THE END OF LOVE

Actor turned screenwriter/director Mark Webber’s somewhat overly ambitious wee film is a piece of faction. He has melded parts of his own life and used his own 4 year old son as his co-star and embroiled a piece of ‘what’s the worst thing that can happen to me’ scenario into an uncomfortable narrative.

The premise of the story is that Webber is a struggling bit-part actor in Hollywood, totally broke, and is a single parent to his four year old son Isaac after the boy’s mother was killed in an accident.  (In real life the actress Frankie Shaw, Isaac’s mother had separated from Webber).  Trying to deal with his own grief he totes the kid around on auditions and centers his whole day around him. There is never any doubt that he totally adores Isaac. When he meets Lydia a single mother who runs the local kids daycare center, Webber arranges a family play date for them all to hang put together. When this morphs into a romantic date for him and Lydia, he very oddly declares his undying love to this complete stranger, confusing both her and us too.

Isaac is unquestionably a  charmer and its extremely clever how Webber manages to incorporate the boy’s ceaseless chatter and the odd temper tantrum into the plot.  I am not going to credit him with being a remarkable child actor because his performance is not an act at all …. although we are never sure if Webber’s is either. It is in fact Isaac that engages our attention and deserves our affection, as the moment Webber is out playing on his own with ‘the grown ups’ he shows himself up to be a rather vapid selfish deadbeat.

At a party hosted by actor Michael Cera at his home Webber’s behaviour is no more erratic and unpredictable than the host’s, but it finally closes the deal with us and we totally lose any interest in how this will all turn out.

Interesting concept, and I indulged Webber’s performance in the first half of the movie as being justified by his grief, but as it veered towards such self-indulgence, I ended up wishing that this vanity project had at least some other outside creative direction to deliver the promise it started out with so enthusiastically.

★★★★   

Available on DVD & Amazon VOD