How to Disappear Completely

Tom Quinn’s sadly underseen “Colewell”, this blog’s #3 movie of the year, might well stay sight-unseen, even now, though it has suddenly proven timely in a way Quinn and his outstanding lead actress Karen Allen could have hardly predicted. Allen’s character, Nora, is not just a postal worker approaching retirement age in a rural Pennsylvania town, she essentially is the post office. The station doubles as her home and her morning routine of coffee and eggs innately gives way to sorting mail. When she receives word her postal outpost will be shuttered, stranding the town without one, it’s a blow both to the community, seen throughout gathering around Nora’s window for chit-chat as much as sending or picking up packages, a threat to her identity, her life, as much as her livelihood.

---------------

It was reported over the weekend that the Trump Administration, in all its inestimable non-wisdom, threatened to the veto the $2 trillion Cares Act if it contained any money to help bail out the oft-financially shaky yet nevertheless indispensable United States Postal Service. The President, His Imbecility, has frequently cited that higher rates on other Internet shipping companies, like Amazon, would right the ship, a claim repeatedly disproved, though as our foremost Trumpologist, David J. Roth, has noted again and again, once Trump convinces himself of something, even if the facts say otherwise, he cannot be unconvinced; the truth always runs second to his own truth, no matter how manifestly boneheaded. Whether Trump is willing to write off the post office to score massive points in his ongoing feud with Amazon and Washington Post overlord Jeff Bezos, hamper mail-in voting for this year’s election, or merely adhere to conservative dogma that everything must be privatized just like Jesus would have wanted, who knows, but it would be a tragedy for this gasbag to confuse such a rash rumbling in his gut for civic duty.

---------------

In the wake of 2016, we were often treated to images of electoral maps, not so much breaking down red states and blue states as red votes and blue votes. Red votes trended rural, blue votes trended urban, evoking our familiar divide. This, went the refrain, proved that Rural America was sick of being ignored. Fair enough, but the Post Office is an institution eschewing pesky partisan divide, acknowledging everyone, day after day, regardless of snow or rain, etc. More than people in the cities, however, where the USPS has multiple locations and citizens often live right on top of one another, so to speak, the post office is a lifeline for rural America, as “Colewell” evinces, allowing distant places and people to maintain connection. And that is why I can’t quite see the logic of standing by the President when he threatens to sever that lifeline if for no other than reason than, at best, his ignorance or, at worst, his vainglory. By rejecting a bailout, rural America, he, the President, is ignoring you.

---------------

Though “Colewell”, made on the cheap, has an indie kind of kitchen sink aesthetic, it also contains a distinct metaphysical air, one lifting it into greatness, conveyed in a young drifter whose story runs parallel to Nora’s. The drifter is Ella (Hannah Gross), her name short for Eleanor, just like Nora, merely enhancing the idea that, despite a scene they shared mid-movie, she is somehow a younger version of Nora’s self, an idea Quinn is smartly content to render ineffable as opposed to explicit. The movie ends by cutting back and forth between Nora going through her morning routine and Ella sitting beside a lake, seeming to find the emotional wherewithal to almost bend time to her will by vanishing into the moment. When she does, we return to Nora’s kitchen save for Nora. The coffee is there, but she is gone. It was a sequence that lingered with me, long after it was over.

In an interview with Stepehen Saito at Moveable Feast last December, Quinn, asked about the film’s genesis, said this: “Initially, I was at a friend’s for New Year’s and he had an agricultural map on his wall, which is a weird thing to have of Western Pennsylvania. I asked him why and he told me it’s because his hometown isn’t on the map anymore – it got erased when the woman who ran the post office out of her home retired, so they retired the zip code and their town got removed, basically.” And as I drifted back to “Colewell” in my mind over the weekend, I realized its ending was not just informed by Quinn’s explanation but brought his explanation to life.

Nora literally disappears.

Colewell

“Colewell” refers to a small town in Pennsylvania where the post office is about to be shuttered, a victim of cost-cutting, threatening to sever the community’s heart, not to mention the livelihood of its sole, multi-decade employee, Nora (Karen Allen). It suggests rural America left behind, and though that idea lingers on the periphery, writer/director Tom Quinn eschews topicality to filter the metaphysical through the kitchen sink settings. Indeed, “Colewell” might be far from Philadelphia, but it’s not that far off from “The Irishman”, in so much as it becomes a kind of meditation on time, how life is both “forever and not long enough”, the line functioning as a prologue before being repeated later, where you don’t even sense the years just slipping through your fingers until most of them are already gone.

The movie opens by lyrically recounting Nora’s morning: putting on coffee, making eggs, getting the paper, opening the post office that doubles as her home. And this post office doubles as the community’s beacon, where locals converse with Nora and with each other, Quinn allowing us to hear snippets of these conversations, an early indicator that he will let his characters talk, meaningfully, rather than reducing them to passing symbols in a montage. There is a benevolence to the rhythm of this routine suggesting Jim Jarmusch’s fabulous “Paterson.” Yet whereas routine in “Paterson” was treated with something close to reverence, Quinn honors it before not so much tearing it down as quietly challenging it, honoring the opening line’s paradox in portraying the routine as giving and taking away. And though another performer might have foreshadowed the curtain being pulled back in these early moments, Allen remains committed to the moment itself, even when she’s pulling on her uniform in the mirror. It renders her character’s unmooring from what sustains her extra powerful, where the way she simply smiles at a mother and her kids in an unfamiliar town where her job might go look like someone casting about for a life preserver.

Cleverly, if not a little cruelly, “Colewell” ties its challenging of Nora’s routine to the routine itself, a letter arriving by mail indicating her office’s impending closure. It’s a decision that cuts to the community, certainly, seen in a convincing moment of civic outrage suggesting an outtake from Frederick Wiseman’s documentary “In Jackson Heights”, correlating rural and urban, though the scene ends with the camera finding Nora and slowly zooming in on her, as if the moment is designed most to cut her heart out. Indeed, she might wonder aloud if that window between her and her customers is her only window into fellowship, but Quinn evokes this in more than mere dialogue, demonstrating how her only relationships center around work, right down to the delivery man (Kevin J. O’Connor) who shows up every morning, looking at Nora with concern sometimes threatening to shade into pity, not that Allen, in her subtle steeliness will accept it.

No, Nora’s only friend outside work is Ella (Hannah Gross), something of a drifter, though Quinn remains elusive about exactly who she is. That vagueness is not a flaw but a means to have Ella work as something like a youthful echo of Nora. She turns up midway through the movie for dinner, the camera cutting between close-ups of the two women, underscoring the intimacy of their conversation, Nora finally but conversationally revealing what brought her to Colewell and why she stayed. The close-ups, though, don’t just underscore that intimacy but deliberately feel apart from the visual scheme up to this moment, the camera mostly having maintained a polite distance from its characters. It suggests an instant bond between the two, also evoked in how Ella just walks right in the door, without knocking, exchanging a smile with Nora as she does.

Maybe this is a recurring moment between the two, Nora giving brief food and shelter to the itinerant Ella, though the dialogue hints at something closer to cosmic connection even as it refrains from spelling it out. If they eventually part ways, they never feel apart, the back half of “Colewell” alternating between them, as if they are leading parallel lives. They might be. A scene of Ella hitching a ride with a trucker, foreshadowed in that opening dialogue, never quite shows the trucker and mostly shows Ella through the trucker’s rear view mirror, alluding to her life as something like Nora’s past, which she is now reflecting on in this great upheaval. I honestly half-expected the closing credits to say Gross was playing Nora.

“Colewell”, given frequent poetically enigmatic shots of foggy bathroom mirrors and characters obscured by drapes, seems like one of those movies destined to dissolve rather than end. That’s not quite true, though. It doesn’t build to some climactic showdown between the citizens and the United States Postal Services, thankfully, but to something more muted and powerful, a close-up of Ella that Quinn holds for a long time as she just sort of settles in with a cup of coffee and tries to find something like inner peace before a cut to Nora leaving her coffee cup, steam rising, on the counter to walk out the door. The routine is severed.