Jordan Rennick | Cold Feet / 2016

readiness is all

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tim Blane (screenplay), Jordan Rennick (director) Cold Feet / 2016 [6 minutes]

 

In Jordan Rennick’s Cold Feet, everything and everyone is waiting in the backyard, the table settings all laid out, the guests in their chairs. But Richie (Rob Silverman), the groom, is missing, and his best friend Mike (Tim Blane) is on the search for him. He finds him sitting in the kitchen.

     “I don’t deserve to get married,” Richie insists.

      Richie feels like a “fucking child,” admitting that he always commits to things before he truly feels he’s ready.

       Mike asks him, however, to look at himself now: he has a steady job, he has an apartment with a parking space. “You helped me get sober, that’s fucking grown up.”

       The conversation continues, Richie tossing out more and more doubts, Mike attempting to answer them, one by one. Unfortunately, the dialogue isn’t that clever.

        But eventually Mike gets around to insisting that Richie trust him. He’s ready for marriage. “When did I ever ask you to do something that turned out badly?”

        “In 2010 I spent a weekend in jail in a rooster costume—in Tijuana!”

        Eventually Mike convinces him that it was he who was the asshole, before he got sober. And that even back then Richie allowed himself to make an adult decision, and if he hadn’t he’d have never found the love of his life. “You’ve learned more about yourself and who you are in the last two years than most people do in their entire lives.”

        And besides, he’s lucky, he gets to marry his best friend—that friend obviously being Mike himself.  

        Richie admits his love of his “best friend,” soon to be husband.

        Mike: “What do you say we go get hitched.”

 

Los Angeles, August 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).