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Anyone who’s returned home wrung out from traveling knows the disappointing chasm between a vacation and a trip.
The difference? Sometimes it’s an accumulation of choices. Time spent in the beach chair versus checking out yet another beach town. Recreational reading versus sending that quick email. Entertaining yourself versus entertaining your child.
In Why Dig When You Can Pluck, protagonist Spring (Sol Marina Crespo) avoids such choices in favor of a do-it-all approach. In fact, she’s adding a third element to the impossible trip vs. vacation coexistence. The filmmaker and mother is explicitly trying to translate her family campout on the Oregon Coast into a movie idea.
“I want the plot to come naturally out of the location,” she explains to her preteen son as they drive toward the ocean. He is unimpressed.
Pluck’s story doesn’t sprout from the rocky coast, though. It owes everything to character. The patiently devastating film from Portland director Cambria Matlow trains its lens on this family of three—barely holding it together—and waits for their interpersonal abrasions to start bleeding.
The result is what Matlow calls a “novella”-style film: 51 minutes and set to premiere locally on Thursday, June 27, at the Tomorrow Theater, alongside the short film Rad Dad from director Zach Weintraub and a live performance by Portland writer Lindsay Baltus.
The early stages of Pluck were “scary,” Matlow says. For one, she’d only ever directed documentaries, like the acclaimed Burning in the Sun (2010) and the Oregon-made Woodsrider (2016).
Inventing characters and story was a new challenge, though the seams of that invention are well hidden. Pluck is largely told through human behavior and makes the audience feel in real time that they’re looking for the same hint of a movie idea that Spring is seeking. Matlow cites beloved Oregon filmmaker Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy, Showing Up) as a key inspiration in this watchful regard, the way Reichardt’s characters just exist, and it’s still fascinating.
The other initially “scary” bit? Matlow didn’t so much dig for these characters as pluck them from her life.
Her debut narrative is based on a June 2020 road trip the filmmaker took with her husband and son while determined to drum up a movie idea herself. The car trip began with a tour of Oregon’s hot springs. They don’t photograph well, it turns out.
“They’re just flat holes in the ground,” Matlow laughs.
Then, her family headed toward Brookings on the Southern Oregon Coast (where half of Pluck was shot; Arch Cape provided the other half of the setting). At that point of the family trip, Matlow says, “some shit went down.”
If the real-life discord was anything like in her film, we’re talking about regrettable behavior curdling from the eternal family-vs.-individual balancing act.
For her part, Spring is shown to be a deeply intentional parent in spurts but is fundamentally looking at her husband and child as artistic subjects.
“They obviously resist that because, in a way, that’s a shitty thing to do,” Matlow says, “But I understand that’s what every single writer who’s ever walked the face of the planet does.”
Meanwhile, Clay (played by Portland actor Patrick D. Green) is tossing up red flags left and right, with angry outbursts and taking a suspiciously large soda bottle full of liquor to the beach. Yet he also takes on the parental role of carefully explaining Spring’s artistic ambitions to their son. He’s also the one making time to play Pokémon with Elio (Mateo Taylor).
“I double-dog dared myself to do it…warts and all,” Matlow says of the autobiographical origins of Pluck.
That said, things have worked out well. Her husband, Ben Bach, is the film’s cinematographer and co-author of the film’s probing close-ups and stark black-and-white palette.
“I think there was a time for [Ben] where we were sort of like pretending the mom character was clearly me but that the dad character was some made-up person,” Matlow reflects. “At a certain point, he just decided that he was comfortable and proud enough of the work we had done and how far we had sort of come as a family.”
“I guess I’ll just say…therapy is awesome,” she adds.
Once the credits roll, Pluck has the feeling of a cautionary tale that was eerily unavoidable while it was happening. Ironically, four years later, with a film ready for audiences, Matlow’s trip-as-inspiration gambit worked.
Advisable, though? Maybe not. In the weeks before the film’s Portland premiere, Matlow is headed to California for the in-person portion of her UC Riverside Palm Desert Low-Residency MFA program in screenwriting.
That’s a trip, not a vacation.
“There’s a reason that writing residencies exist,” Matlow says. “You really need to be alone.”
SEE IT: Why Dig When You Can Pluck screens at Tomorrow Theater, 3530 SE Division St., 503-221-1156, tomorrowtheater.org/movies/why-dig-when-you-can-pluck. 7 pm Thursday, June 27. $15.