Michael R. Barnard | Hot Car / 2015

swallowing down your sorrows at ihop

by Douglas Messerli

Michael R. Barnard (screenwriter and director) Hot Car / 2015 [17 minutes]

 

There are no cars, alas, in Michael R. Barnard’s rather polemic argument between youth and old age. The situation is one that might have been truly potent if the director had no intentionally been determined to make simple such a profound complex encounter.

     Both man and boy in this work are at the verge of self-destruction, the young Jesse (Julian Perez) having been hired for the night by the elderly Hal (Barnard), who has never before “had” a gay encounter.

     They have reached what appear to be their endgames, the hooker from age 16, when he finally left his unloving father—who since his son was 14 has been unable to forgive his admission of homosexuality—after years of street abuse has just learned that he is HIV-positive. The money he is about to receive from his encounter with Hal that evening will pay for a gun with which he hopes to shoot himself in the head. “But they treat it now, it’s okay.” Not evidently enough for the young man who sees no hope for his income as a male prostitute.

      Suddenly the man who wants what even Jesse describes as “a last fling before he checks out” —after which he plans to take what Hal describes as a “Heath Ledger cocktail”*—becomes a sympathetic father figure as he is forced to admit truly greater failures as a human being than the young 18-year-old (the age required, of course, by all official film boards today). What Hal did to his one and ½-year old son Travis was leave him in hot auto one morning as he went in for hours of work before remembering that he had taken his son with him. The “hot car” is an incident in his distant past which resulted in a prison sentence and the understandable loss of his wife, his friends, and any possibility of continuing on with a normal life.

      The two individuals, man and boy, recognize themselves as a truly “pathetic pair,” and spend the night, not in bed together, but sleeping on a couch and a chair with bedspreads offered up by the sensitive and despairing elder.

      Unfortunately, this drama is played out in a dialogic encounter that allows us no true entry into the real psychological emotions of either of the individuals. And the dilemmas of Jessie, in particularly, are relegated to simple misperceptions of a young man by the older father-like figure who would give anything to have his son, who he repeats would now be about Jesse’s age, back.

      Jesse remembers the times before his father discovered his homosexuality when they used to share pancake breakfasts together at IHOP. And, of course, what Hal has to offer him the next morning is a return to that magically healing past. The banality of the film crashes down upon any emotional healing that director Baarnard might ever have imagined. Too bad breakfasts at IHOP might not truly resolve years of abuse of a young boy and years of guilt by an older father who forgot that his son even existed. But then, I never imaged that a picture of Norman Rockwell’s Thanksgiving dinner, “Freedom from Want,” might ever help me to resolve my horrific memories of family celebrations. What I wanted was not to be found on that festive table.

      There are a lot of ways these two lost souls might have found a way to come together and help reaffirm each other’s life, but IHOP for breakfast doesn’t seem to me to be the proper solution, even if the unfortunate Jesse imagines it was the highlight of his former life. After buttermilk pancakes with a maple, blueberry, and cherry syrup high, even I might forget the boy who I came with. Besides, Hal has asked the kid to pay, since he’s given over all his money to him for the sex for which they never consummated.

      If I were Jesse, I’d leave the old fart behind and scurry myself off to the nearest clinic as soon as I’d put a few bites of buttermilk pancakes into my tummy. Let the old man incinerate in his dreadful memories of child neglect. I’ve been known, in my forgetful professor’s syndrome to even have left cars behind, walking home after I drove to work, but never have I left a human being within them.

 

*Actor Heath Ledger, suffering from insomnia was diagnosed as having died "as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine.”

 

Los Angeles, November 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).