Sacramento screens at the Sydney Underground Film Festival on 14 & 15 September. Tickets are available here.
“I don’t know if I listened to everything you said, but I heard free childcare and I’m too tired to turn that down.” Tallie.
Michael Angarano’s road trip dramatic comedy Sacramento is part of a burgeoning cinematic culture gently and poignantly discussing men’s mental health. Similar to Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain it takes two estranged but previously close men and puts them in too-close-for comfort quarters while they work out their combined and separate anxieties.
Glenn (Michael Cera) is about to become a father for the first time. He’s neurotic to the point of needy frustrating his generally chill but increasingly exasperated wife Rosie (Kirsten Stewart). He gets an unannounced visit from his childhood friend, Rickey (Michael Angarano) who unbeknownst to him has just left hospital after suffering a nervous breakdown. Glenn is trying to “phase out” contact with Rickey who he sees as an irresponsible flake. There is something about Rickey that pulls him back into his youth and he doesn’t like it. From the fourth grade Glenn feels like he’s been putting up with Rickey’s antics, and as he’s about to be a dad he wants to keep Rickey’s will-card personality away from his ‘adult life.’
Glenn accepts a lunch invitation from Rickey (“You want to have lunch? At noon?”) mostly to keep him from discovering Rosie is pregnant. Rickey is so eager to reconnect with Glenn that he has purchased the car they used to drive around in when they were younger; Betsy – a gas guzzler that screams “teen slacker.” Lunch isn’t a disaster, but it isn’t exactly a fantastic catch up with Rickey blithely (or deliberately) pressing at Glenn’s loneliness and insecurities. Rickey doesn’t respect Glenn’s boundaries which appear to be many. Rickey admits he knows they have drifted apart into ‘once a year catch-up’ territory but he’d like to at least spend an extra fifteen minutes driving around with his erstwhile best buddy.
That fifteen minutes turns into an impromptu road trip from Los Angeles to Sacramento where Rickey says he needs to scatter the ashes of his very recently deceased father. “He’s so manipulative,” Glenn complains to Rosie on the phone, “I can’t believe he pulled out the dead dad card.” Glenn agrees to go as repayment for the time Rickey got him through the death of his own father. A journey of “self-uncovery” ensues as the two men bicker their way across the almost four hundred miles to America’s farm to fork capital.
“It really burns my ass when people lie,” Glenn says to Rickey. “Mine too,” he replies. Rickey’s reason for choosing to travel to Sacramento is a lie. Glenn is lying about how much he enjoys his new social circle (it doesn’t exist) and he is still keeping Rosie’s pregnancy from Rickey – something the latter worked out very early after seeing a discarded cot Glenn had a meltdown building. The two manchildren have spent a lot of time lying to themselves and others and whether they like it or not, being in each other’s company is going to force some uncomfortable truths to surface.
Rickey is the kind of guy who jumps impetuously into things. The opening scene of the film sees him camping by a river. A woman yells “Nice dick!” from the other side of the shore and within moments of flirting with her he has quite literally jumped into the river to swim to her. When they do meet up, he and Tallie (Maya Erskine) realise they have nothing in common but snuggle briefly. “We should stay here forever and have babies and make a colony,” he says. Tallie’s response is she thinks he’d bail.
Glenn, on the other hand, needs structure and a precise way things must be done. Coffee as take-out after lunch. Phone on silent. Only a certain type of sunscreen. Going with the flow doesn’t come easily to him, less so now he’s about to be a parent and one facing unemployment.
The ease in which Angarano and Cera slip into their characters and their spiky but charming chemistry is the core of Sacramento. Rickey’s a mess who has been floating through adulthood for too long. Glenn’s a mess hovering on the edge of nervous collapse whenever a power cord isn’t plugged in correctly. Neither of them are good at facing up to their own bullshit; but somewhere in a not quite lost weekend in Sacramento they begin to clumsily reach out to each other and find “We’re a lot closer than you think.”
Maya Erskine is excellent as the real reason Rickey decided to head to Sacramento. Frazzled, pissed off, sceptical, and funny. Tallie says to Rickey exactly what Rosie has been saying to Glenn – or will be saying more forcefully soon. If Tallie can see the potential for Rickey to grow up, then there’s the potential for Glenn to grow up too when he faces what he’s been avoiding.
Sacramento is a relatively familiar narrative, but Angarano’s script written in conjunction with Christopher Smith is raw, sensitive, and humorous – never losing site of the imperfect men who need to admit their flaws and deal with their avoidance of their numerous issues to move forward as ‘proper’ grownups.
Sometimes a bit shaggy around the edges like Michael Angarano’s character, but Angarano’s direction, script, and performance uplift Sacramento into a sweet, generous, and self-aware film. A rough gem, but a gem nevertheless.
Director: Michael Angarano
Cast: Kristen Stewart, Michael Cera, Michael Angarano
Writers: Michael Angarano, Christopher Nicholas Smith
