December 4, 2002

Personal Velocity explores a trio of women as they struggle with change.
By Dennis Harvey

THE STORIES IN Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity hurtle along at the speed of thought, despite the occasional abrupt backtracking and pauses spent examining details. The half-hour tales have an omniscient narrator (The Sopranos' John Ventimiglia) who's alternately cool, detached, sarcastic, and judgmental – all with a very literary, authorial tone.

Yet despite these devices and mediators (or maybe because they all combine into something oddly like spontaneity), we enter the three central female characters from the inside out – examining the world from their temporarily less-than-clear gaze, as they grope toward some inconclusive (but improving) insight, a process that seems both messily organic and razor-sharp. Personal Velocity is a series of small surprises that taken together are exhilarating. Although the trio is connected by a background newscast that suggests simultaneous action, the portraits involve protagonists from New York state who'd likely never meet – and if they did, they'd hardly be comfortable around one another.

Delia (Kyra Sedgwick) is a Catskills wife and mother whose embattled domesticity is horribly clear the moment she opens her mouth. Her call that dinner is ready betrays a kind of lowercase fatalism, as if she's certain her family will find a way to betray her between the front door and the table. Moments later she sighs over a slight by her husband, Kurt (David Warshofsky), and we see him digest her reaction, simmering silently. Menace is in the air until you're almost sure the moment has passed; then his arm rockets out to knock her off the dining room chair, face first.

Retreating from this shock, the narrator walks us through scenes from Delia's past – a history that's taught her people only give when they want to get something – and it's no mystery what that is in her case. The soundtrack heckles her with an '80s country tune, "Baby's Got Her Blue Jeans On." Delia has learned that she is first and foremost a fine piece of ass. She wields this fact like currency, seizing the title "school slut" like a Roller Derby queen clutching (and swinging) a trophy.

Delia expects the worst from men. But she loves her three children and has stayed with Kurt these 10-odd years because there are no obvious alternatives – until, back in the present, the latest spousal beating breaks her inertia. While Kurt is passed out on the couch, she packs the kids in the wagon and takes off.

Long toughened by the belief that no one's going to help her, Delia feels dizzy when she's put in situations – first at a women's shelter, then at the house of a long-forgotten "friend" – where she must accept others' good intentions. She summons her powers at a chaotic moment that closes her section of the film with a discomfiting, just-right sting of irony.

In the sly, very funny "Greta," Parker Posey plays a Harvard law school dropout turned New York cookbook editor. Her marriage to the nicest man on the planet (Tim Guinee) provides shelter from the knowledge that she's a failure by the only standard that ever mattered – that of her overbearing liberal icon-lawyer father, Avram (Ron Liebman).

One day, out of the blue, she lands a job editing the hot young novelist of the moment (Joel de la Fuente), a windfall that puts her hitherto listless career on a whole different track. Dad, of course, is the first to reward her newfound prestige, and to her excitement and horror, Greta finds she's more her father's daughter than she'd imagined. As if waking from a long slumber, she finds herself "rancid with ambition," no longer needing or desiring her sweet, adoring husband.

Finally, the somber (and warm) "Paula" has Fairuza Balk playing another discontented, vaguely goth-looking chick. This one's on the run from an unexpected pregnancy, a concerned boyfriend, and a night of partying in Brooklyn that ended with something truly awful. Rattled, she drives aimlessly upstate, giving a ride to a drenched adolescent hitcher (Lou Taylor Pucci) who seems to be in much worse straits. When she discovers he's badly hurt, her maternal instincts emerge. Nevertheless, the jarring events have triggered something new in her.

Miller is the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller (perhaps the imposing Avram is based on him) and the wife of Daniel Day-Lewis. She had an unremarkable, brief acting career before writing and directing 1995's Angela, which (like Personal Velocity) won prizes at the Sundance Film Festival. Angela was released and then disappeared immediately (although it was finally released on video and DVD last month). Few people who saw it knew how to react; its tale of two little girls creating their own dangerous mythology to make sense of a disastrous home life was odd and upsetting.