Among the many benchmarks of American culture that transcend language and geography, the quirky comedy Willie and Me focuses on two: Willie Nelson, and what for the purposes of this study we will call the Manic Pixie Dream Frau. The film is a labor of love for Eva Hassman, who stars in a film she wrote, directed and produced. The results are unfortunately kind of awkward, if well-meaning and intermittently entertaining. But despite ludicrous plot points and a protagonist who’s thinly drawn — albeit by design — this shaggy meditation on music is inevitably kind of endearing, at least for Nelson fans.
Hassman plays Greta, a neglected Munich housewife whose distant husband August (Thure Riefenstein, the actor’s very name sounding villainous) refuses to let her travel to America to see Willie Nelson’s farewell concert in Las Vegas.
Greta has a long history with the country music legend; in a flashback, you see an adolescent fandom that to some degree helped her navigate the trauma of her parents’ broken marriage. She put aside childish things until a pivotal moment in her own marriage reawakens the call of the red headed stranger—to the point that, to finance her trip in defiance of her spouse, she sells her husband’s Porsche and, leaving home, inadvertently burns down their house.
This is all played with the light tone of the Manic Pixie; we really don’t get any sense of Greta as a person other than her Willie Nelson fandom and the associated trauma. But it becomes clear that she’s finding her voice too, granted in a script that depicts her as one of the most naïve neglected housewives in cinema.
Greta’s observation of America is likewise that of a pop culture junkie. To give you an idea of the film’s fevered relationship with the United States, before seven minutes have elapsed, Greta, landing in Los Angeles on the way to Vegas, encounters not only an Elvis impersonator (Nick, played by Blaine Gray), but, in his last feature film as an actor, Peter Bogdanovich, as the manager at a seedy hotel where Nick works.
Sure it sounds precious, and it mostly is. But despite the comic tone, which sometimes recalls the deadpan romantic touch of Aki Kaurismaki, one starts to wonder if our heroine is not all there mentally, and there’s a grimy undercurrent from early on. As Greta’s naïvete leads her into one scrape after another, keeping her from her starstruck goal, Willie and Me starts to play like an anxiety dream co-starring Nelson himself —in a dual role: He plays the country legend, and he also plays a mysterious and possible Native American figure called Bones, who serves as Greta’s guide on her largely thwarted quest.
Believe us when we say this is far from Nelson’s least promising role; if you ask nicely, we might, as a future Streaming Hell feature, revisit the 1996 science fiction drama Starlight, in which the highlight is when Nelson activates a totem pole travel machine by means of laser beams that shoot out of his eyes.
But this is Hassman’s show, and she doesn’t quite land it, despite a game performance from Gray, who brings some humanity to a stock character. Still, one is willing to give props to a superfan who not only produced a piece of fan fiction, but co-wrote a song with the legend and got to sing it with Nelson over the closing credits. It’s not very good. But it’s leagues better than Starlight.
Photo courtesy of Quiver Distribution
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