THE BOOK Either You’re In, or You’re in the Way by Marin County’s Logan and Noah Miller was a local publishing success.
The two redheaded brothers, minor-league baseball players who took up filmmaking, certainly had their game faces on for the cover photo. In the book, the Millers describe turning their autobiographical experiences into an indie project with all of the trimmings, including Skywalker Sound audio and ILM visual effects.
The Millers succeeded in raising a multimillion-dollar budget despite being nobodies. They write, “To those who no longer believe in the American dream, read this and say otherwise.” After a couple of years on the film-festival circuit—and garnering the Audience Choice Award at the Omaha Film Festival—the Millers’ film, Touching Home, is getting general release.
Wearing every hat they could grab, the Millers direct, act and produce. Touching Home looks professionally done; visually, it celebrates one of the most beautiful areas in the world, Marin and Sonoma counties. But the level of honesty and acting capability wanes throughout the film. Touching Home is about hardball players, but it’s a relentless game of softball. Twins Clint (Noah Miller) and Lane (Logan Miller) are back in town after having bottomed out in Phoenix as baseball hopefuls. They have returned to the Fairfax area where they were raised; they move in with their inert, alcoholic grandmother (former Catwoman Lee Meriwether) and their zany, uncle (Brad Dourif).
The two lads hustle little jobs, trying to save enough money to get back into tryouts next season. But the biggest obstacle in their life is their charming but hard-drinking dad, Charlie (Ed Harris), a transient who lives in the back of his truck.
Clint—an unlettered, quick-tempered young man—can’t sympathize with the father, even as he’s starting to follow in the old man’s footsteps: he’s loafing and drinking too much Lagunitas Ale. Meanwhile, Lane starts a romance with the local schoolmarm (Ishiah Benben)—and this affair causes more strife between the brothers.
The film’s energy is strictly about the twins; “Bro is me, and I am Bro” is the way the Millers put it in their book. That kind of attachment doesn’t leave much room for anyone else in the picture, certainly not for Benben. This rivalry between identical brothers obsesses the Millers, and they think that obsession will affect the viewer, too. It doesn’t—it just gets uncanny. I understand why a colleague said she wanted to see Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers immediately after she saw this. The Millers might be right in the parts of bizarre twin hit men; they would really be able to let their intensity loose.
Naturally, Harris’ consistent underplaying steals the camera from the Millers, especially when Clint is raging (again). Harris is particularly deft in what looks like a spot of muttering improv during a late-night scene in which he is being taken back to his truck. The chance to play another almost-ran loser must have appealed to Harris, even in this familiar melodrama drunkard’s part.
In interviews, the Millers say that the film is their duty to their late father; he was a more interesting kind of drinker, according to the book. But it’s one thing to build a memorial, and it’s another to make that memorial a polished commercial proposition and charge admission.
The film’s contrivance of image (there must be 30 perfect sunsets in this film) matches contrivance of plot (“SF Giants to Hold Open Tryout at Local Field,” reads a newspaper headline). The Steinbeck-lite ideas and Dourif’s Smithfield-quality hamming; the exercise montages: they all lead to something that’s less like the future of indie film and something more like yesterday’s Chevy truck commercial.
Local theaters, show times and tickets at MovieTimes.com.
Touching Home
PG-13; 112 min.
Directed by Logan and Nolan Miller and starring Ed Harris
Opens May 7 @ Camera 3
