Passenger Side Takes An Eccentric Ride Around LA

It's fitting that Passenger Side, a film about a day-long road trip around Los Angeles and environs, had its premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival. It's also fitting that I saw it two hours after arriving in Los Angeles after being the passenger on a week-long road trip. But the LA of Passenger Side is not the LA of a tourist, unless that tourist were particularly fond of transsexual prostitutes, middle-of-nowhere gas stations, and low-rent porn shoots.

Beyond the seemingly disjointed scenes of LA's underbelly and a couple of plot twists I can't reveal, there is little plot to share. Former addict Tobey (Joel Bissonnette) calls on writer brother Michael (Adam Scott of Party Down) to drive him around Los Angeles supposedly for a series of job interviews, encountering a series of oddball characters along the way.

"The film has a very limited narrative," writer/director Matthew Bissonnette agreed. "A guy shows up, says he's doing one thing, it turns out he's doing another thing, which turns out to be a third thing. It's a 1-2-3 plot, so it's much more about the relationship between the actors."

That third thing made me wish theatres had rewind buttons, since it forces the audience to re-examine events, but the heart of the film is the poignant and unexpected revelations of character rather than plot. Michael is too much an observer of life, not enough a participant. Tobey, whose past is the subject of the road trip, has perhaps participated a little too much. The costs of their life choices, however, are not quite as predictable as the brothers or the audience might think.

The Bissonnette family is well-represented in Passenger Side – Montreal-bred Matt and Joel are brothers, and Matt's dog even has a role in the film. Canadian-born, LA-based brothers making a film about Canadian-born, LA-based brothers invites the most obvious of questions: are the characters modeled on the men?

In one scene, Tobey expresses his dismay at the fact that Michael's failed novel paints the protagonist's brother as a screw-up. Joel denies he had the same reaction to the script. "They're both characters which are perhaps hybrids of both of us and neither of us. And then once we started shooting, there was a whole lot of Adam Scott."

Article Author: Diane Kristine Wild

Diane runs the TV, Eh? website, a compilation of news about Canadian television. Follow her on Twitter @deekayw for more random thoughts.

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