Non-Review Review: Cas & Dylan

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival 2014.

There are not too many surprises to be had in Cas & Dylan, and those surprises mostly come towards the end of the film. For most of its runtime, Cas and Dylan is a reliably constructed old-fashioned odd-couple roadtrip movie. The roadtrip movie is a cinematic staple, and it has attained that status for a reason; it’s a fairly standard format that adapts to fit the actors and characters slotted into the adventure.

In this case, first time feature director Jason Priestley is directing veteran performer Richard Dreyfuss and young up-and-comer Tatiana Maslany. The charming duo give Cas & Dylan a bit of an edge as far as road movie go. The pair play comfortably off one another in fairly stock roles, elevating material that might otherwise seem a little overly familiar or trite. Cas & Dylan succeeds primarily off the strength of its two lead performers.

The basic set-up is all very familiar. There are two characters who need to get some place far away, preferably within a time limit. The duo are always conflicting archetypes – they are always an “odd couple.” After all, if you’re going to lock two characters in a confined space for an extended period of time, you do need a bit of energy and excitement. Having two characters who conflict thoroughly with one another is the obvious choice.

Even the archetypes will be familiar to cinema goers. Cas Pepper (“Doctor Pepper”) is an uptight old man who is very learnt and very experienced, but presents himself as a cynical kill joy to the world around him – he has locked himself off from the world, ignoring the people who try to reach out to him, and has a mobile phone with only one human being on speed dial. He is a very stereotypically grumpy old man.

In contrast, Dylan feels like an offshoot of the young female independent cinema protagonist archetype that become fashionable over the last number of years. She is a force of nature, sweeping up any poor soul caught in her path. She is unpredictable, unreliable, but also energised. She genuinely seeks to improve the lives of those around her, whether they want to be improved or not. She is, naturally, an aspiring writer.

These are just ingredients. They are pretty familiar and fairly stock. The movie makes recurring allusions to Cas’ ability to make truly wonderful pasta sauce, and that feels like a commentary on the movie itself. It’s not so much about the ingredients or the result, so much as how you assemble them. The fact that Cas & Dylan spends most of its runtime as a fairly typical road movie populated by fairly typical characters is not inherently a bad thing – particularly when you’ve got two leads who can spice things up.

Dreyfuss and Maslany add a lot to Cas & Dylan. The pair are fairly wonderful – both in isolation and as part of a double-act. Dreyfuss has wry, snarky and cynical down to a fine art – he knows better than to try to hide his character’s heart of gold, making it quite clear from the outset that Cas is probably a better person than he would want the world to think that he is. Similarly, Maslany takes a fairly common character archetype and does her best to flesh out. The young star of Orphan Black not only manages to hold her own on screen with Dreyfuss, she also manages to make Dylan feel more like a real person than stock character.

And most of Cas & Dylan coasts rather charmingly off the charisma of the two leads, going through the metaphorical motions. To be entirely fair to the script, it does value its audience’s awareness and observational skills. There are recurring references to the fact that Cas is aware of certain plot points long before they are made explicit – the implication is that the audience should also have been well aware before the film explicitly stated them, which feels a lot more respectful than playing these (somewhat predictable) revelations as shock twists.

The movie does really come into its own in its final third, as the movie eschews the traditional happy ending that one might expect from a film like this. One of the more endearing facets of Cas & Dylan is the movie’s willingness to follow through on its big ideas, and to actually end on a note that subverts the expectations for a film like this. Neither Cas nor Dylan end up anywhere entirely unpredictable; rather, the film has the integrity to pursue those plot threads to their logical conclusion instead of offering a convenient “cop out.”

Director Jason Priestley has a wealth of experience on the small screen, and he transitions to the big screen with relative ease. Most of that is just a willingness to allow Maslany and Dreyfuss room to work, but he also relishes the luxury afforded by filming for cinema. While there’s not any showy or distracting camera work, there are lots of charming and effective establishing shots that afford the movie a sense of place.

Cas & Dylan isn’t anything particularly radical or subversive. It’s a familiar story, just told very well by some very talented people

All audience members are asked to rank films in the festival from 1 (worst) to 4 (best). In the interest of full and frank disclosure, here is my score: 3