When I'm Ready
What do you call a movie about a freshly-minted couple traveling America's backroads while they await the destruction of the Earth? The genre-blurring film is now out on disc and VOD.
The press notes for “When I’m Ready” dub it a “romantic thriller,” which I’ll admit is a new one on me. Thrillers might have some romance in them, or vice-versa, but generally it’s hard to focus on one without detriment to the other. Something like “True Lies” or “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” come closest.
It’s best not to try to shove the square “Ready,” which is now out on Blu-ray and VOD, into any round genre hole. It’s not an action film (apart from a couple of harrowing scenes) or disaster science fiction. Certainly romance would be at the forefront, but it’s also got elements of melodrama and even notes of comedy.
The story of a freshly-minted couple traveling America’s backroads while awaiting the annihilation of the Earth by an asteroid cluster, it’s mostly a wistful rumination on human connection, its fleetingness and frailties. It prods you to ponder your own relationships and whether you’ve truly invested all that you should.
Michael (Andrew Ortenberg) and Rose (June Schreiner) are a winsome couple, I’m guessing early 20s. The story (screenplay also by Ortenberg) arrives in media res; the destruction of the planet is already a known and accepted quantity. Though there’s talk of various government plans to prevent the asteroids from smacking into the planet, people seem to know it’s just patter to keep the populace from going crazy.
That’s already happening to a certain degree, as the pair have some disturbing and even malevolent encounters with others. For their part, they’ve decided to treat the apocalypse as an adventure.
They’re driving around the dusty side roads of middle America in Michael’s ‘70s-era king-cab Ford truck, camping in the bed at night, stopping to buy food or gas when they need it, occasionally even breaking into unoccupied houses for a bed and shower.
With six days to go until the big boom, Rose settles on the idea of driving to see her grandmother, Ruth (Dana Andersen), in her nursing home. Both Rose and Michael are estranged from their parents, and seem disinclined to reopen old wounds before it all ends. Michael receives calls from his father that he ignores. Going to see grandma seems as good a way to play out the string as any.
Though they’ve known each other since high school. Rose and Michael only got together as a couple at the start of this journey. They’re essentially building a romantic bond while knowing it’s not something they’ll have to work to sustain.
Rose occasionally descends into bouts of anxiety and depression, though Michael seems much more chill — though it’s possible he’s just putting up a brave front for her sake. There’s a power imbalance in their relationship, acknowledged implicitly and later explicitly, that Michael needs Rose more than vice-versa.
Their encounters with others range widely in aspect. Early on they are nearly killed by some roving marauders. They stumble upon some youngsters about their age who are looking to hold a nonstop party while awaiting the end, we’re guessing with pharmacological assistance. At one point they come across an abandoned mail truck, find an incredibly poignant letter, and decide to deliver it the addressee.
This leads to meeting Julia (Lauren Cohan from “The Walking Dead”), a single mom who is excited to get the letter from her long-distance lover, Oliver. Our erstwhile postal carriers find out the two have never met, as Julia has channeled a lot of her own hopes and disappointments into this prospect, which now many never be consummated.
Another chance meeting is with an older guy who never offers his name, played by Dermot Mulroney. Rose and Michael have sneaked into an abandoned diner and cooked themselves up a breakfast feast, and this guy walks in like there’s nothing weird about popping in for a coffee and muffin.
He’s a bit disheveled and slightly scary, though he doesn’t make any threatening moves. He explains that he’s using his last days to be “out and about” his hometown, and mostly just wants someone to talk to. They’re happy to oblige, but wait and see where things wind up.
Eventually the couple makes it to Ruth’s, and have another encounter that doesn’t quite go in the way they expected. As things get closer to the end, the tension builds between the couple as their method of approaching certain death diverges. A familiar, comforting voice is the DJ on KIWA radio (which must be AM or have hella FM range) letting people know what’s going on and playing some tunes on the way out.
“So where are you guys going to die?” somebody asks them at one point, a stark idea now made commonplace in this world.
It’s one thing to know and accept that everybody is going to die someday, and quite another to have the time for every single person clocked out to the minute. This is a story of ordinary people coming to terms with the extraordinary.
Director Andrew Johnson and his cast evoke a lot of empathy for Michael and Rose. The movie can be a bit slow at times, and probably could have used a judicious snip here and there in the editing bay. It’s a great-looking picture with lovely cinematography by Rachael Kliman and an evocative musical score by Gilbert Cameron Evans.
“When I’m Ready” is a curious animal. I kept trying to decide what it was, and finally decided I didn’t need to. It’s a tidy little movie of substantial ambition, the kind to tell a story and make you think, too. All it takes is the end of the world.