Upstate Story (2018)

A peek at the week of a man who struggles to go through it.

Well-written story that deserves some budget to take off. Upstate Story is the case where the script is better than the film. Not because writer/director Shaun Rose doesn’t have the skills to pull it off, but strictly due to budgetary restraints that don’t allow him to develop it the way he envisioned it.

Upstate Story surfaces an enormous problem many people fail to address and, consequently, deal with unfulfillment. The notion that we could have done so much more with our lives if we were just given the chance. What makes it worse is asking, to the point of begging, for this chance from people who have been given that chance and didn’t deserve it, to begin with. And then time goes by, and that chance seems further and further away, sucking, at first, our energy and then our lives like a black hole of despair. And while these nihilistic thoughts consume us like woodworms, during these darkest hours, Upstate Story‘s hidden positivity urges us to always hang onto whatever we consider a lighthouse in our lives and be guided by it so we don’t crash on the rocks.

Ellis Martin is a real-life, relatable character who can be developed into a person who one day will find the purpose he so eagerly seeks and write a book called “Against All Odds” or “Finding the Strength”, but he can also become the person who grabs a gun and enters a mall. He represents a surprisingly huge portion of people out there who have unexplored skills that could make all the difference in the world. A person’s thoughts represent them, and Ellis’ choice of words renders him the poster child of the endless Freudian battle between id, ego, and superego.

Yes, a few minutes from here and there could be shaved off in the cutting room, and yes, a lot more could have been done to make it visually more impressive, but that leads us back to the no-budget-indie-filmmaking issue. Just try to be in the hero’s shoes for an hour and, maybe imagine that this minimalism expresses and represents countless people who struggle with a dead-end nine-to-survive job. If it were a small-budget film, it would have swept through the festivals and be an Oscar bait if Billy Bob Thornton was in it. Even so, it was selected as a semi-finalist at the Los Angeles Cinefest and proud winner of the Feature Film Silver Award at CINEMAFEST 2018.

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