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When hitmen Kirby (Doug Lamoreux) and Owen (Ron Wells) check into a hotel for their next assignment, they aren’t expecting anything out of the ordinary. While waiting for their next mark to show up, they spend their days drinking coffee in a small restaurant, and their nights drinking booze and dialing 1-900 numbers. But one day Kirby encounters a very different kind of person – Ruby (Debra M. Stanley.)
Ruby is a single mother with a disabled daughter and an elderly father to take care of. She works as an AIDS counselor, and spends her spare time passing out flyers and trying to talk to people about her faith in God. When she first confronts Kirby, he is beyond annoyed with her repetition of the phrase “Jesus loves you,” but in time he grows attached to Ruby and her unwavering faith. But this friendship soon throws a monkey wrench into Kirby’s and Owen’s job, and puts Ruby and her family in danger.
Content
There are some really interesting elements to this film. Firstly, it opens with shots of flowing water, and audio of a Latin litany to the saints, which I really liked. And later on, after Kirby has been continuously hounded by Ruby, there is a really great montage where he stumbles down the street, lost in thought. He encounters an old nun who used to be his teacher in grade school, and she follows after him until he ditches her in a liquor store. But every person he encounters looks at him and says, “Trust Jesus.” Kirby’s character almost reminds me of the character of Pinky in Graham Greene’s novel Brighton Rock; the cradle Catholic gangster haunted by his past. Despite all the evil he does, he is hounded by his upbringing, as the phrase “Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi, Miserere nobis,” (“Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us”) continually runs through his head. Kirby seems to be the same kind of person, and encountering Ruby makes him confront all of these feelings. It also strikes me that Ruby is kind of like the angel on Kirby’s shoulder, and his partner Owen is like the devil character. Incidentally, I was very impressed with Debra M. Stanley as Ruby; she did a very good job, this is especially notable because she is not an actor.
However, there are a few things that I think could perhaps be tweaked a bit. First of all, it’s rather hard to tell what Kirby and Owen are doing for the first part of the film, though it is apparent that they are probably up to no good. It would be nice if this was made clearer to the audience at the outset, and this could be as simple as including a shot of either one of them putting on or picking up a gun. Also, there are a few times in which the story drags on a bit, and could stand to be tightened up a little.
Finally, I didn’t quite understand the ending. There was a really nice montage at the end that I really liked, then there were two shots included from the very beginning of the film that didn’t seem to fit in with this final montage. It almost seemed to imply that the entire film was just a dream, but if that was the case there should be some clearer indication of it, such as including more and/or slightly different shots.
Visual Look
The visual look of this film has a very dreamlike quality to it. A lot of the scenes were a washed out, with very low color saturation. The good thing is that the shots all match each other quite well, and I really liked the low saturation. But there are several instances where the washout is too extreme. For instance, the majority of the film is spent inside the restaurant, with the main characters sitting at a counter, behind which is a large glass window. And because the restaurant is so small, the majority of shots that include these characters have this window behind them, thus leading to greater washout when the footage was corrected for the backlighting. As this window is so big, it may have been a good idea to find a different location to shoot in altogether, just to avoid this washout problem. In addition, it might have been beneficial to shoot the outdoor scenes with a neutral density (ND) filter to avoid such extreme washout.
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