“You’re the most self-aware inexperienced person I’ve ever met.” So says the eventual love interest to our protagonist soon into their first outing together in co-writer/director Brittany Snow’s Parachute. Maybe that’s true, since the surrounding context of the conversation is that Riley (Courtney Eaton) has never changed a light bulb in all her life and therefore mistrusts herself to be able to do so. It’s sort of a prickish thing to say to someone, whom you obviously like, this soon into a potential relationship, though. One of the unspoken things in this movie is that maybe Riley hasn’t met Mr. Right, after all, but then again, there are more important things going on here than whatever is happening in her love life. That goes unnoticed, as well.
The story of Snow and Becca Gleason’s screenplay is an inherently moving one, in that we automatically wish only good things for Riley but also learn that she’s not in a good place these days. Riley has an eating disorder and suffers from extreme depression and anxiety as a result of it. As the movie begins, she has just been released from a rehabilitation center, outside of which she listens to a voicemail of some importance and opens a certain social media app to look at a few celebrity accounts and what they have to say about body dysmorphia. Right off the bat, the movie communicates her journey through a cycle of self-destruction: whenever she feels her body is not up to par, she eats, which leads to the attendant despair that her body has changed from the gained mass.
There is nothing wrong with her, of course, but this is life with an eating disorder. At its best, the film and especially Eaton’s performance work to convey this struggle, which makes it all the more confusing that the central conflict is a romantic one. Everything about Riley’s mental health is a sort of ticking-clock mechanism at the service of her budding relationship with Ethan (Thomas Mann), a young man who, at first, is charming and patient and honest, with his own demons involving an alcoholic father and a lot more wisdom and words of honesty than he really needs to give to Riley at this point in her recovery. The story, admirably ambitious for the way it develops over the course of a few years, begins when she is still in year one of that process, and the official word, including from her therapist (Gina Rodriguez), is that Riley needs to wait before starting any sort of relationship.
That could mean a few things for the filmmakers, but by committing to the troubled dynamic between the film’s two leads, Snow and Gleason ignore the more honest routes of simply following Riley through her own story. Hints at this alternate film do exist, such as the startling moments of self-realization and self-awareness that haunt Riley (how she pays close attention to the bodily features of others and excuses herself to the nearest restroom, for instance). Mostly, though, we get a series of repetitious arguments between Riley and Ethan in a will-they-won’t-they kind of tension with larger-than-usual stakes.
Snow also doesn’t entirely know what to do with a surprisingly large ensemble (which includes Scott Mescudi and Francesca Reale as a pair of sympathetic friends-turned-lovers, Joel McHale and Jennifer Westfeldt as Ethan’s parents, and Dave Bautista as the proprietor of a murder mystery dinner theater), but that’s more forgivable than the turn toward soap-opera theatrics and longing gazes that Parachute eventually becomes. The film’s message is sound, but as they say, the execution falters.
Photo courtesy of Vertical
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