Butler's Cinema Scene

Kelsea Bauman, Will Dennis

“VANILLA”  My rating: B

87 minutes | No MPAA rating

If Elliott (Will Dennis) was ice cream he’d be vanilla.

His shirts are always buttoned tightly around his neck. He carefully charts out each day’s schedule (most days the big entry is “Lunch”).

Elliott spends many hours mooning about the girlfriend who got away. In his remaining time he is developing an app that will allows hungry users to literally scream for ice cream into their cell phones; a delivery man will be dispatched with the desired cones, scoops, toppings and other accoutrements.

Elliott is such a boring, lame-o character that one cannot imagine him holding down a feature film all by his lonesome. Happily he shares the screen with Kimmie (Kelsea Bauman), a sort of sarcasm-steeped gamine who hopes to become a standup comic. Between the two of them they make “Vanilla” a low-keyed, off-beat pleasure.

Making this all the more remarkable is that Dennis, who also wrote and directed the film, and Bauman have no feature film experience.  Until recently he was a product design consultant; “Vanilla” is his feature debut and while it isn’t earth-shaking, it’s kinda huggable.

The central premise has Will and Kimmie joining forces to drive his old van (it’s white, naturally) from NYC to New Orleans, where his ex, Trisha (Taylor Hess) is a P.A. on a film shoot and desperately needs an old beat-up white van for a stunt.

Kelsea Bauman (enjoying our nation’s capital)

Anyway, on the long cross-country drive Will and Kimmie come up with “road rules” to govern their journey.  One is that whenever they cross a state line they have to open up one of the many fortune cookies littering the van’s interior. (Will gets a fortune that simply says: “You will die alone.”)

Romance slowly blossoms as Kimmie’s sassy sardonicism chips away at Will’s uptightness (you can tell because he leaves his collar open). But each has a secret they’re keeping from the other.  For Will it’s the knowledge that he’ll be seeing his long-lost Trisha.  For Kimmie it’s her gig as an on-line sex worker (at first Will can’t understand why all that moaning is coming out of her motel room).

None of this sounds terribly promising on paper.  In the playing, though, “Vanilla” works up quite a head of charm.

Bauman is real find, with an ageless insouciance (she could be anywhere from 21 to 35) and sex appeal that blossoms before our eyes (in her early scenes Kimmie is trying too hard to be clever/cute; happily the actress quickly looses the irritating edges). Dennis is so good at sneaking in Will’s transition from drone to lovable leading man that we’re taken by surprise at his incremental transformation.

Even a rather grating subplot about Will’s septuganarian mom (Kathryn Grody) and her twenty something weed peddling-boy toy (“Pose’s” Johnny Sibilly) eventually worms its way into our good graces.

Not bad for a bunch of first-timers.

| Robert W. Butler