Marine majesty is no match for the storytelling sins of Get Away If You Can, fatal flaws which run the gamut from neglecting Chekhov’s gun to self-indulgent beach-sex scenes between characters played by the married filmmakers. Terrence Martin and Dominique Braun capture some admittedly compelling shots of landscape and wildlife, whether it’s the setting sun shimmering across ocean waves or playful seals zipping around underwater. But that’s about as much value as can be wrung out of this aimless melodrama about two vapid spouses bickering on both land and sea.
Written, directed and produced by its co-leads, the story revolves around two generally unpleasant people who hope a protracted journey within the enclosed space of an ocean-faring sailboat will save their turbulent marriage. The image of a wine-drunk TJ (Martin) bobbing along on his anchored boat while playing around with an unloaded, high-powered shotgun (which never appears again) is emblematic of this tedious misfire: any sense of rising tension is short-lived and simply dissipates.
After TJ shrugs off attempted affection from Domi (Braun), who’s grown restless within the confines of the boat, they argue. TJ, who hasn’t bothered to follow through on Spanish lessons, asks his Argentinian wife to stick to English, thank you very much. Domi wants to impulsively explore the island they’ve happened across, the first sign of land in some time, but TJ insists these are called the “Islands of Despair” for a reason and they’d be crazy to stop here, demanding that they stick to the plan and head for some other island instead. It’s a dumb fight between two shallow characters who seem prone to making poor decisions. When TJ passes out drunk, Domi paddles the dinghy to the beach and pitches a tent on a hill. He eventually paddles his surfboard ashore and asks her to come back to the boat. She refuses. He tries again with similar results. They fiddle around on the island for a while, alone and then together. And that’s about it.
Martin and Braun attempt to flesh out this dearth of story with flashbacks to how their marriage got so rocky. However, we never get much sense of their actual issues, because neither seems like a three-dimensional person with real motivations or complex emotions. Put them together, and it’s like adding negative numbers. The only real conflict here is family. TJ’s asshole dad (Ed Harris) doesn’t care for Domi in the least and spends an awful lot of time dwelling on that fact, either in cold one-on-ones with TJ or on the phone with TJ’s brother (Riley Smith). He even awkwardly dubs his scheme “Operation Dismiss Domi,” with the objective of allowing TJ the space to grow a spine and be a man again, or something. The rationale here is never more complex than “that woman has got his head all twisted up.”
If there are racist or xenophobic undercurrents here, they go unexplored, though Domi makes sure to confide in her friend (Martina Gusman) that TJ’s is a family full of chauvinists. And if Harris adds some irascible bite to the role of misogynist patriarch, it’s through his own talent and not through anything offered in the hackneyed script. These flashback sequences are meant to add dimension to the characters and their scenario, but all that the nonlinearity really does is serve to further illustrate how thinly sketched these characters are, and to highlight the vast gulf in ability between Harris and everyone else.
Harris, who essentially likened his involvement to throwing indie filmmakers a bone, ends up shoe-horned in as a superfluous element to a story that would’ve been better developed by building a sense of claustrophobic desperation between two central characters who are as aimless in their literal journey as in their figurative one. Instead, we get two unpleasant characters who surf and scuba dive a bit, and otherwise sit around and stare a lot, TJ drinking wine straight from the bottle and Domi scrunching her toes in the sand. Conflicts arise and reach resolution for no particular reason, and in place of rising tension is instead mind-numbing tedium that makes even this slim 78-minute feature seem like any endless journey to nowhere.
Photo courtesy of Brainstorm Media
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