Broken

Directed by Alan White Starring Heather Graham and Jeremy Sisto
Reviewed by Martin Tsai
A cautionary tale about an aspiring entertainer who arrives in Hollywood only to land on the proverbial boulevard of broken dreams sounds all too familiar in this celebrity-obsessed culture. With someone like David Lynch at the helm it might turn into a spellbinding phantasmagoria like Mulholland Dr. Otherwise, it’s a well-worn cliché.
In Broken, Heather Graham plays a failed chanteuse not so subtly named Hope, who’s of course waiting tables in some seedy diner — which seems sadly appropriate considering how far Graham has fallen since her Felicity Shagwell days. As if Hope weren’t downtrodden enough, she has to juggle an onslaught of increasingly demanding customers: two losers trying to score women and drugs, a group of partiers making a stop before an orgy, a Hollywood madam and her protégée, an obnoxious movie producer and his writer/director, an arrogant agent and some no-talent band he’s trying to sign, and finally, Hope’s codependent crackhead ex-boyfriend, Will (Jeremy Sisto).
Drew Pillsbury’s screenplay jumps temporally between Hope’s dreadful nightshift and her drug-addled relationship with Will, and there are no discernable parallels between the two narratives. The non-linear storytelling also doesn’t make the unsubstantial plot any more interesting. The flashbacks only serve to reveal the couple’s addictions and rope in some gratuitous sex scenes, doing nothing to account for Will’s intense obsession with Hope and her inexplicable tolerance of him. Graham is extremely photogenic, but it isn’t enough to make us care about whether Hope’s plight is just one big hallucination with a cop-out ending. If anything, one wonders whether Graham will wake up from her own nightmarish career.
Broken also makes a compelling case for independent films to stop employing amateurish guitar scores. It seems as though many indie features, be they thrillers or romantic comedies, have similar scores that inappropriately accompany them as if they were all The Spitfire Grill. Perhaps its production budget all went toward casting recognizable stars; the soundtrack in Broken consists solely of songs from the San Francisco-based band the Brian Jonestown Massacre and composer Jeehun Hwang’s score, which seems to alternate between just a couple of chords. As Hwang slowly strums away any tension left in the film, one can’t help but wonder if it would be better off as a silent film.
© Copyright 2007 Martin Tsai. All rights reserved.