The acting isn't all that bad. These actors look and talk about like real people look and talk. The expressions on their faces are approximately what people really do in surprising and stressy situations. When your business looks like it will fail, what do you do? Moan and thrash around, or do you go off somewhere and just sit there and think, stare into the distance? When the TV News says there is one exception to their findings, and shows Jay Austin's car lot, what does he do? What would you do? I'd just sit there. I wouldn't scream in amazement, nor would I put my hands in front of my face. But in a movie you've got to have the guy do something; so he leaps to his feet and stands in front of the TV and continues to watch, with his mouth partly open. Completely shocked, surprised, astonished - the standing up is a little extreme but it's obviously an extreme situation. It's played exactly right. What we call good acting is actually just slick Hollywood styling. Real people act more like what we see here. When people say bizarre things to them they might not speak right up - they often sit and think a second before they respond. At least people in healthy societies do.
You see a related thing in The Electric Horseman. Sonny asks Hallie what her real name is, and she admits it's Alice. What a dumpy, ordinary name. Yet, he calls her that, because it symbolizes total honesty, total lack of insincerity. From then on they share a relationship based on abandonment of insincerity. The people in Flywheel seem to me to be doing about this throughout. Just living their parts about like most of us live our lives.
All except Max. He just stands there. Will James wrote about this. Some cowboys were hired to be extras in a cowboy movie, and they wondered why a real cowboy wasn't picked to play the cowboy hero part. It was explained that they bring in this actor because the real cowboy would have about the same expression on his face whether he were proposing to Greta Garbo, or feeding his horse. Well, Max has about that same expression on his face throughout.
It appears to me that the makers of Flywheel didn't do Hollywood acting because they basically didn't care what the folks in Hollywood might or might not do. Which is very tight with the message of the film.
The movie really suffers from two problems: 1) the starvation budget, which it pretty deftly overcomes, and 2) an incomplete knowledge of Christianity, altho this is realistic for the Bible Belt. The story of the man's repentance is about as good as it is possible to get. John the Baptist never preached a more effective, more penetrating sermon. So what if they pray a little strangely, at least they are praying.
You see a related thing in The Electric Horseman. Sonny asks Hallie what her real name is, and she admits it's Alice. What a dumpy, ordinary name. Yet, he calls her that, because it symbolizes total honesty, total lack of insincerity. From then on they share a relationship based on abandonment of insincerity. The people in Flywheel seem to me to be doing about this throughout. Just living their parts about like most of us live our lives.
All except Max. He just stands there. Will James wrote about this. Some cowboys were hired to be extras in a cowboy movie, and they wondered why a real cowboy wasn't picked to play the cowboy hero part. It was explained that they bring in this actor because the real cowboy would have about the same expression on his face whether he were proposing to Greta Garbo, or feeding his horse. Well, Max has about that same expression on his face throughout.
It appears to me that the makers of Flywheel didn't do Hollywood acting because they basically didn't care what the folks in Hollywood might or might not do. Which is very tight with the message of the film.
The movie really suffers from two problems: 1) the starvation budget, which it pretty deftly overcomes, and 2) an incomplete knowledge of Christianity, altho this is realistic for the Bible Belt. The story of the man's repentance is about as good as it is possible to get. John the Baptist never preached a more effective, more penetrating sermon. So what if they pray a little strangely, at least they are praying.