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Not Your Everyday Film

By Sarah Stodola

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Everyday People
Written and directed by Jim McKay
Premieres on HBO this Saturday, June 26th, 9pm/8c

The greatest trait of Everyday People, a film that will premiere on HBO this Saturday evening, is its impressive cast of characters. It’s difficult to make a movie with such a large array of costars - none more important than the others - and retain a coherent plot. Everyday People features no less than nine central characters, all of whom are in some way associated with a struggling Brooklyn diner. Even more amazingly, we are led to both hate and sympathize with each character at some point in the film. At every turn, the movie brings us to the brink of typecasting, only to step back when it seems it’s already too late to do so, thus displaying the complicated nature of humans through the interactions of its characters.

Take, for instance, the character of Ron. We are first introduced to him as he is about to enter the diner, but is distracted by a man on the street selling black ribbons to “brothers.” We watch this scene and we sympathize with Ron, because what New Yorker hasn’t at some point wished they could approach a crazy preacher on the street and tell him how wrong he is?  Minutes later, though, Ron is inside the diner speaking with a colleague about his company’s plans for the neighborhood, which include the buyout of the very diner they are sitting in, in order to make way for a large-scale development replete with a Hard Rock Café. Later, Ron ruthlessly threatens to bury the diner’s young owner/manager, Ira, when Ira decides to back out of the sale in order to save the Brooklyn “institution” that the diner has become.

Finally, Ron returns to the diner at night to once again take Ira on. Ira is going to be a few minutes, so Ron sits at the bar and orders a drink. He strikes up a conversation with an older woman-about-town (shall we say), through which his conscious finally reaches him. One can’t imagine him backing out of the deal now, but at least we know that he is conflicted about what he is doing to this Brooklyn neighborhood. What we take from this is that there are no black and white answers - a common enough lesson, but one that in the case of Everyday People becomes all the more salient.

Although the film is about Brooklyn (Brooklyn was, in fact, the film’s working title), it was actually filmed in the space on Delancey Street in Manhattan formally occupied by the restaurant Ratner’s. But the film’s choice of location does nothing to detract from the feeling that we are seeing the real, raw Brooklyn.

And the time is right for a film such as this one. Brooklyn is famously the most diverse, impassioned, and proud of the city’s five boroughs, which makes its struggles with gentrification all the more interesting and, at times, heartbreaking.

The film was made, in part, with the goal of eventually being turned into an HBO series. After viewing it, one would certainly hope to see an incarnation of Everyday People become a regular on Sunday nights.

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Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three.  She can be contacted here.

© 2004 Me Three