Kicking off the Sundance Film Festival Dramatic Competition this year is Omaha, an increasingly bleak road trip with a recently widowed father, his two kids and their dog. Set against the 2008 financial crisis, Omaha begins with a dad (John Magaro) facing foreclosure on his house after losing what appears to be everything professionally as well as the tragic death of his wife and mother to their two kids, Ella (Molly Belle Wright) and Charlie (Wyatt Solis).
As the film begins, he faces this latest crisis and gathers up the kids and their pet dog to jump into the increasingly unreliable family car, which usually only starts and gets going as Ella runs alongside and helps push it forward. And so they are off on an unspecified journey across the American Southwest with stops along the way that begin to explain — however subtly — this dad’s deep money problems. There’s a stop at a convenience store where he doesn’t have enough money to buy the few things he takes to the register, and more devastating is a stop at the SPCA where, in front of his hysterical daughter, he drops off their dog for adoption, unable to take care of him anymore. This is particularly disturbing as he has to comfort Ella, who doesn’t understand what is happening to their family.
Debuting feature director Cole Webley and screenwriter Robert Machoian lay this trip out as one more disturbing sequence after another is played out on the morose face of Magaro (so great recently in September 5), who is clearly keeping the truth from them — and us — of what this journey is actually all about. They continue along through the picaresque locales of a fading American landscape where a financial market crash has left so many with nothing and, in the case of this (unnamed) father, a desperate sense that he can no longer be the provider he once was. Webley does not fill in much detail of what actually got this man and his family to this place in life. At best it is subtly suggested, leaving the audience to fill in the blanks, and for that I admired the stripped-down storytelling here in a tight 83 minutes.
To say more plotwise would be to ruin the journey for the viewer as the ultimate destination takes on real-life consequences, and at least for this audience member, provides quite a jolt.
Magaro, looking uncannily like a young Dustin Hoffman, is terrific in this role, and we have such empathy for him — a man for whom dire circumstances are forcing him to find a way, any way, to keep his family together. The kids are perfectly cast as well, particularly Wright (most recently the lead in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever), who is called upon for the film’s most blatantly emotional scenes. Solis as the younger brother also is very fine here, as is Talia Balsam, who plays Nurse Edie in a wrenching key scene later in the film. Cinematography by Paul Meyers is excellent in capturing a very ordinary roadside America,
Producers are John Foss, Scott James and Preston Lee.
Title: Omaha
Festival: Sundance (Dramatic Competition)
Director: Cole Webley
Screenwriter: Robert Machoian
Cast: John Magaro, Molly Belle Wright, Wyatt Solis, Talia Balsam
Sales Agent: UTA Independent Film Group
Running Time: 1 hr 23 mins