“West Michigan” (2021) Review
“West Michigan” is a quiet tale of giving up and second chances. Writer/director and star Riley Warmoth and Chloe Ray Warmoth double as on and offscreen siblings - Charlie and Hannah; who are left to their own devices while their parents have gone out of town to visit their terminally ill grandfather.
Charlie is home from a college break, and Hannah is in the last high school holiday before life begins. The curtain draws on Hannah’s childhood, and death draws closer for their grandfather, and the siblings decide on a road trip to be by his side.
Riley Warmouth’s screenplay creates a strange tension. The knee jerk reaction is to reject the premise. The movie’s stakes, the overwhelmingly extreme reaction may find you feeling that the events are pure contrivance and stylistically muted melodrama. What has caused the film to dwell in my thoughts is those memories of extremity. Those feelings in your youth that for someone in their thirties are like half-remembered, abstract dreams- like a movie you only think you’ve seen but can’t reconcile the story. Warmouth’s intent, perhaps, is to stage a kind of fake it until you become it a crisis, a forgery of great suffering and despair to instigate the impulse to live. Once you’re an adult, it’s easy to forget the psychological, social, emotional turbulence of adolescence.
Chloe Warmouth’s Hannah doesn’t outwardly convey the rudderless despair that plagues her. Years of predefined routine, education, family structures are crashing down like dominos, and she starts to play the roles that fit her mindset at the moment. Hannah thinks she wants to end things; Hannah believes she’s a Jack Kerouac beatnik when she befriends a trio of explorers (including Justin Mane, Sydney Agudong) on the road for a carefree domestic backpacking summer. In some respects, the surprise of such a destructive impulse goes against the intent. Riley Warmouth’s Charlie is the bumpers on the lanes, a little further ahead in the game and keeping Hannah out of the gutter.
Throughout “West of Michigan”, director Riley Warmouth cleverly frames small-town West Michigan with a sleight of hand. The whole region deceives you with the thought that you’re being dropped into an elaborate miniature. Only when compositions get closer to the tapestry of what one assumes are formative landmarks that you realise is a real place and genuine people here. It’s in this quaint setting that the mounting pressure of the vastness of the world starts to suffocate. Riley Warmouth demonstrates sensory vision in orchestrating characters soaking in life-affirming cliffside water-views, experiencing the joy of frolicking in the lake, and the isolation and illumination under street lights.
“West of Michigan” searches for meaning in the detours, the guesses and the errors after the trials. It’s a meandering, personal tale that echoes the universal question at the end of high school; what happens now? What’s refreshing is that despite the growing clouds of uncertainty, it still positively beams, “I’m not sure, but we’ll figure it out together.”
