"My Best Day," at ReRun Gastropub Cinema June 14-20

Ashlie Atkinson and Rachel Style

It can be kind of awk­ward when you become friendly with someone who labors in the arts and you’re not famil­i­ar with their work. The film­maker Erin Greenwell has been a neigh­bor­hood friend of mine for a while, and we’ve had con­struct­ive dis­cus­sions about movies, and she’s been kind enough to offer me very use­ful advice on some of my own pro­jects, but it was only recently that I got to see My Best Day, her 2012 film that premiered as part of the “Next” pro­gram at the Sundance Film Festival of that year. As you might ima­gine, I looked at it with some trep­id­a­tion. I had heard good things about it; John Anderson, who’s also a pal and whose crit­ic­al judg­ment I con­sider very sound, wrote very pos­it­ive things about it for his Variety review when it screened at Sundance. Still. You nev­er know. As I say, could be awkward.

So I’m happy to report that I found My Best Day delight­ful. It’s a small-town-set com­edy that has a very cred­ible sense of place to it—something that hardly hap­pens at all these days in movies either studio-made or inde­pend­ent. Greenwell pitches her depic­tion of this envir­on­ment per­fectly between lyric-pastoral-potential (let’s take a walk by the rail­way tracks) and you-could-be-bored-to-death-out-here (let’s lie down on the rail­way tracks) per­spect­ives; it’s a per­fect place for her char­ac­ters, whose quirks stem from ostens­ibly post­mod­ern iden­tity issues that were likely always per­tin­ent, but just nev­er dis­cussed in the Norman Rockwell days. Rachel Styles’ Karen, raised by her mom, works as a refrigerator-repair dis­patch­er, and at the begin­ning of the single day covered by the movie—the Fourth of July, as it happens—gets a call from a house­hold she believes is that of her bio­lo­gic­al fath­er. So begins her odys­sey, for which her help­mate is Ashlie Atkinson’s Meagan, who had planned on spend­ing the day fig­ur­ing out wheth­er she was going to stray from her long-term girl­friend or not. The folks they meet on their jour­ney are in a sense kindred spir­its in that they’re all look­ing for a home, or at the very least some relief from a prob­lem they believe makes them unique. Greenwell’s point is that every­one’s a mis­fit in some way, and it’s through recog­niz­ing that fact that we can forge true com­munity. But the movie makes its point the best way pos­sible, through enga­ging you with the char­ac­ters, and it does this via brisk writ­ing and excel­lent per­form­ances (the cast also fea­tures Kate McKinnon, who’s been mak­ing a big impres­sion on Saturday Night Live recently). The dir­ec­tion is also very assured: Greenwell’s aware that her human story is also a little on the fanci­ful style, and she does­n’t try to dis­guise that with faux-gritty cine­ma­to­graphy; her visu­al style is crisp, alert, attractive. 

The movie is get­ting its first New York the­at­ric­al run at the ReRun Gastropub Cinema start­ing tomor­row; check it out there if you’re able. The movie’s web­site, which will update you on how to see it and when, is here.