I’m Totally Fine Review

Delicacy is not on the plate of I’m Totally Fine, a piece that hopes to mount the grief train and steer it through extra-terrestrial territory. Still, it takes something supreme or out there to compartmentalise and move on from grief, even if that would be aliens from out space as suggested here. Lo-fi tonalities are not the best of match-ups to a feature hoping to dissect how the stages of grief feel permanent, cyclical and sudden. Still, as far as independent features go, this one is the most grating of all. It is typically North American and middle-classed, the Tesla-driving, bum-a-cigarette-in-that-twee-manner type of moronic. Boyfriends that learn to slap the bass, grieving in some articulate, visionary home, it is the suburban husk and shell transferred to beautiful surroundings.

I’m Totally Fine is nowhere close to fine. It is awful, janky and awkward but displays this as slick and charming rather than what it actually is, dull, typecast and moronic. Brandon Dermer directs this piece with flat qualities right at the core, a trip away that delivers absolutely nothing of truthful or interesting perspective for the grieving experience. Jillian Bell’s attempt to hold it together would be much stronger if the script were punchier, and articulated better. Interesting would help, too. Vanessa, being forced into potentially having a party marks one of many fateful and drawn-out interactions. It reveals the core problem of this piece. Grieving does not inherently turn someone into a disgusting person. Vanessa is presented as that, a biting character that hopes to rip the heads off of absolute strangers. It is possible, but not believable.

Even if that were the core value of I’m Totally Fine, it hopes to present its message of moving on through the impossible. It is insultingly twee with that fixation on grieving in an undignified way, as frequently showcased in the interactions of Vanessa and Jennifer (Natalie Morales). These are not bad performances, that is crucial to I’m Totally Fine and why a lot of it feels like such a disappointment. Bell and Morales are on solid form, but there is only so much a pairing can do when there is little chemistry to be worked from the script, even if an extra-terrestrial touch is hoping to shake things up a little. Worst of all though is that the crux of the plot, the whole meaning behind it, was staring Vanessa right in the face in a live, laugh, love template hanging above a mantlepiece.

As if that were not hilariously poor enough, it is the little sparkles that play over the top of it, cementing that, yes, “What we once enjoyed we can never lose”, written up in cheap Manhattan Darling typography, is the whole point. Any fundamental, basic discussion of grief would have been better than that. I’m Totally Fine would have been totally fine had it not rested its entire narrative on a pink banner that not even the most rigid and militaristic wine moms would hang in their own, flat, sleek and modern homes. I’m Totally Fine has the gall to suggest that influence, grief and the process of it all can be hung up on a wall. If it was aiming for funny then it did not show, if it was aiming for genuine discussion, then Dermer and company’s work fails at the first note. Instead, it feels drawn out for people moved by premise, not passion or placement of good quality work.