“Watching Mr. Pearson” is an indie outing with “Sunset Boulevard” as its original mailing address.
A drama about an aged actor lost in his old roles, with two caregivers indulging his “harmless” dementia and acting out his old scripts with him, it lacks anything in the way of wit and much that would make it dramatic.
It begins with a seriously unconvincing black and white film-within-film and leans on that device for flashbacks-that-don’t-look-like ’40s and ’50s cinema as it quickly stalls out. It’s essentially a screenplay pitch that needed workshopping that would polish dialogue, raise the stakes, flesh out characters and sharpen agendas and motivations.
Robert Pearson (Hugo Armstrong) is an old man in the hands of caregivers at his seaside mansion. But back in the day, if you needed a hardboiled private eye, a hero fighting oceanic “evil” in “The Beast from Below” or a flinty Western gunslinger, he was your man. Sam Bullington plays Avery the gumshoe and Robert in the other guises of his youth.
Miguel (Luis Rizo) has the night shift “Watching Mr. Pearson.” Polish immigrant Caroline (Dominika Zawada), anxious about her Green Card renewal, keeps him company during the day. She’s the one who sees the old props around the house and the old screenplays lying about and starts indulging Robert as he dementedly drifts off into a role from his past.
“I’ve got alarm bells for broads like her,” he once said on the silver screen. “And they were ringing like a Christmas hymn.”
Today, he’s still a diva.
“Are you just gonna STAND there? It’s YOUR line!” “Can you see me?” Yes. “That means you’re in my SIGHT line!”
Miguel has his doubts about this indulgence of Caroline’s. But it turns out he’s an aspiring screenwriter, and there’s a couple of years of film schools in all these scripts for “Ranger on the Bluff,” “The Captives,” “Avery” and “Truer Odds.”
Pearson drifts in an out of reality, fretting over finances (Zainab Jah plays his financial advisor) — “They want to cut me apart and sell me piece by piece.” Much of the time, no one can tell if he’s expressing real feelings or just parroting old dialogue.
“My life is over when I SAY it is!”
Armstrong — who has bit part screen credits going back to about 2000 — is meant to be the anchor here, a colorful curmudgeon of the old school. That’s a tough assignment as the film rarely gives us the human being underneath the scripted creation. The other performances range from adequate to eye-rolling in the movie clip flashbacks.
There’s no hint that this suburban LA story was filmed in Connecticut, but the editing doesn’t build suspense or sustain pace. The production values are decent enough. But an opening scene of a PI back in the black and white cinema heyday includes a student film level blunder — a highway speed limit sign is reversed as our anti-hero drives past it.
As we wrestle with the lack of pathos, the point of it all and how this story sets up that low-stakes resolution, the most hopeful words of encouragement for all this work — all those graphics of fake-movie posters, renting that mansion and a quarter million dollar+ collectible Porsche convertible — is “better luck next time.”
Rating: unrated, some violence
Cast: Dominika Zawada, Hugo Armstong, Zainab Jah, Sam Bullington and Luis Rizo.
Credits: Directed by Dillon Bentlage, scripted by Dillon Bentlage and Simon Kienitz Kincade. A KT Pictures /Hedy Films release.
Running time: 1:24
