The Whole Lot
Constraint can be an artists’ best friend. Without the wherewithal for swooping images or lush backdrops the filmmaker is ideally forced into the heart of his piece, scything through obscuring sound design or camera movement to emerge with a treasure of real truth in his or her hands. Forced to discover what their film is really about and present it without trappings it is made irresistible or dies.
In practice it dies more often than not. Shorn of their coverings a lot of decent movies are revealed to be hollow in the center. Even more mundane or silly ideas are gussied up to a level of respectability, their art coming entirely from their craft because there’s not much else to them.
On the surface Connor Rickman’s The Whole Lot is the classic example of the form, reducing itself to just a handful of cast members and a single location to get the most from its limited resources, but also discovering what those limitations truly mean. Dialogue heavy and character rich, Matthew Ivan Bennett’s screenplay could easily be mistaken for a stage adaptation rather than the original story it is. A single, nearly real-time conversation between Della (McLoney), her husband Eli (Webb) and estranged brother Jamie (Kramer) over the disposition of their late fathers collection of classic cars unravels into a litany of recrimination and secrets The Whole Lot is a unity of time, place and action that would have made the Greeks stand up in admiration.
Stuck as they are in the garage until an agreement can be made about who gets which vehicles – Della and Eli seek to sell the entire collection to fund their entrepreneurial pursuits while the will restricts Jamie, who actually worked on the cars, to just one vehicle for fear he will fritter it away on drink and drugs – the film itself never comes off as trapped. It speaks to the strength of Bennett’s screenplay and the surety of Rickman’s direction that The Whole Lot never seems slow or ungainly even as it revolves its small cast around into distinct two-character scenes that scratch away at the strange and strained relationships between the trio. Why does Jamie dislike Eli and what is behind his drinking? How has the SIDs death of Della and Eli’s son strained their marriage and why is Eli pushing so hard to sell the cars? Why does Della continually give in to Jamie and is increasing demands even as she sees his instinct for self-destruction take hold of him?
Like a minuature Béla Tarr, Rickman eschews even quick cuts to add speed and drama, relying on long takes and the dance of the actors between their words to keep our attention. A quick glance at the frozen mountains of Colorado, in its way as cold and apocalyptic as Tarr’s dusky, rainy Hungary, is nearly the only time the outside world makes an appearance before the trio disappears into the incubator of the garage preparing for some new version of themselves to be born. As far as squeezing blood from a stone goes, the Greeks had it right about these constraints – with nowhere to go and nothing to do humans pick at their scabs until they spring forth again. And there’s nothing to do in the garage but dig.
The downside to all that digging is it is terribly easy to go too far and wind up in a whole too deep to get out of. Even at a scant 75 minutes The Whole Lot rips through its initial conflict and goes searching for more and more dirt under the trio’s fingernails. As more and more secrets come to the surface Rickman and Bennett seem to wager among themselves how far their transgressions and forgetting these games of chicken usually have no winner. The line between self-realization and self-destruction is made purposefully thin, the only chord binding these three people together being their shared difficulty in avoiding their own worst impulses.
It’s an engrossing but difficult slog to come out the other side and find the best option might be getting away from everyone you’ve spent your life with, a decision Rickman ultimately refuses to finalize. Sometimes constraints aren’t freeing, they’re disabling and The Whole Lot wavers between those realities, never quite falling but not flying off in success either.