THE STORY – 70-year-old Sylvia becomes an unlikely foster parent to 8-year-old Emily, removed from her dementia-stricken grandfather’s care after a near-fatal incident in New Jersey.
THE CAST – Susan Sarandon, Everly Carganilla & Aubrey Plaza
THE TEAM – Zach Woods (Director/Writer) & Brandon Gardner (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 110 Minutes
For fans of Zach Woods, the comedic actor is marking a major next step in his career with his directorial debut feature, “The Accompanist,” here at the Tribeca Film Festival. While the star is often known for making people laugh, this film surely sets the tone (or, in this case, many) for a filmmaker who wants to display his range as a multi-hyphenate. On the surface, it’s an intimate drama about the power of found family and the bonds that tie us together. As it goes on, Woods begins to strive for an atmospheric rug-pull, which only drags down this endeavor into all the worst elements of many actor-turned-filmmaker directorial debuts.
“The Accompanist” follows Emily (Everly Carganilla), a nine-year-old New Jerseian living with her grandfather, whose lovely demeanor masks the ever-growing signs of early cognitive problems. After an almost fatal incident, Emily’s desire to help her grandfather inadvertently leads to the involvement of child protective services and the disastrous extraction from her only remaining family. A reluctant Emily, desperate to find her way back to her grandfather, soon finds herself under the temporary care of Susan Sarandon’s Sylvia, an unorthodox foster parent whose mischievous nature provides an emotional stability Emily has been missing for some time. Together, the two grow closer to one another, but Sylvia’s hesitance to get attached because of her checkered past leads to an uneasiness in a household filled with ghosts of its own.
One would not be able to guess from the interminable prologue featuring an eerie dance sequence that Wood’s would tonally pivot to a more mundane feature that is too familiar for even his own good. As Brandon Gardner and Woods’ screenplay begins to lengthen out, Wood’s direction proceeds to take it to overdrive, throwing a dart in how aggressively his surrealist tendencies begin to creep in. The ambient score, which heightens the tension to a borderline thriller-esque level, only perplexes viewers, as if what they’re supposed to see is an understated ghost story rather than a traditional drama. It turns out it’s a bit of both? And not one that is exceptionally effective at pulling either off. The audience sits through a relationship that, albeit at times charming to see develop, eventually hits all the expected beats. It makes all of the fantastical sequences interspersed, especially one during a leaf-shower storm, feel all the more out of place.
The cinematography by Andre Lascaris does enough to establish an autumnal warmth, especially in this New Jersey backdrop, where Woods is a native. Even the surrealist moments involving Tedra Millian are beautifully captured in this haunting dance-studio purgatory, to which Sylvia keeps returning, like a bad dream. Lascaris’s visual eye helps evoke the feelings audiences are supposed to feel, just as Woods’s desire to inject all these shades makes it feel like a completely different film each time audiences are subjected to this tonal whiplash. It’s somewhat surprising that Woods, mostly known for his comedic background, rarely capitalizes on his innate talents, instead favoring the occasion, sarcastic joke delivered by Sarandon that instantly cues audiences to what type of personality will likely win over the young Emily.
It’s Carganilla’s breakthrough performance that gives “The Accompanist” any sort of significance, setting the stage for a young performer who more than holds her own, if not acting circles around Sarandon or even Aubrey Plaza, who is briefly in the film. Beyond the adorable, childlike exterior, Carganilla’s work is mature for her age, demonstrating a wide range of emotions for a character in her position. Her work is more than aided by the reliability of a performer as great as Saradon, who is good in the film despite playing an atypical grief-stricken woman trying to overcome her trauma. The relationship, as mentioned earlier, is charming at times. Still, it’s in the little moments, such as Sylvia pulling pranks on Emily, that the naturalism of Wood’s direction begins to find a steady rhythm. Plaza’s performance is solid, yet her character’s ineptitude only adds to an unseriousness that she can’t quite shake from a character that’s purely there to drive the plot forward.
It’s hard to wrap one’s head around the feelings that are left with you by the end of “The Accompanist.” The title, which thematically aligns with the journey Emily and Sylvia embark on, leaves audiences no less perplexed by the end of its bloated runtime. Somehow, it’s far more effective when regurgitating the clichéd dramas in this vein than when Woods’ new ideas sideline a coherent experience.
