Pardon our dust! We just migrated to a new host and platform, and we're still doing some fine-tuning. Broken images, URLs, etc. will be par for the course.
**½/**** starring Tony Amendola, Hayley Erin, Sonya Walger, Nick George written and directed by John Rosman
by Walter Chaw I respect the directness and simplicity of John Rosman’s New Life, the way it addresses a double-edged problem through two women in separate storylines who represent the point and counterpoint of a debate without an easy answer. How does one balance the individual good versus the interests of the collective? Easy enough to say that any individual must be sacrificed for the sake of society until one humanizes the individual. Plenty of films tackle this question: John Frankenheimer’s The Train measures the value of a man’s life against a priceless work of art; Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s extraordinary 28 Weeks Later and Breck Eisner’s remake of The Crazies wonder how many people must be sacrificed for the greater good, no matter how heroic the lengths they’ve gone to survive. New Life‘s stakes are similarly big, although its focus is smaller–the “Trolley Problem” where one of the hero’s choices is to kill a person she likes in order to save a planet full of strangers. Complicating it all is that the hero herself, Elsa (Sonya Walger), is afflicted with a progressive neurological disorder, meaning her time is limited regardless of what she chooses. If she does the difficult thing, in other words, she’s not even doing it for herself.
Ian (Nick George) is planning on proposing to his girlfriend Jessica (Hayley Erin) on a camping trip when Jessica’s fondness for local wildlife is maybe what leads to her contracting a pretty nasty bug. She’s merely carrying it for now, but Ian starts bubbling and sloughing off flesh almost immediately. This draws the attention of a CDC-esque agency responsible for stemming a pandemic deadlier than the one we’ve just proven entirely unequal to slowing, with Elsa drawing the short straw of bringing Jessica back in after she’s escaped captivity. The film then splits between Elsa bristling under her responsibilities and dealing with her rapidly degenerating physical capabilities and Jessica making her way to parts remote in an attempt to catch her breath–not knowing, or perhaps only suspecting, that she’s carrying a deadly pathogen and putting the good samaritans who stop to help her at mortal risk. We root for her, though, despite her selfishness–partly because Rosman opens New Life a lot like Jeremy Saulnier opened his Blue Ruin: wordless with a domestic break-in, the goal of which appears to be a nice bath and a change of clothes. It humanizes Jessica’s plight instantly, this early desire for a bit of comfort and normalcy. Her introduction provides enough goodwill for her character that I never really rooted for her capture.
The reason New Life isn’t better is that there’s too much time squandered on whooshing Bourne Identity tracking sequences in which a team of technicians shackled to screens tracks Jessica’s movements while Elsa’s handler, Vince (Jeb Berrier), nudges her forwards. It’s an already-familiar film’s most rote convention, though it doesn’t feel like that kind of movie to begin with. Jessica’s interactions with lonesome old guy Frank (Blaine Palmer) and kindly bar owner Molly (Ayanna Berkshire) are much more compelling, presenting the idea that there’s incredible good in this world, that the qualities of human kindness in short supply nowadays do still exist–and none of it will do a thing to save us when the plague comes again. I liked Elsa quite a lot as a character. I appreciated how her body betrays her as she’s trying to do her job; her frustration, embarrassment, all of it registered with me, along with the irony of her labours to produce a positive outcome in the face of her own impending doom. Maybe this is the point of New Life: poor players strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage and then it’s curtains for us all, sooner or later, dignified or, more often, not. Nothing we do has eternal meaning; life is moments of grace punctuating suffering and repetition. When New Life is focused on Jessica and Elsa’s last moments, pushing towards their meaningless and brief intersection and then oblivion, it’s fantastic. I wish the picture trusted itself more, but it’s still worth a look.
