As his 25th birthday approaches, Charlie Silver Cloud III feels more anxiety than most people. His father and his grandfather were both killed on their 25th birthdays, both crushed by the weight of onrushing milk trucks.
Right off we have a reason to feel hope about “Expiration Date,” the movie in which this scenario comes at us like, well, an onrushing milk truck. Comedies about death, after all, can be bracing as well as silly – think of “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” “Harold and Maude,” or even the Burt Reynolds flick “The End.”
Charlie (played by Robert A. Guthrie) is a half-American Indian living in Seattle. Well, if you call it living: He’s basically spending whatever time he has left bargain-shopping for coffins.
Despite his gloomy demeanor, Charlie has a girlfriend, although he dumps her for the sake of sparing her the grief of his imminent death. Immediately, he meets another woman (Sascha Knopf) and she blows up his plans like a classic refugee from a screwball comedy.
The script, by Hamish Gunn and Rick Stevenson, sets all this up with economy, but after the opening reels things begin to go awry. The timing feels off, for one thing, and the performances vary from person to person (and sometimes from scene to scene).
A certain amateurishness is forgivable in some of the supporting actors, given the low-budget nature of the film. Newcomer Guthrie holds his own in a role that requires a great deal of reacting, but most of the other performers tend to be bigger and broader than the bandwidth allowable for a little movie like this, including leading lady Sascha Knopf. Exceptions are Dee Wallace Stone, as Charlie Silver Cloud’s mother, and David Keith, as an overly caffeinated regular at the restaurant Charlie works at – savvy professionals both.
The movie is chock-full of Seattle locations, including the Pike Place Market’s Alibi Room and the streets of Ballard. Director Rick Stevenson is a Seattle-based filmmaker and knows how to get the local turf on screen.
A miscalculation, though, is the reliance on a stale convention: Charlie’s being an expert barista (he has a legion of devoted espresso drinkers in his orbit). The local coffee connection stopped being a fresh image around the time grunge came in.
As storytelling, “Expiration Date” makes all the pieces fit, yet somehow fails to find the newness or the joy that would make this material click. When the movie showed at the Seattle International Film Festival a couple of weeks ago, the audience vocally enjoyed the movie much more than I did – perhaps its premiere engagement here in its home city may find that receptive audience over the course of a regular run.
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