MARMALADE - Mark Reviews Movies

Marmalade, Brainstorm Media

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 8, 2024

Early into Marmalade, his cellmate tells Baron (Joe Keery) to cut the fat of his story about how he wound up in prison, needs to escape, and has the love of his life, as well as $250,000, waiting for him on the outside. Writer/director Keir O'Donnell's debut movie doesn't have any fat on it, but there's not much meat on the bones of this eventually twisty thriller, either.

About half of this narrative is Baron telling that story, and to the filmmaker's credit, the course of it keeps us distracted from the real game he's playing with this movie. That's mostly because the story-within-the-story is a bit too familiar and predictable, while also skimming on its most intriguing ideas. It convinces us this plot is heading in one inevitable direction, so when O'Donnell changes that direction a couple of times later, it's a nice jolt—albeit only a momentary one.

Eventually, each new path of this story becomes just as routine as the first one, and it's not as if the characters are compelling enough to deflect from that. In fact, the whole point is that some or all of these characters might not be who claim to be—or that they are exactly that, only not in the way we're initially led to believe.

That means the plot here matters more than anything else, and you can pretty much stop as soon as you're pretty sure you've heard this one before. It's likely you have.

Baron finds himself in prison, after being arrested, processed at the local police station, and sent to the clink to await the next step of the judicial process. He's a quiet, timid guy, who doesn't have much to say and says what he does have to say with an aw-shucks attitude, as well as a penchant for malapropisms and mispronunciations. Baron isn't the smartest young man, but he knows what he knows. Right now, he knows he needs to get out of prison and meet the woman of his dreams at a specific time in a particular, secret location the following day.

When his cellmate Otis (Aldis Hodge) reveals that part of his long rap sheet includes multiple prison escapes, Baron asks for and then pleads for the man's help. He's even willing to give Otis his quarter-of-a-million-dollar share for the crime that landed him here, but Otis needs convincing that anything this stranger is saying is on the level.

Thus, we get Baron's story, which begins with his childhood in a wheat field, and Otis can't stand such unnecessarily sentimental flourishes. It's strange to find oneself waiting for Baron to be interrupted by his literally captive audience, but the only real flashes of some personality and cleverness here come from those little interludes. Hodge's amusingly dead-pan and impatient attitude help considerably in that regard.

The actual story, though, has Baron being fired from his job at a small-town post office after refusing to cut his long hair, realizing he needs to find a way to pay for his bed-ridden mother's expensive medication, and becoming distracted when the mysterious Marmalade (Camila Morrone) arrives. Baron immediately falls for her, and she seems to take a liking to him. Soon enough, Marmalade suggests the best way to have some fun in this place and to be able to afford the mother's prescription is to rob a bank.

This is where any sort of plot synopsis should stop. The rest of O'Donnell's screenplay offers up one pseudo-twist (which intentionally isn't much of one, because Marmalade, who calls her new beau "Puppet," is only as innocent as the naïve Baron's perception of her), before hitting us with one after another after another. Something about the plotting is a bit off here, such as how the escape attempt is played for suspense, even though we've already learned that there really isn't any to be had in it, and the way O'Donnell has characters vocalize revelations even after they've been made pretty clear. Is this simply a matter of a filmmaker not trusting the audience to keep up with the obvious or a case of a screenwriter almost trying to convince himself that all of this lines up exactly as he intended?

Since this does come down to a matter of winding and weaving plot, the movie does gain some energy when O'Donnell finally embraces that reality in the second half. The performances have some fun with characters who aren't quite or at all what they seem to be, with Keery playing a sympathetic dolt with a good heart, Morrone playing someone out of a sheltered young man's fantasy with eccentric charm and hidden intentions, and Hodge gradually taking command of an entirely different plot.

The story and characters are quirky, although in a way that feels a bit too calculated (There is, perhaps, an in-movie explanation for that), but when so much about a narrative is left deliberately uncertain, it needs more to connect to than just that. Marmalade comes up short in that regard and especially in some last-minute attempts to add some weight to this light-as-a-feather material.

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