-director Scott Coffey expanded it into a feature-length film over the next four years. It was released in 2005.
Plot
Ellie Parker is a semi-autobiographical story of an Australian actress struggling to make it in Hollywood. Ellie is young enough to still schlep to auditions back and forth across L.A., changing wardrobes and slapping on makeup en route, but just old enough that the future feels "more like a threat than a promise". She lives with her vacuous musician boyfriend (Mark Pellegrino), who leaves her just about as dissatisfied as any other part of her life, and has a loose definition of the word "fidelity". Helping make sense of their surreal and humiliating Hollywood existence is her best friend Sam (Rebecca Rigg), another out-of-work actress trying her hand at design, who attends acting classes with Ellie to stay sharp. When Ellie gets into a fender bender with a guy who claims he's a cinematographer (Scott Coffey), her perspective on her work and the dating world starts to change. Chevy Chase also makes an appearance in this series of Hollywood vignettes, playing Ellie's agent.
Origins
Watts, Coffey, and Pellegrino all worked together on David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, where Watts had her breakout performance, and Ellie Parker grew out of the friendship forged between Watts and director/screenwriter Coffey. It was shot on digitalvideo over the course of five years, having begun its life as a series of shorts featuring Watts' character.
