Other People's Children is one of those faux-philosophical dramas
that aims to be profound but has no way to go about it. The plight of the
homeless and the loneliness that comes with creative freedom are cheap fodder for
what amounts to "a very special episode of One Tree Hill", where
really pretty, ridiculously privileged people dabble with the less fortunate
for a while so they can pretend to not be shallow. But the water is only ankle
high in Liz Heinlin's film that features the best-looking homeless
people this side of Zoolander.
Where's Mugatu when you need him?
Superficial and riddled with lazy clichés
of indie dramas you learned to avoid years ago, Other People's Children begins with Sam (Diane
Marshall-Green), a wannabe documentary filmmaker who can't even win over the
respect of her father (Scott Patterson), a prominent artist. When he
unexpectedly dies, she enters a period of aimlessness that sees her banging
guys in club bathrooms, drinking, and the whole nine. That is until she returns
home to Los Angeles and encounters P.K. (Chad Michael Murray), a perfectly-hunky
and Yoda-esque homeless dude who happens to frequent Starbucks bathrooms.
There isn't a shred of authenticity in the
screenplay by Adrien Harris, offering instead stilted dialogue that sounds like
it was taken from a cheap romance novel sold at the grocery store checkout line...
"I'm interested. I want to get to
know you."
"Well, maybe you shouldn't be."
Awww, isn't he just so mysterious? Well,
no, he isn't. P.K.'s not interesting enough to be enigmatic, and resembles what
someone who has never seen a homeless person thinks he would look like. His
beard is the kind of perfectly trimmed scruff that comes with really lousy
attention to detail. Sam should have “oblivious” tattooed on her forehead. She
comes up with the brilliant idea to make a documentary about homeless people,
but all they really do is sit around in circles playing guitar and smoking weed
out of bongs, broken up by the occasional frolic in an empty warehouse while
bad garage music plays.
Of course there's a romance that brews,
and Sam is just so progressive that she's willing to date a homeless guy even
though her pretentious friends think he's icky.
"You could have any other guy",
he says.
"I don't want to be with any other
guys", she replies.
And that's the end of the discussion.
Guess it's really not that big of a deal? But that's the surface view the film
takes on everything. Fortunately, nobody is likely to view Other People's Children at all, and if you do, make sure the
money spent on the ticket belongs to other people.
Rating: 1 out of 5
