Director/writer Matthew Brown had problems with his feature film "Maine": the writing, pacing and general emotional tone. What saves the production is selecting Laia Costa to star. The Spanish actress manages to get across in very clear terms the confusion, concerns and cares of her character even when Brown's script fails to make those points.
Costa ("Life Itself") plays Bluebird, a married Spanish woman who has left her life behind to travel to the United States to hike the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail. Her plan is to use the alone time as she treks from Georgia to Maine to figure out her problems. Plans change when she is joined by Lake (Thomas Mann, "Me, Earl and the Dying Girl"), a young American hiker. The long days and nights in the wilderness bring the pair together as they begin to share an emotional and romantic bond. But, big questions keep haunting Bluebird.
Brown, whose only other work as a feature film director was "In the Treetops," exhibits the symptoms many novice filmmakers show in their early efforts. His work shows real love with how fascinating it is that "Maine" was shot on location, and so much love for the script he failed to see when the thin patches show.
The bigger problem is the script. Brown has Bluebird on a journey of self-discovery, but he does very little to set up the context of that mission. And, her decision-making is so scattered and vague that at the end it is hard to decide whether her mission is accomplished or interrupted. If you can ignore the irrational writing and just focus on the way the actors deliver, there are several glimmers of realizations to be had.
That's a lot to put on Costa and Mann, as the majority of the movie is constructed like a two-person play. Both actors have shown in past works an ability to handle acting challenges, but they never faced a situation this spotty.
A lot of their conversations are the benign chats average people have, whether it is in the woods or on a bus. That kind of dialogue goes a long way to anchoring the story in a deep sense of reality. The problem is too often it looks like Brown ran out of dialogue and filled the voids with scenes of the pair walking, taking a bath in a stream, brushing their teeth, walking some more and then, when all else fails, more scenes of the pair hiking.
There are such large gaps in the story when the concentration is on the trail that it's surprising a logo for Maine Office of Tourism doesn't pop on screen.
As a feature film, "Maine" doesn't go quietly. When given something to do or say of any relevance, Costa and Mann make great movie moments. It is just that Brown failed to give them a clear path to follow. Their work looks like snippets of what could have been a solid movie with a little more polishing of the writing and a little less admiring of the local vegetation.
