When Malcolm (Andy English) goes to the airport terminal to greet his girlfriend with a bouquet of pink roses by way of an apology, he has no idea that he’ll run into someone who will make him completely reexamine his relationship and his life.
As he waits in an airport bar, trying to read a paper to pass the time, he is consistently pestered by a beautiful blonde named Jordan (Leah Loftin). She seems unable to leave him peace, seemingly working out her own internal struggles about the man she’s waiting to meet by taking them out on Malcolm. Since he’s not going to be able to read his paper without her continual comments on everything from ‘Little House on the Prairie’ reruns to the color of his roses, he finally sets the paper aside and actually engages her in some dialogue. As he does so, he finds that he reveals more about himself and the sad state of affairs in his relationship than he intends.
By the time the red-eye flight that’s to bring their respective significant others arrives, Malcolm has had his life flipped on end and is left with a diabolical choice: stay with a woman that emasculates and exhausts him or leave with Jordan to see if life can truly be different with someone who says she’ll accept him, despite his foibles and desires.
The content of this film was, in the end, very winning, but it took quite a while to get there. At first, Jordan’s behavior is so ludicrous and strange that the audience feels embarrassed on her behalf. And the character of Malcolm responds in ways that seem very unnatural. His behavior implies that he’s got no backbone whatsoever when it comes to dealing with women, which belies a later statement that he’s like rock group, “Led Zeppelin.”
It’s almost like we’re starting out with the ‘Nikki Phone Call’ from Swingers, arguably the most painful part of Jon Favreau’s brilliantly written Indie film. (For those of you unfamiliar with Swingers, the scene mentioned is a phone call in which Favreau’s Mike repeatedly calls a woman he’s just met and attempts to leave a simple message, but, through subsequent phone fumbles, ends up spilling his guts about his former lost love and his own insecurities on the answering machine in the process.) In Swingers, this works because we have time to get to know the character of Mike before we launch into this painful (yet necessary) scene. Due to the length of this film, we have no such build up time with Jordan, so we’re immediately left squirming in our seats with no real reason to find out why she’s acting this way, other than simple morbid curiosity. A way to have improved this might have been to shoot an introductory scene with Jordan talking to the bartender, perhaps talking about her own issues and helping us to like her a little more before she begins harassing Malcolm.
By the middle of the piece, however, they reach a place of actual communication at which point both actors really do an amazing job of shining in their respective roles. You really want to know what motivates them and what is causing them to be in this airport waiting for people who so clearly don’t fulfill their needs.
