MOVIE REVIEW: When I'm Ready
Images courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment
WHEN I’M READY– 3 STARS
When I’m Ready opens on two twenty-somethings coming across like sweet vagabonds enjoying a freewheelin’ life on the road. The blissful couple– Rose and Michael, played by little-known performers June Schreiner and Andrew Ortenberg— is showing a mischievous side as they trespass on someone else’s property to enjoy a rustic sunset and stolen bottles of wine. They are roused and shooed off the property by peppered rounds from the rightful homeowner’s shotgun. While peeling away in their vintage pickup truck, a small question breaks their laughter.
“Can you check the news?” asks Rose.
With that, the tone changes, the conversation is recolored, and the radio is turned on. She’s looking for a certain update that has nothing to do with their recent escapade snagging sunrays and booze, seen through the lush outdoor photography of cinematographer Rachael Mira Kliman. When the chosen station’s signal is found, the KIWA radio host Bryan Benson’s voice (provided by The Ringer editor-at-large and The Press Box podcast host Bryan Curtis), describes the latest on the external high drama hanging above all things as the premise of When I’m Ready.
It’s no less than the impending extinction of the human race. In the film, society has been bracing for unimaginable finality since the discovery a month prior of a collection of asteroids on a collision course with Earth. Folks like Rose have been hanging on voices like Benson’s with bated breath awaiting the success of man and science’s interventions to prevent this calamity. Nothing has worked, and the countdown to impact is within a week’s time.
LESSON #1: HOW IS THIS CALAMITY GOING TO GO?-- Like any character-driven film worth their salt that uses the backdrop of the end of the world as a means to add stakes and urgency to their desired setting and plot, that premise tends bring out two types of motivation: frivolity or madness. The removal of control, decorum, faith, and consequences is either idealized or denigrated. Some characters let their inhibitions loose and cares melt away to live it up with the happy intention of going out in a blaze of glory. Others fold to the desolate fear and descend to a dark place of will-destroying insanity. When I’m Ready lets that teeter-totter go up and down a bit, but greatly favors a rosier picture.
When I’m Ready stays entirely on the coming exploits of Michael and Rose. We learn that they are former high school classmates who have reconnected during this crisis. Neither had solid significant others or have strong existing family ties that send them hunkering down with relatives during this coming catastrophe, so they have taken to the road together. They seek quality time, sights, and experiences to appreciate in their predominantly quaint southern California habitat with backroads and dwellings secured by location manager Liam Finn.
LESSON #2: WHAT WOULD YOU DO IN THIS SITUATION?– In many ways, this premise of When I’m Ready says more than enough to hook one’s attention and offers a classic conceit for automatic audience connection. The questions of what would you do, where would you go, who would you try to see before your life ends, and more arise naturally. We compare our answers with what transpires on screen and simultaneously judge and empathize with those choices. Relating back to the motivations mentioned in Lesson #1, we cannot help but gauge our imagined capacity for levity or instability as well. We’ve seen enough movies following what blockbuster-level heroes would do galavanting around to save the world or, at the very least, their community and family, but When I’m Ready knows its microbudget scale and settles wisely on the intricate simplicity provided by Rose and Michael.
First-time feature director Andrew Johnson and the debut script from lead actor Andrew Ortenberg (A-X-L,The Re-Education of Molly Singer) yokes the power found in the intimacy of seeing what smaller, ordinary folks would do with this big ending stalking their near-futures. Between Rose and Michael, her worry level is high while his is low—something she openly questions. When dangers arrive, Michael has a handgun and is not shy about using it. Through it all, their push is to make the best of it with a strong “as long as we’re together” unifying energy.
Some of the comparison of reactions and states of mind from Lesson #2 occurs in When I’m Ready with the wayward strangers who cross the paths of Michael and Rose. Two asides in particular—one with The Walking Dead’s Lauren Cohan as a former beauty queen safeguarding her niece and a second with cherished character actor Dermot Mulroney as a lonely diner patron—really hoist the relatable and sincere magnitude the film is choosing to emphasize. Those two provide searing moments of emotionality alongside June Schreiner (Voodoo Macbeth and Chicago Med) and Andrew Ortenberg’s visiting ramblers soaking in the profundity in an effort to find their own, guided by the new question of “Do you wish we did more good?”
Reality might say this would all be wilder and worse from an anarchy and gridlock standpoint. The typical apocalyptic imagery of looted streets and martial law chaos and sounds of rank violence and festering terror are far away from and entirely scrubbed from When I’m Ready. Our protagonists have the connective and unlikely safety net of working cellphones. Even so, the only outside information comes from the aforementioned off-screen Bryan Benson, a DJ who states he’s going to stay broadcasting and emphasizing the positive out there until whatever end arrives. If anything, the doom factor is almost too relaxed in the movie.
Nonetheless, When I’m Ready makes the journey heavy enough for the two young lovers in its center. What episodes of despair are present crack the ease of the happy-go-lucky misadventures Rose and Michael are sharing. Moral challenges and splits involving personal truths increase as the days and hours dwindle to do something about them. Depending on the viewer’s acceptance and temperament, When I’m Ready is a complicated blend of the morbid and the soulful. Cynics will call it soft and over-convenient. They’ll be missing the attempted love letter-level poetry championing companionship. Instead, those who lean to and shine with the positive latter will be rewarded with a lovely odyssey of warmth fighting back bleakness.
LOGO DESIGNED BY MEENTS ILLUSTRATED (#1280)
