Kelly & Cal is Tully without the M. Night Shyamalan gimmick at the end, but with way more realistic, socially awkward moments. It is about a first-time mother who is trying to settle down with her husband in the suburbs and only her in-laws are company until her next-door neighbor, a disabled teenage boy, comes into her life, and they discover a shared emotional common ground. Juliette Lewis plays the protagonist.
Kelly & Cal is my version of a horror movie because I am helplessly watching characters make bad decisions which will obviously lead to horrible scenarios, but are simultaneously completely understandable, and it is impossible not to feel empathetic instead of instinctually writing a character off with swift judgment. While I can subjectively find this movie not purely enjoyable to watch because it made me squirm uncomfortably in my seat, I objectively can separate my discomfort from a movie that succeeds in creating characters, interactions and a narrative that effectively felt like an emotionally plausible journey that in its specificity revealed some universally applicable truths about humanity. Jen McGowan directed this film and Rust Creek, which is more my cup of tea, but this movie may be superior in terms of transcending the simple narrative and communicating an emotion that all viewers can relate to.
Kelly & Cal ended up in my queue because a woman directed it. I have never been a fan of Lewis although retroactively I realize that I am not a fan of her characters, but she is an honest actor who is able to infuse humanity and feeling into some really fearlessly unlikeable people, which is unusual for women characters. I am probably supposed to like Kelly, but I do not, yet I can relate to her. I relate to the phenomenon of somehow losing yourself over the course of time, routine and almost indiscernible changes and minute choices that suddenly leave you unmoored in circumstances that feel dramatically different than the destination which you were headed towards. You do not have to be a new mother or have children to relate to that phenomenon, but by rooting the character in a gender specific, location specific story, it transcends those boundaries just like her friendship with the other titular character.
I hate that the protagonist derives her worth from men’s sexual attraction to her. I hate that she wants to reclaim her past self while looking down on people from her actual past because she is a mother and feels above them. Then she hates being a mother and feels like a misfit among mothers. I am mad that she wants to be edgy yet took deliberate, conscious steps to distance herself from that life. She wants to have her cake and eat it too, and I am jealous that it is possible for her to do both if she had a skosh more judgment. Kelly & Cal is about finding peace in the decisions that you make and ultimately coming to the understanding that others are experiencing the same difficulty of feeling alone and feeling kinship when neither is true, and both are true.
I love stories about intergenerational friendships, but Kelly & Cal unflinchingly delves into the innocent and messy, inappropriate aspects of that friendship. The film gives me a character that acts in ways that I would never consider, but occasionally I can herald her actions. I wanted it to remain completely platonic, but concede that was unrealistic because of the way that Cal initiates their contact. I did not like Cal, and I would never progressed past hello. She never crosses over criminal territory, but it gets awfully close to the line. The relationship becomes another decision about who she is: a responsible adult or a rebel who does not care about the rules.
I loved how the supporting characters in Kelly & Cal felt like real people with lives outside of the titular character. Bev, her mother in law, could have been a character that rested on the usual interfering, annoying stereotypes, but the film deftly creates and Cybill Shepherd breathes life into the character that you can see her through Kelly’s eyes while simultaneously seeing a woman who has been in her shoes and is trying to make life easier for Kelly in ways that she wishes someone would have done for her in the past. Her sister-in-law reveals cracks in her persona that why she is such a jerk. There are volumes in the fact that the movie never even touches on why Bev does not even notice or try to mitigate her daughter’s pain, but relates to Kelly more yet by remaining silent on the issue, allows the audience room to imagine the sister-in-law’s life and why she is so unsatisfied with it. The intergenerational interaction of different mothers at different stages in their lives could be its own movie. The only father is Kelly’s husband.
I liked that Kelly’s husband is not a villain, and that Kelly recognized that he made sacrifices for their family. Kelly & Cal briefly touches on Kelly’s lack of family so while her husband could be written off as the stereotypical guy that tames a woman, separates her from everything that made him fall in love with her, make her entirely dependent on him socially, it appears that he gave her the family that Kelly chose not to have, but Kelly’s historical discomfort with her family exacerbates her adjustment into becoming a mother and a wife and still makes her awkward with his family though she knew them from the beginning of her relationship. Again the movie never explicitly addresses these issues, but it drops just enough facts to allow the audience room to relate to the characters and fill in blanks. It is not easy or instinctual to make sympathetic men in a scenario where a woman is basically adrift and left out to sea yet he is. When she tries to return them back to the past, he is stubbornly and practically present with the baby in a way that she is incapable of being at that stage of the movie. It is refreshing to see a man as the more responsible caregiver yet still have a space where a woman needs more than she has. He reminded me of the father and husband in Return.
Kelly & Cal is a good movie, but is it a cinematic movie or a television movie? Nothing particularly distinctive stuck out for me visually. It feels like an insult to call it a television movie because it feels more emotionally nuanced than a Lifetime movie, but it would not be out of place on network television except for the occasional profanity and nudity. I loved the music and how the music and character’s aesthetic instantly rooted me in the character’s history without belaboring the point. We are contemporaries.
I would not say that I enjoyed Kelly & Cal because I was internally screaming, “What are you doing?” to the characters, but it is honest, visceral and true in a way that Closer insists that it is yet falls wide from the mark. Jen McGowan may not be a favorite of mine, but she definitely has talent.