By George & Josh Bate
Make no mistake about it – Ponderosa is a weird movie. Yes, it’s funny and touching and mysterious, but it’s bizarre. And yet for as experimental and strange as it is, filmmaker Rob Rice’s film has something profoundly relevant and prescient to say and will linger in the minds of viewers long after the credits roll.
Making its world premiere at this year’s Tribeca Festival, Ponderosa follows Zeke (Jack Dylan Grazer), a young man who enjoys a quiet suburban life with his mother, Sandra (Alexis Bledel). As the buffet where Sandra works nears closure, wealthy regular George (Bill Camp) hires Zeke to work on a local construction project, the first step in his plan to create a father-son bond with Zeke. What ensues is an understated clash of generations as Zeke remains resolute against the strange advances of a man who is obsessed with becoming his father.
The HoloFiles recently had the opportunity to speak with Ponderosa star Jack Dylan Grazer and writer/director Rob Rice about their new film, its immediate relevance to our political climate, finding the humor amidst the horrible, and more.
The premise that drives Ponderosa forward, much like the broader film itself, elicits laughs and disconcertment in equal measure. The idea of a grown man vehemently wishing to become the father of a young man, only to be continually rebuffed by his advances, may seem like the set-up for an uproarious comedy, but Rice’s film proves far more nuanced.
Bill Camp’s George is a member of a group of men who are determined to bring what they see as tenets of the American 20th century into the 21st century. George and his evangelist overlords present disturbing, even depraved ways of living as not only natural but necessary, a description that will eerily resonate with anyone familiar with real-life right-wing thought leaders.
Rice purposefully drew on the humor that underlies such voices in conceptualizing George and his fellow evangelists. “The way that [right-wing thought leaders] are all humiliating themselves with their ridiculousness is one of our great weapons against them,” Rice said. “I mean, I think they’re just profoundly silly, unfortunately effective, but profoundly silly.”
The group of men obsessed with fostering father-son bonds with unknown young men are certainly silly in Ponderosa, although not particularly effective. As Bill Camp’s George desperately tries to do what he can to forge a relationship with Zeke, Jack Dylan Grazer’s character is unmoved by all the advances. “I like the kind of monotone of Zeke’s presence,” said Rice. “It’s almost like whatever happened, wherever he gets to by the end, he was probably ready for at the beginning and it’s not like he’s changing very much. It’s their refusal to see how they’re being perceived and how silly they are. It’s just like making them more and more and more deranged, George especially. He’s desperate for any kind of validation and the more he doesn’t get it the more off the chain he becomes.”
Grazer’s polite yet reserved and largely dialogue-less performance contrasts much of the Los Angeles native’s prior work. Grazer is known for more eccentric, animated roles in the It and Shazam! franchises but undertakes a different challenge in Ponderosa. “He’s remarkable and playing him was such a strange experience, like a lightning in a bottle thing,” Glazer described. “I wouldn’t know how to replicate it. There was so much unsaid, unacknowledged, unconscious. A mystical torture in there somewhere. But it was wonderful and I was underwater the whole time in a really strange, cool way, but it was all so pleasant and I enjoyed every minute and I loved the challenge of playing Zeke.”
While being a hypochondriac in It and relying on crutches in Shazam!, Grazer plays a decidedly more unusual character in Ponderosa. “I’m so weird,” Grazer said. “I feel like I look like I’m caked in makeup and I look sort of, not in a bad way, but I look sort of uncanny or strange, you know, and my hair is constantly wet and my rat tail is erect. But I just think I’m weird and I think [Zeke] is right when he says I’m defective in a way.”
Zeke’s humorous and, at times, perplexing indifference to George’s advances reflects how older generations interpret younger folks as passive, according to Grazer. “It’s sort of so annoying for the older generation that we’re so passive,” Grazer stated. “When we do talk about the future, we’re talking about manifesting something. We’re never actually putting pen to paper. And it’s so interesting. I would be so aggravated to be old. I think about my grandpa, who’s a real big boomer, he was born in 1936, and how it’s almost like the same feeling as sitting on your chair, looking at the window and you’re like, ‘I couldn’t jump up right now, even if I wanted to.’ That’s so infuriating. And kids do that all the time in any [part] of the world.”
Almost exclusively focused on three characters, each occupying three distinct generations, Rice finds Ponderosa interrogate the guilt older generations feel for leaving a flawed world for younger ones to navigate. “[Alexis Bledel] follows [a key scene] up when they get to the parking lot by saying, ‘I just worry that my generation ate all the icing off the cake.’ There’s something I think about guilt in the way her perception has changed. She is mad at herself for not having seen how dire and obvious the depravity from the George world is. The whole landscape is marked with it.”
Rice continued, “And you shouldn’t beat yourself up for that kind of thing, but we all do. For not seeing it sooner or for being taken with it. I think the End of History rug was pulled out from under us somewhere in our youth in that generation. And we feel bad for ever having believed it. And I think [Bledel’s character] is feeling it too. And now when you see the landscape, you see how obvious it all is.”
Conversely, Zeke does not ever buy into the worldview imposed on him by George and the older generation. “There’s something [about] the love the film has for Zeke, or the hope that we put in Zeke and the generation he represents, that at least they never believed in that thing,” explained Rice. “There’s something so thrilling about their capacity because they were never fooled. We’re embarrassed in a way that they’re so strong, even in their reservation.”
Rice’s points about the guilt of Bledel’s generation and indifference of Grazer’s generation is perhaps best encapsulated by a poignant line in the film in which Bledel says, “My generation is just eating all the icing on the cake,” to which Grazer replies, “I don’t really like icing anyway.”
Grazer’s passivity and reservation in the film juxtaposes the anxiety and urgency of Bill Camp’s George, whose every action in the film represents his desperation to forge a father-son bond with Zeke. “I think one of the most interesting things about George is that he’s an imperfect evangelist of whatever it is he believes,” Rice stated “I think that says something more about ideology, like a lot of those guys would never admit it….I think it’s interesting that George is so imperfect…. He’s probably confused himself, like what organization he’s in, and what they believe ultimately, what they’re trying to do. And really what he may genuinely want a son. He just wishes he had some camaraderie and community in his life, [but] he doesn’t get that everything he’s fighting for is working to undermine. Everything he wants he could have if he just stopped doing what he was doing. But he’s instead ramping up and ramping up and ramping up. Those guys he’s with are the exact wrong people for him to be around.”
Ponderosa is so rich and layered in its examination of intergenerational conflict and contemporary America that Grazer believes the film necessitates multiple viewing. “I actually think that this might be a movie that people need to see more than once or twice, because it’ll keep evolving,” Grazer remarked. “It’s really a strange, really awesome achievement on Rob’s part. So kudos to Rob, for being able to create something that’s not just idiosyncratic or special or poetic or abstract or avant garde or whatever. But it’s like mushrooms. I don’t know about those [laughs], but I know that some people describe, when you take mushrooms, each time is sort of different, and you learn a new thing. And I feel like that’s this movie.”
For Rice, he hopes that audiences come away feeling that the normality that defines American life feels abnormal. “I want you to feel defamiliarized with the film’s concept of what’s normal and the people who are working so hard to produce that. And their sense that it’s inevitable or evident and obvious and objective. And it’s so not and so much of the humor comes from how arbitrary it all is and how ridiculous it is and silly they are. But I think that defamiliarization feeling is one of the most thrilling [feelings] you can have in your life when you walk back outside and see things for the first time or stop taking them for granted. And be like, ‘Wait a minute, what? That’s how our world works?’
At a key juncture in the film, Alexis Bledel’s character Sandra travels with her son Zeke in a car and remarks that so much has changed in the land surrounding them. Then, she almost immediately corrects herself and asserts that, in actuality, everything is the same, but it feels different. This moment succinctly reflects what it feels like to watch Ponderosa. The world we step into after the credits roll may be the same it was before, but the way we view everything has certainly altered.
Watch the full interview with Ponderosa filmmaker Rob Rice and star Jack Dylan Grazer below….
