“Northwood Pie” (2019) - Review
“Northwood Pie” is a scrappy underdog of a film that elevates a town’s communal pizza joint to an essential ‘rite of passage’.
Crispin (Todd Knaak) is stuck in the suspended animation - killing time with aimless Community College and hanging with his oldest friends. When the crushing realisation that a piece of paper and a lifetime of debt awaits, he gets a job at his local staple Northwood Pizza. Working in this suburban beacon with the misfits who call it home, Crispin attempts to set a new course.
Filmmakers Jay Salahi and Todd Knaak perform, direct and co-write this postcard to suburban purgatory, dog days and melted cheese. While their characters are “film bros” and measure one’s taste on whether they like Harry Potter - Salahi and Knaak wear their independent inspirations (namely Kevin Smith’s Clerks and Richard Linklater’s Slacker) on their sleeve.
Their home town of Irvine, California, and the central village exudes the feeling of a landlocked nation. Nothing of what outsiders assume about California is on show, except for the perfect movie-making weather. Salahi keeps an understated handheld quality to the close-up interactions; holding tight with shifts at Northwood Pizza, parties and charting the Irvine points of interest one hang at a time. The use of drone cameras helps to reinforce the design of the town. The precise topography recalls the quote from French philosopher Jean Baudrillard - “Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America that is Disneyland.
The movie charts a course between laconic, sardonic and apocryphal embellishments. When Salahi and Knaak stay in the Linklater-esque suburban malaise with the Smith-esque flourishes of unexpected sincerity, “Northwood Pie” absolutely delivers. The performances, from a whole mess of newcomers and non-actors, range from very good to serviceable, which is kind of miraculous in a film of this scale.
“Northwood Pie” does a terrific job of qualifying millennial malaise. In an interconnected digital world, how is it possible that the boundaries of a suburban hub continue to feel like the was at Folsom maximum security prison? That’s it the world is ruthless, demanding, impermanent, and success and failure are determined in the starkest terms. Create an app, be a genetic freak sports star, ascend to the heights of rock-stardom, be a worldwide influencer, act in superhero franchises; almost anything else is suffocated. This little slice of despair from the heart of American suburbia registers deeply here in Australia. Irvine’s picturesque, man-made, consumerist oasis is a honey trap, begging you to surrender.
Since I can remember, my family have travelled to a small coastal town south of Sydney called Gerringong. Right in the centre of this little village wedged between green rolling hills filled with livestock and the glorious stretch of the southern Pacific ocean is an enduring hole in the wall takeaway pizza shop. Every visit the latest crop of Gerringong’s teens serve the flood of outsiders who swarm on this small town in summer because there’s truly no place like it. I’ve been down there with increasing frequency of late and every visit, there’s at least one trip for a delicious pizza. In the last few trips, I’ve paid attention to every single employee. Who are the elders (relatively), who are rookie’s, who are there for a summer of settling in, living for the ongoing immediate gratification and familiarity?
Salahi and Knaak are bound by a swathe of enormously useful and, at best, affecting tropes that occupy the genre. For example, Crispin meets Sierra (Annika Foster), a kindred spirit readying for an escape. It’s a blooming connection that emboldens a move and takes hold. There’s almost an expectation of home town coming of age movies that there’s a love interest, meet-cute, and perhaps heartbreak. Still, the specificity of the telling and using the Pizza shop as a test site for life readiness that sings.
If there’s a criticism to be levelled at “Northwood Pie” - apart from the frustrating fact that it’s “Pie” instead of the eponymous “Pizza” - it’s the integration of the attention-grabbing oddballs and weirdos that populate the film. They are just one toe dipped into Zucker Brothers (The Naked Gun, Airplane) territory that almost derails the tone of the movie.
