‘My Dead Friend Zoe’ is an earnest, successful drama about PTSD
And ‘Riff Raff,’ also co-starring Ed Harris, brings a super-overqualified cast to a generic crime drama.
My Dead Friend Zoe is mostly successful both as a movie and as a piece of issue advocacy. It has a few flaws around the edges, but overall it’s a decent feature directorial debut from Kyle Hausmann-Stokes. Hausmann-Stokes is himself a veteran of the Iraq War and wrote the film to honor a couple of friends that he lost.
The film tells the story of Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green), an Afghanistan veteran now back home in the Portland area. The story is divided between Merit’s life in the present day, and scenes back during the war, where we see her in a series of discussions with Zoe (Natalie Morales.)
The title is a bit of a spoiler, but yes, Zoe is dead, and she appears constantly to Merit in the present day, as the ghostly personification of her PTSD and survivor’s guilt. It’s a metaphor that, while a bit obvious, mostly works.
In the present, we also see Merit struggling in a veterans support group (led by a somewhat overqualified Morgan Freeman), and ultimately going to live with her grandfather Dale (Ed Harris), a Vietnam vet in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. She also flirts with romance with Alex (Utkarsh Ambudkar), the proprietor of the nursing home where her mother (Gloria Ruben) is trying to locate the grandfather.
The film — for which Travis Kelce is listed as an executive producer — mostly does a good job of illustrating the difficulties of veterans coming home and coming to terms with the past, and there’s one great scene where grandfather and granddaughter compare notes on the generational divide of the reception soldiers faced, whether they were returning from Vietnam or Afghanistan.
My Dead Friend Zoe is mostly a series of two-hander scenes, and I liked the chemistry between Martin-Green and Morales, two actresses better known for their TV work. Harris mostly nails the grandfather role and the plot point that he only has “early stage” Alzheimer’s means he mostly sounds like himself in most of his scenes. I would have liked to have spent even more time with the veteran’s support group, all of whom are played by real vets.
I have a few minor quibbles. Like My Old Ass last year, the title implies something a bit more light and jokey than the movie that actually exists. The film seems like it’s going to lead up to Merit, after spending the entire movie never speaking in a certain venue, speaking at length, but cuts off before she does.
And at the end, My Dead Friend Zoe borrows a couple of pages from Sound of Freedom, albeit on behalf of a much less dubious cause. We get a countdown to a “special message” from the cast and crew, call-to-action URLs, a list of every last crowdfunding contributor and yes, even a pay-it-forward campaign.
I felt like the film itself made its case much better, and much more creatively, than any of those things.
My Dead Friend Zone, strangely, is one of two movies out this week in which Ed Harris plays an older man whose children and grandchildren happen to be Black. The other is Riff Raff, a new crime drama that stuffs a ludicrously talented cast into a mostly forgettable story.
Harris plays Vincent, a former criminal now safely retired in Maine, with his wife Sandy (Gabrielle Union) and son DJ (Miles J. Harvey.) He has another son, Rocco (Lewis Pullman), with his horny, drunken ex-wife (Jennifer Coolidge), while a pair of Coen-style bickering hitmen are played by Bill Murray and Pete Davidson.
By the end, obviously, all of these people are going to end up in the same room, with secrets of the past resurfacing and guns pointed everywhere.
Riff Raff is directed by Dito Montiel, best known for A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, and the film is never quite as interesting as the cast it assembled.
But I did enjoy Lewis Pullman, who has that Cooper Hoffman thing where he can’t help but recreate his own father’s facial expressions and mannerisms. Also, it’s funny to see Jennifer Coolidge, horny and talking all the time about penises. Coolidge played the oversexed older woman in American Pie, 26 years ago, and she’s still doing it now.