There is a certain brand of American indie filmmaking that premieres at Sundance almost pre-packaged in the visual grammar of “authenticity”: handheld cameras, muted palettes, sparse dialogue, aching silences, and a social issue to center around. Unfortunately, Cole Webley’s debut feature, Omaha, is yet another handsome, earnest, and ultimately hollow entry in this tradition. Set ambiguously against the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis, it follows a father (referred to only as “Dad”) who packs his two young children and a golden retriever into a barely functional car and drives them to Nebraska under the pretense of a family trip. His true purpose, however, is carefully concealed from his children and the audience alike. The premise is not without potential, but the execution largely squanders it.
Robert Machoian’s screenplay has the bones of something shattering: a man crushed by foreclosure and grief, a road trip that is not a road trip, two children and a dog in the gravitational pull of an adult catastrophe they cannot fathom. But the film is so committed to withholding the backstory, the motivation, and the context that it mistakes opacity for profundity. We know virtually nothing about who this father was before the trip. No world exists behind his eyes beyond exhaustion and dread. The script presents deliberate vagueness as a formal virtue, but there is a difference between a film that trusts its audience and one that simply hasn’t done the work of characterization.
Omaha attempts to be in the lineage of intimate American portraits such as Andrea Arnold’s American Honey and the films of Kelly Reichardt that place everyday survival under an unflinching lens. Cinematographer Paul Meyers captures the beauty of the awe-inspiring Americana landscape along the road trip and Christopher Bear offers an indie-rock score that provides the expected emotional scaffolding. These are the markers of a certain well-crafted festival film. As an aesthetic object, Omaha is certainly not a deficient work. As a piece of storytelling, it is frustratingly inept. One cannot help but be reminded of Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, which excavated a struggling father’s inner life through the fragmentary and unreliable perspective of the now-adult daughter remembering her childhood through the pixelated footage of digital video. Omaha, on the other hand, having established the children’s point of view as its moral and emotional center, loses its nerve and shifts perspective to the father in the film’s final movement, precisely when we need his opacity most. The result feels like a structural capitulation rather than a revelation.
What rescues the film from disappointment is its performers. Molly Belle Wright, as the older daughter, Ella, is quietly extraordinary. She carries entire scenes on the tension between a child’s need to believe her father and the knowledge, already legible in her eyes, that something is terribly wrong. Wyatt Solis, as the younger brother, Charlie, brings the mercurial joy of a child too small to register the storm around him, and it is genuinely affecting. The scene where the two fly a kite on the paradise-like Utah Salt Flats is especially heartwarming. And then there’s John Magaro (Past Lives), who has made a career of doing enormous emotional work in supporting and sometimes underwritten roles, and here finally has the chance to play the leading man. There is real anguish in his silences, in the effort it costs his character to manufacture a smile. It is a performance of considerable discipline, all the more remarkable for the fact that the screenplay gives him almost nothing to build from.
The film’s final title cards reveal the social context beneath the drama: Nebraska’s notorious 2008 Safe Haven Law, a legislative accident that intended to deter infanticide, lacking any age restriction, effectively permitted parents to abandon children of any age without facing prosecution, which resulted in 35 children, none of them newborns, being brought across state lines and surrendered in a 127-day period before the law was finally amended. It is a genuinely devastating footnote to a well-intentioned social policy that went horribly wrong, and it deserved a film bold enough to confront it head-on rather than deploy it as a closing gut-punch. That the revelation lands with such force is almost an indictment of everything that preceded it: the film needed this context inside it, not as a final plot twist. The performances of the three main actors alone ensure that Omaha is not without feeling, and I’m very sure tears will be shed among the audiences. But it confuses silence with meaning, and in doing so, leaves its most urgent questions unanswered.
Frank Yan
Frank Yan is a New York based film programmer and critic. He’s also the co-founder of the record label Soundtrack Magazine and the boutique distribution company Crescendo House.