The whole lot in regards to the backstory of Hassmann’s characteristic is inspiring, particularly to unbiased filmmakers who commit a hundred percent to their imaginative and prescient, no matter it might be. Sadly, the consequence is a kind of movies that simply would not work. Even for a picaresque plot comprised of incidents and moments, it is a flat and disjointed effort that lurches ahead and stops and lurches ahead once more all through its transient operating time—a labor of affection that does not ship.
The over-reaching manufacturing values are characterised by unconvincing green-screen work, which could probably have been transformed from a legal responsibility to an asset if the film had leaned into the chintziness and gone for one thing extra “storybook.” The actors (together with the late Peter Bogdanovich as an alcoholic supervisor on the resort the place Greta stays, and Blaine Grey as Duke, a good-hearted Elvis impersonator) are caught taking part in cartoony, cardboard-cutout, indie-movie Americana “sorts,” outlined by one or two traits. The humor appears to need to be bubblegum candy and bitingly satirical on the identical time, impulses that cancel one another out.
It might need labored regardless of itself if Hassmann’s efficiency have been highly effective sufficient to collect all of it up and unify it by sheer originality and vitality. However whereas she’s a sexy, likable, sympathetic lead, there isn’t any discernible comedian point-of-view to her efficiency, and her bodily resemblance to Madeline Kahn circa-Nineteen Seventies would not do her any favors. You could end up imagining what an excellent, continually shocking performer like Kahn, or a contemporary equal like Kristen Wiig, or an unknown who was extra of a dynamo, might need carried out as an alternative.
Or maybe not. The character of Greta is narratively a zero, drifting from one catastrophe to the subsequent, whether or not she’s by chance setting her husband’s home on hearth throughout her nighttime escape or hiding the nest-egg of Euros she took from him below a motel mattress solely to get up to seek out that it was stolen following a drunken escapade with a wierd man.
Naive blank-slate protagonists like Gulliver, Candide, Forrest Gump and Barbie have been a minimum of supported by a storyteller’s unified structure and centered drive. This movie retains genuflecting in direction of a extra cartoonishly “large” mode, leaving Greta deserted on the facet of a freeway and having her appear to drop out of the sky in entrance of bewildered onlookers and so forth. However though it clearly appreciates that kind of slapstick, it would not know the best way to execute it in a method that sells it, so the result’s extra cringe-inducing than hilarious or charming. And ultimately, it is onerous to say what its opinion is of America, Germany, marriage, the function of popular culture iconography in shaping personalities, or anything is perhaps. Is that this a satire? It carries itself as if it has one thing to say. However what?
The CinemaScope-dimension imagery, credited to Marco Cappetta and Alexa Ihrt, is the second smartest thing in regards to the movie, though there are moments when it overwhelms the slightness of what is onscreen. The very best factor in regards to the film is the near-nonstop use of snippets of Willie Nelson’s music, however you possibly can create that by yourself with a playlist, have been you so inclined.
“Willie and Me” is created from love and a dream. I’ve not often rooted more durable for a film to succeed or been sadder when it did not.