MOVIE REVIEW

'Assisted Living'

A young filmmaker finds the heart of the matter in his surprising mock documentary.

By Kevin Crust
Times Staff Writer

April 15, 2005

While most recent American independent films grasp for a low-budget version of Hollywood slick or embrace a type of forced quirkiness that at least one critic referred to as "the curse of Wes Anderson," few embody the type of genuine offbeat charm that was seen in films like Richard Linklater's "Slacker" in the early '90s. Writer-director Elliot Greenebaum's "Assisted Living," however, is authentically unconventional — opening in the form of an almost convincing mock documentary — but it gradually evolves into something more deeply affecting.

The loosely constructed narrative follows Todd, an at times irresponsible pothead, as he goes about his business as an orderly at a nursing home. As played by the superbly nonchalant Michael Bonsignore, Todd is aloof from his surroundings, needing his morning toke much the way many people crave coffee. He teeters at the edge of acceptable behavior with his habitual tardiness, sometime even falling off, as when he makes prank calls to the home's residents pretending to be their deceased loved ones checking up on them from heaven. The calls initially seem perverse and cruel, but in an expertly played sequence, Greenebaum and Bonsignore deliver laughs as well as a glimpse into Todd's potential for compassion.

Although the faux documentary elements punctuate the rest of the movie, it is Todd's relationship with an elderly woman that gives the film its sense of humanity. Mrs. Pearlman (the wry and touching Maggie Riley) is in the early stages of Alzheimer's and takes an odd liking to Todd, who reluctantly indulges her requests, but eventually the tone of the film shifts in a subtle but surprising way.

Greenebaum shot "Assisted Living" in an actual nursing home in his native Kentucky, using its residents and staff as extras. The facility is not the dungeon of horrors or phony senior citizen utopia so often portrayed in films and television. It is a nice place with clean rooms, pleasant grounds and activities for the residents, but the staff is harried, the tightly wound director holes up in his office and most of the inhabitants are lonely, waiting for visits by children or grandchildren that may never come.

The verisimilitude this lends the film, offset by the intended parody of the interviews, perfectly mirrors the relationship both Todd and Mrs. Pearlman have with the blurry line between reality and fantasy. The two people, separated by more than 50 years in age, are moving in different directions on this paradigm, but for a brief moment there is a clear convergence that allows each to live a little more fully.

Only 22 when he began shooting the film, Greenebaum displays a prodigious understanding of the treatment of the elderly in contemporary America.

'Assisted Living'

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Some drug use

An Economic Projections Inc. release. Written and directed by Elliot Greenebaum. Producers Alan Oxman, Archie Borders, Elliot Greenebaum, Alex Laskey. Cinematographer Marcel Cabrera. Editors Paul Frank, Adriana Pacheco. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes. At Laemmle's Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500; and the Laemmle's Playhouse 7, Pasadena, (626) 844-6500.