Group

      Group is a film which succeeds though the director, Marilyn Freeman, has no idea what to do with a digital camera. Much of the indie movie is multi-screen images, but they are lame, arbitrary closeups of the nine female characters who are participating (this is the whole movie) in the most intense of group therapy sessions. Yet what's really impressive is how much the actresses are wedded to the unhappy, angry, bewildered people they are portraying. I've seen few films ever where it's so unclear if the actors are acting, or somehow have gone off into real life. At the top of the list is the great Carrie Browstein, Sleater-Kinney rock star, who is brilliantly convincing as a post-college girl suffering depression because her beloved father has run off with a 17-year-old.

GERALD PEARY
(July, 2002)

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