Road to Perth (Peter, 2021)
When I was in graduate school (yea, many years ago), I once earned an “A” on a paper from a respected mentor who was hardly a pushover. When I tried to submit the same paper for publication, I received a somewhat scathing rejection letter. So I took the paper back to the professor and asked what else I needed to do to it. He offered some perfunctory suggestions but summed up the issue by saying, “Well, you know, there’s a difference between a graduate-level exercise and a professional paper.”
Although my professor of yesteryear did not articulate that difference, I’ve come to see it over the years like this: the purpose of a graduate paper is to prove that you can write a paper; the purpose of a professional paper is to write a paper. So it is with movies.
That’s not to suggest that director Chad Peter or anyone involved with Road to Perth is a student. Far from it. Peter has a respectable resume of shorts and second-unit work that should make the competent look of the film no surprise. But Peter admits in the Press Kit for the film that is making was a bit of an academic exercise:
“Of utmost concern to us was this: can we accomplish this production, and can we make it seamlessly, as if it appeared to have a budget, and have a crew, even if it didn’t? I’d experimented with a moderately successful unscripted road trip short film before, but never a feature length project…”
The word “experimented” is telling here, as it appears to indicate that the purpose of the exercise has more to do with the artist learning his craft than whether or not the audience is entertained. He made the movie to see if he could.
The result is largely what you might expect. Road to Perth looks and feels like a bigger-budget movie without a script (or that has script problems). If you aren’t ever sure where it is going (other than to Perth), well, there’s a reason for that….
The story, such as it is, revolves around Alex (Tommy O’Brien). He has just proposed marriage and been turned down, so he decides to take a trip to Australia on his own. While there he meets Ronnie (Hannah Lehman) who has her own reasons for traveling some of the same roads as Alex.
The problems here are ones of conception rather than execution. Typically when we suspect (or are told) that actors improvised extensively during a production it is because whoever was in charge of it realized something was missing or not working and hoped the talent and instincts of the performer could make up for the lack of preparation. It rarely does. That doesn’t mean that O’Brien or Lehman or even Peter the director are bad at what they do, just that they aren’t given much to work with
It sounds as though what Chad Peter learned from this experiment is that he could make a competent movie under duress. That would matter to me if, say, I were a producer looking for someone with skills to make an actual movie. But I’m not; I’m a film viewer.
What I learned from this experiment is that films with scripts and some pre-production are usually tighter and more interesting than films where everyone (even talented people) just wing it.
