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MARVELOUS AND THE BLACK HOLE
Director: Kate Tsang Cast: Miya Cech, Rhea Perlman, Leonardo Nam, Kannon, Paulina Lule, Jonathan Slavin, Keith Powell MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:21 Release Date: 4/22/22 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 21, 2022 Sammy (Miya Cech), the teenage protagonist of Marvelous and the Black Hole, is angry for good reasons. Her mother died a year ago, and while the world and the rest of her family seem to have moved forward, she hasn't. Writer/director Kate Tsang's debut feature is intrinsically about grief, but more to the point, it's about how difficult communicating one's thoughts and feelings within grief is. The sadness and the anger aren't the problem for the problem for Sammy, since those are natural and perfectly normal reactions. The fear of talking about those emotions is at the core of the issue. She doesn't know how to communicate these things, especially with the people who matter the most. Sammy doesn't want to hurt any more than she already does, and she doesn't want to hurt her family by talking about it, either. The central gimmick of Tsang's story, which has Sammy meeting and learning from a magician, may seem to be far removed from the pain of that loss and the cycle of silence that has arisen in the girl's family. It's not, though, because the filmmaker retains a steady focus on how Sammy learns to channel her emotions and, through this form of creative expression, find a way to communicate the things she otherwise cannot. There's a bit more to this story than the cutesy premise suggests. Since the death of Sammy's mother, the girl has been sliding academically and getting into trouble. Her father Angus (Leonardo Nam), who has lost himself in work and started dating Marianne (Paulina Lule), has tried therapy for his daughter. She isn't coping like him or his elder daughter Patricia (Kannon), who has lost herself in the world of an online video game. With Sammy's latest outburst of vandalism at school, some time away at a reform camp seems to be last option. He enrolls her in a business class at the local community college for the summer, but if that doesn't work, it's to that camp with her. Sammy meets Margot (Rhea Perlman), a magician who performs for kids. The performer, who knows a lot about grief from her own past, instantly spots and sympathizes with the girl's own anger, and Margot offers her a chance to be her stage assistant, learn some tricks along the way, and figure out how to use magic to tell a story. That last part particularly appeals to Sammy, since her mother's stories had such an impact on her (A few moments that visualize Sammy's imagination are clever, if underutilized). Tsang's film is short, smart, and, despite its honesty about the underlying despair of the main character, sweet. Marvelous and the Black Hole doesn't dig too deeply into these ideas and relationships, but in this case, that's fine. For this character, the mere act of scratching the surface is challenge enough—and a vital one, at that. Copyright © 2022 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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