Able Edwards (2004)

• Written and directed by Graham Robertson
• Starring
  • Scott Kelly Galbreath
  • Keri Bruno
  • David Ury
  • Steve Beaumont Jones
  • Michael Shamus Wiles
• Produced by Scott Baily and Graham Robertson
• Executive produced by Jay Hart, David Mazer and Steven Soderbergh

The back of the Able Edwards DVD box tells two stories: the one it means to present, and the one present between the lines. It proudly proclaims that it holds “the Guinness World Record for first feature film shot entirely without sets against a green screen beating out such big budgeted films as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Immortel (ad vitam).” All of that sounds impressive, until one starts to wonder why such a groundbreaking film (with Steven Soderbergh listed as an executive producer, to boot) then took three years to get any DVD distribution, and that with a very minor distributor like the now-defunct Heretic Films.

If you wanted to summarize this movie in as few words as possible, you’d call it “Citizen Kane retold with a clone sprung from Walt Disney’s cryogenically stored head,” but using as few words as possible isn’t how we do things around these parts, so let’s look at it in excruciating detail.

A man and his panda. And no, that isn’t a euphemism.

As summed up for us in helpful newsreel footage, Able Edwards (Scott Kelly Galbreath) was a visionary moviemaker and all-around entertainer who died in a helicopter accident in 1960. (Wait — were newsreels still around in 1960?) After serving in World War I, he turned to Hollywood and staked his fortune on cartoon properties, including the adorable Perry the Panda. He parlayed that success into a huge movie studio, which then opened a “Fantastic Wonderland” theme park in California, with one on track to open soon in Florida at the time of his death.

So far, so good. Now: flash-forward to the “near future,” after a bio-accident has killed 90% of Earth’s population, and the remainder have moved to a “Civilization Pod” in orbit. The Able Edwards Corporation is still around, although its main business now has morphed to the design and production of androids. Business has kind of plateaued, so Chairman Warren Hastings (Brian Carpenter) hits on a novel if far-sighted means of reenergizing the company: cloning Able Edwards, waiting twenty-five years, and letting the clone take over the company. (At least this is one movie in which the realities of clone growth are acknowledged, as opposed to those which treat “cloning” as a method of instant human replication. Still, I can’t see shareholders willingly putting their votes into a plan to turn this stagnant company around — in only two and a half decades!)

“Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Suffering leads to a benefit concert headed by Bono.”

The clone, referred to as “Able Edwards Beta,” is brought up by Hastings and his wife, with a cyborg best friend and a clear vision of what is expected from him at maturity. And so, a week after his twenty-fifth birthday, he takes the reins from skeptical chairman Franklin Wallace (David Ury) and declares that android production will be cut in half, and the empty facilities will be repurposed — as a new Fantastical Wonderland, complete with rides and cloned extinct animals! The most fantastical thing about this new Wonderland is that, with the limited space resources one would expect on a near future space habitat, one can build a theme park with a HUGE expanse of empty air above and around it. Space may be infinite, but space stations are definitely not.

The Fantastical Wonderland is a huge success for a populace searching for something “real” after a lifetime of simulated entertainment. But we know that something is going to go wrong, because everything we’ve seen has been couched in the framing device of a probate hearing. And what a hearing! In a public gallery reminiscent of the Senate of the Star Wars prequels (again with the open space!), the judge (Michael Shamus Wiles) hears testimony from the clone’s designated “best friend”/cyborg watchdog Gower (Steve Beaumont Jones), former chairman Wallace, and the clone’s widow and co-designer of the theme parks Rosemary (Keri Bruno). And the hearing is to determine… what, exactly? Well, apparently there’s a dispute between the Able Edwards Corporation and Rosemary as to the clone’s estate, but none of the testimony seems directed toward resolving that dispute. Especially when (spoiler!) the court rules that the clone is the “creative property” of the AEC, about which absolutely none of the testimony is concerned. And you’d think that the legal personhood of a clone would have been hammered out prior to this time — say, when the clone was given the fiduciary responsibility as Chairman of the corporation, or when he married and fathered a child (is his son also company property as a “derivative work”? Does the “one drop” rule apply?), or maybe when he mounted an almost-successful race for the Senate. You’d have to think there was some law against chattel holding elected office, wouldn’t you?

Holy frickin’ airspace, Batman!

While there is a theme here which keeps sticking its head above the waterline, that of the clone trying both to live up to the legacy of the original Able Edwards and yet be his own person, and there are repeated echoes of the question, “What is real?”, the movie lacks a single driving narrative thrust. That omission is made obvious by its overt homages to the structure of Citizen Kane; what’s missing is a “Rosebud” — a single question which prompts and gives purpose to the layered flashbacks. And because there isn’t an enigma which drives the biography-like narrative to an “aha!” moment, it’s all to easy to be distracted by things like the boneheadedness of the AEC execs who completely ignore the business model that gave the company success in the first place.

As with most indie films, acting quality is varied. Galbreath as Able Edwards (both versions) acquits himself well as both the larger-than-life figure and the man trying to fill those shoes. (Galbreath is aided by some effective age makeup that helps him play the role across a timeframe similar to that in Citizen Kane.) On the opposite end, you’ve got Wiles as the probate judge (ironically, the cast member with the most extensive filmography) who seems to be of the “when in doubt, act needlessly belligerent” school of acting. And unfortunately, because he’s part of the framing device, we can never get away from him for more than a few minutes.

“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen! And for my next trick, I will swallow my own head!”

Props, of course, to the attempt to green screen an entire film, something which literally had never been done before. That doesn’t mean that the end result is as effective as hoped. The matte work is haphazard; figures either have a halo around them or, in what was probably a measure to eliminate this halo, the foreground figures are actually eaten away a bit around the edges. Everywhere a neck extends above a collar, it’s suddenly a quarter-inch thinner. Rather than being a trompe l’oeil, it’s a distraction that makes you wish for good ol’-fashioned rear-screen projection. Compare it with Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), which the DVD cover practically begs us to do: In Sky Captain, visuals are chosen for the striking final effect, giving us an image that’s almost impossible to do practically. In Able Edwards, principle photography seems like it was almost always designed for the simplest possible compositing, which means stationary cameras aimed at standing people; it comes off like an episode of The Starlost (1973). (There’s more than one scene of a group of people “walking” against a moving background in which they’re obviously shuffling their feet in place; the unintentional hilarity of the result undoes any suspension of disbelief which the movie might generate in other places.)

A tribute to a man and, yes, his panda.

The value of Able Edwards is as a proof of concept to other filmmakers, documenting an early attempt at the kind of virtual image creation which could become a standard tool in the indie film repertoire in the near future. No experiment ever fails if it results in collected data, so by that standard Able Edwards is a success. But ambitious as it is, the visual effects aren’t quite good enough to rise above the not-quite-gelled script, and the script isn’t quite good enough to rise above the distracting effects.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 2 (plus “a lot”)

• breasts: 0
• explosions: 4
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Michael Shamus Wiles (the probate judge) played “Captain Bosaal” in the Voyager episode “The Void”