At first, “Dynamic Tom” seems like the kind of seedy documentary you’d stumble upon late at night on Skinemax. It follows a 68-year-old bachelor as he hops from bar to bar looking for women. He even tries to pick one up at a car wash!
Dynamic Tom (a nickname he gave himself for his fun personality) dresses in sleazy white suits and sleeps with as many women as he can (the count is up to about 1,600, he says).
It would be easy to antagonize or satirize this man. Instead, as any great documentarian would do, director Andrew Cohn steps back and tries to understand his behavior. He lets Tom speak for himself.
Cohn stumbles when he asks Tom the same tired questions. “What is love?” “Do you believe in love?” “Have you ever been in love?”
However, the film is effective nonetheless. It’s a poignant portrait of a lonely-rogue charmer. It’s also a quaint vision of a man searching for flesh-and-blood women in the age of the internet.
Get tickets and showtimes for the Indy Film Fest short film here: http://www.indyfilmfest.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=154&Itemid=105