Tribeca Films Up Close:
Farewell Bender and Fifty Pills
By Sara Brady

I suppose it's the nature of film festivals that you see some odd combinations of films-East Broadway and Civic Duty in the space of four hours comes to mind as two great tastes that don't really taste great together. But Farewell Bender and Fifty Pills are kind of like peanut butter and bananas: they pair up in a weirdly delicious, complementary sort of way.

Both are of that weary genre we call coming-of-age, in which characters cursed with an overabundance of self-awareness discover what's been holding them back from becoming well-rounded, only slightly dysfunctional members of society. For the almost-post-college guys in Farewell Bender, it's the sudden death of a friend that jerks them into adulthood; for Fifty Pills's nineteen-year-old Darren, it's the sudden and agonizing disappearance of his financial aid. Both dig into the uncertainty of youth, how eighteen-going-on-nineteen can look like unimaginable freedom or like a death sentence, and often like both in the same day.

In Farewell Bender, three high school friends reunite in their small northern California town for a funeral. Mitch (Kip Pardue) has gone away to college; Stan (Eddie Kaye Thomas) got a municipal job after graduating and seems in permanent stasis; and Dixon (Josh Cooke) has a bourbon I.V. and no visible means of financial support. The fourth, Bender, accidentally drowned jumping into a river. And if you think it's coincidental that the film is set in 1996, when grunge and the dot-com boom were about to cause a cultural earthquake, this might just be the first movie you've ever seen.

Writer Jeremiah Lowder and Oates have the profane rhythm of young men's conversation down, which makes the scenes where the three are sitting around shooting bull the most realistic and meaningful. They don't quite have a handle on the way women the same age talk or interact with guys, which isn't particularly rare or surprising. The emotional ambition of the film is such that it really, really wants to be The Big Chill for the generation that believed in Kurt Cobain rather than Jimi Hendrix. It isn't, but the three leads all turn in engrossing and relatable performances. Cooke, especially, who's suffered two failed sitcoms on NBC, stands out as the friend no one expects to live past 30.

At the center of Fifty Pills, Lou Taylor Pucci gives an appealingly confident performance as a college freshman selling Ecstasy to pay his tuition after his roommate's hijinks get his financial aid yanked. Pucci's Darren runs all over lower Manhattan and some of Long Island selling the tabs, all the while attempting to maintain some sort of equilibrium so that the gorgeous girl in his dorm (Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars, as the film's quiet moral heart) will continue giving him the time of day.

As Darren's debauched roommate, Nip/Tuck's John Hensley turns in the most appealingly sinful performance since Ray Walston in Damn Yankees. The havoc he wreaks is mostly hilarious in nature, and while Matthew Perniciaro's script is, to put it mildly, all over the place, the disparate narrative threads all weave together in the end. As an added bonus, Crash's Michael Pena, Eddie Kaye Thomas, and Monica Keena all turn in some of the funniest work they've ever done.

Fifty Pills looks like it was made for the soundtrack budget of Farewell Bender, but when it winds up it's a more satisfying experience. Taken together, the two films represent the populist streak running through this Tribeca festival (witness: Poseidon, Mission: Impossible III). They might not have much to offer anyone who wasn't fetal during the Carter years, but both represent a generation of American filmmakers that's just making itself heard.