November 27, 2002 | If you’re seeking respite from the overbearing sound and fury of most heavily-hyped holiday season releases, spend some quality time with Personal Velocity, Rebecca Miller’s subtle, psychologically precise triptych based on three of her short stories about women — impressively played by Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey and Fairuza Balk — caught in the process of reinventing themselves.
Each individual, self-contained segment serves as testament to Miller’s strengths as a storyteller: Her ability to sustain clarity and narrative momentum within a time-tripping structure – each chapter reveals key details in flashbacks – and her gift for quickly and vividly defining characters through their sudden decisions and impulsive actions.
Miller cheats only a bit in using a narrator – the same one, Jon Ventimiglia, for all three chapters – who occasionally tells slightly more than we need to know. But never mind: Even the mixed-blessing voiceover enhances the impression that we are witnessing real life caught on the sly, viewed from an ironic yet empathetic perspective.
And for once, the sporadic fuzziness of digital-video serves a movie well: Like the central characters, cinematographer Ellen Kuras occasionally appears to be uncertain about what to do or where to move next. The only difference is, Kuras’ uncertainty is very likely more apparent than genuine.
Sedgwick shines brightest as the movie’s most complex character: Delia, a thirtysomething beauty who long ago discovered, very early during her teens, the power of her sexuality. Unfortunately, that power fails her when she’s repeatedly abused by her once-hunky, gone-to-seed husband. So she flees with her children in tow, hoping for a better life in another town. She finds herself stuck in a dead-end job as a café waitress. But, more important, she regains her power, during a denouement that, depending on your point of view, is either bitterly vengeful or bittersweetly triumphant.
Posey plays Greta, a Manhattan book editor who, at 28, worries about the sluggishness of her professional advancement. (Hence, the movie’s title.) For a while, she takes comfort in having an unambitious husband, Lee (Tim Guinee), whose most endearing quality is his reliability. Greta’s worst fear is being abandoned — like her mother was abandoned by her overbearing attorney father (Ron Leibman). So she places great importance on the certainty that Lee would never leave her. Indeed, she begins to see him as a possible impediment – well, actually, as definite dead weight – only when her career finally starts to take off after she edits a hot writer’s new novel.
Last, but certainly not least, there is Balk as Paula, a Gothic young woman who impetuously drives away from Manhattan – and from her live-in boyfriend – when she’s told she is pregnant. She’s inconsolably anxious – truth to tell, she’s certain she would be as lousy at parenting as her own mother – and she’s all the more unstable in the wake of witnessing a fatal hit-and-run. But when she reflexively helps a runaway with a horrifying secret, she makes a surprising discovery about her own maternal potential.
Personal Velocity is relatively short – less than 90 minutes – but it never feels rushed or superficial. Miller is unafraid to pause and linger on a revealing gesture or an emotional encounter. At the same time, she’s equally unafraid to have a bit of fun during her close observation.
In one of the movie’s wittiest sequences, a flirtation escalates into a heated clinch, then calms, then evolves into what might be called heavy petting, then calms again. The final step toward the logical outcome is never taken – at least, not on camera – and we’re made to feel almost as disappointed and frustrated as the folks on screen.
Listen closely, and you can almost hear Miller telling us: “Gotcha!”
