One of the great secret weapons of American film and TV in recent years, solid-gold supporting actor Bill Camp gets a rare and fascinating leading showcase in “Ponderosa” — though in committing to Rob Rice’s quietly sinister and wildly peculiar black comedy, no one could accuse him of chasing the spotlight. A defiant oddity that deserves to find its own select and equally eccentric cult, the film fixes its gaze on two strange, sad male archetypes of modern suburbia — the purposeless, woefully outmoded boomer and the shiftless, willfully isolated zoomer — only to tease out yet stranger, sadder dynamics between them, in that specific American environment of strip malls and infinite parking lots where human connection goes to die.
A recent premiere in Tribeca’s U.S. narrative competition, “Ponderosa” is probably destined for niche exhibition, and will likely divide general audiences: For every viewer compelled by its deadpan air of everyday liminality, at least one other will find it too alienating, or just too alien, to bear, and one suspects that’s the way Rice wants it. But if the film occasionally threatens to float away into its own inaccessible realm, Camp’s witty, doleful performance grounds it with a human dimension, albeit not a terribly warm one. Well matched with a passive, perfectly wary Jack Dylan Grazer as the gormless young man taken inexplicably under his wing, and given ample room to play by the film’s own curiosities, he’s a treat.
Zeke (Grazer) is a directionless twentysomething in a drab middle-American town, who spends his days either idly scrolling his phone, or idly driving around in circles — activities with no clear endpoint, which equally goes for the structureless suburban sprawl around him. He’s still highly dependent on his mother Sandra (Alexis Bledel), who works at the bland buffet restaurant that gives the film its title; that job gives him a daily discounted lunch, but with the restaurant facing closure, he’s even more adrift. At first Zeke seems the very embodiment of older generations’ complaints about GenZ ennui, but Rice isn’t taking cheap shots — not least since since his elders-but-not-wisers get no more flattering a portrait once George (Camp) enters the scene.
First accosting Zeke in the Ponderosa parking lot with a completely unsolicited offer of mentorship, George seems determined, for no apparent reason, to mold the young man in his image. But what image? A property developer currently spearheading the construction of a glum cookie-cutter housing estate named — with an almost admirable absence of irony — Walden Colonies, George is a uncharismatic schlub with money but no other assets that might mark a successful life, including partner, children or friends. Few would see him as something to aspire to: Zeke certainly doesn’t, but he’s also aimless enough to say yes when George offers him a vaguely defined job on the project, and the older man places altogether too much stock in that acceptance.
There’s a dry, droll seam of generation-gap humor in George’s continued, failed attempts to insert himself as a father figure into the life of someone who never asked for one, and Zeke’s blankly bemused resistance to his efforts. But there’s also something more disquieting at work here, and not just when George’s advances begin to feel very much like, well, advances. Or when a hangout at a suburban house frequented by George and his fellow dreary older men of business reveals a locked wing of dead-eyed, gym-built teens seemingly being trained to succeed them.
That threat, meanwhile, is amplified by the banality of “Ponderosa’s” setting, with its haphazard collection of highways and featureless new builds, all blocked and framed to look as unpeopled as possible, and captured by DP Barton Cortright with just the right degree of uninviting digital flatness: a very ordinary and absurd America, with the humanity sapped out of it from under everyone’s noses. George’s narcissistic vision of the future is one essentially frozen in time, where all younger men eventually come around to his vision and his values; Zeke may not be very engaged, and he’s certainly not very engaging, but he’s smart enough to know progress when he doesn’t see it.
And so “Ponderosa” emerges as a dark, timely examination of the prevalence of conservative manosphere-style psychology — outside the more aggressive online spheres where such thinking is generally seen to fester. Camp’s cleverly double-sided performance leads with what’s lonely and vulnerable and tragic, sometimes hilariously so, about George, but it would be too easy to play him as a crazy old coot: The actor also outlines a grinning social danger in those bluff, blustery men who are most eager to impart knowledge they don’t necessary have.
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