Jason Sondhi
Nothing pleases me more than when a comedy stretches out a joke properly. It’s akin to Tarantino and his rubberband analogy—yes, it’s comedy instead of suspense, but it is no less a bravura high-wire act. How far can an absurdity be pushed? Will the writers simply run out of ideas? Will some element of its craft or the performance turn the excitement of escalation into sour dread as the proverbial horse is beaten to death?
The upside is worth the risk because sometimes it leads to a film like Call Your Mom, which takes a fairly simple joke and stretches it out like Laffy Taffy. Even better, director Isaac Garza and his team inexplicably (but awesomely) decide that the inherent challenge of a stretched-out joke film should be matched in difficulty by the effort to capture it. So, the short’s 8-minute runtime is an elaborate oner, one of the best we’ve recently seen, and captured in a true, single long-take.
The setup is appropriately mundane. Pete has just landed the biggest deal of his life, and as he and his sales partner struggle to contain their excitement leaving the meeting, he mutes his phone. Who was it? Just his mom. His partner is aghast! He talks to his mom every day. When was the last time Pete talked to his mom?
“I guess you all could make it after all.”
The resulting conversation spirals into morbid discussions of actuarial data, followed by layers and layers of retorts and complications as strangers weigh in and siblings show up to chastise Pete, crafting, block by block, a Jenga tower of reasons why Pete should call his mom. As the hypothetical potentially turns literal, all this concern seems prescient, but Garza has one more twist in store.
While the sentiment that provides the film’s premise may be mundane, Garza’s inspiration is dramatic, recalling for us that:
“A few years ago my mom invited her grown-up children back home for her birthday party. We all had to decline the invitation due to our busy lives. Then on the weekend of her birthday, my mom suffered a minor heart attack. We all immediately travel back home and when we get to her hospital room she makes the comment, ‘I guess you all could make it after all.'”
“My cinematographer and I have always wanted to challenge ourselves with an elaborate true oner. We’re huge fans of that technique” – Garza on the filming approach for Call Your Mom
This underlying pathos helps provide a bit of weight to Call Your Mom, which otherwise might feel frivolous. Despite the laudable execution in both the storytelling and production (buoyed by Garza and his fellow performers in the Austin, Texas improv scene playing the key roles) the film, tonally, threatens to never achieve escape velocity from a certain middlebrow comedic sensibility. Even as the absurdity grows, the story stays within recognizable boundaries and doesn’t push towards the extremes of anti-humor or over-the-top spectacle. Strange as it is to type this sentence, the morbidity helps. Garza elaborates with the sentiment, “I love my mom. Sometimes I think about her dying and the regrets I’d have. It’s a real fear I think a lot of us have. I use humor to cope with my feelings.” I often think that we’re too hard on comedy in the short film space, sometimes it is nice to just laugh without intellectualizing too much, but great comedy is often derived from these more dramatic emotions and the very real specter of death balances Call Your Mom tonally in a way that is equally impressive to stretching a joke 8 minutes or coordinating an 8 minute shot. The result is an impressive all-around piece we’re happy to welcome into our collection.
Call Your Mom premieres online today here on Short of the Week and Shortverse after a solid festival run that included The Austin Film Festival and the Cleveland International Film Festival. Garza is in the midst of prolific stretch, and his next short is already hitting festivals. Called The Son Who Can’t Play Trumpet, the film is a love letter to his family and hometown of Laredo, Texas and was initiated as part of Warner Discovery’s 150 and HBO’s Pa’Lante Promise program for emerging Latino filmmakers along with support from the Laredo Film Society and the Austin Film Society.