All I Want is a 2018 comedy romance about the anxiety of modern love and life among friends in a big city.
Every generation seems to have one or two movies like West Liang‘s latest All I Want, a mostly single setting dramatic comedy where a group of old friends get together and hash out demons from their pasts, most drawing comparisons with one of the trailblazers in the genre, Lawrence Kasdan‘s 1992 classic The Big Chill. The recent Sally Potter black comedy The Party certainly shares lineage to this and All I Want surely feels familiar as such, it being another social gathering where conflicts arise, yet despite its cast of mostly unknowns and a limited budget, strikes a welcome tone with some honest performances and its heart exactly in the right place.
It’s the story of Mel (Melissa Center) and Andrew (Drew Rausch), a young couple about to celebrate ten years of marriage. They seem a happy pair, in a nice home, a satisfying sexual partnership and genuine trust, at least by appearances. For their anniversary, they’ve decided to throw a big party at their house, inviting some family members and their closest friends to share in their achievement. These are some colorful characters of course, with plenty of history between them, obviously very close but carrying all kinds of baggage as they struggling with moving on to the next stage. However, amid all this, Mel and Andrew are harboring a secret, one that is clearly weighing on them throughout. They search for the right time to reveal it to the group, knowing that when they do, it will have profound effect on them all.
Co-written by Center and Liang and filmed with barely any money, All I Want is an adult story even as it embraces some comedic overtones. The guests are a mix of assorted personalities all looking to find some place in the world, a few cynical, others still untainted by the weights of being grown up and others already bitter. This means that while we orbit around Mel and Andrew as they consider their announcement, others linger about the living room in continually rotating pairs trying to connect even though they are already familiar. When Mel eventually and suddenly lowers the boom, it does indeed change the dynamic and the party becomes a house divided as the night careens off track.
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It’s probably a little unfair to throw The Big Chill into this, creating a kind of expectation that All I Want not only can’t fulfill but really doesn’t try to do. While the ensemble cast certainly makes it easy to draw lines to a number of movies in the genre, at least Liang and Center work to make this their own. The story is of course not entirely original, yet the script is very well written with strong, convincing dialogue and a host of good performances that really give this some well-earned momentum. These are ordinary people with ordinary looks and ordinary jobs and ordinary ambitions and because so, lend themselves to a certain authenticity that really makes identifying with them easy. That absolutely makes a difference.
All I Want isn’t a flashy melodrama, even as it plays by rules we’ve seen many times before, taking hold of a few obvious clichés that seem impossible to escape in this kind of film. It also avoids a few and builds honest moments with these relationships, this clearly a passion project for the talented Center who truly binds this all together. Warm, sentimental and even a little challenging, this is one of those rare little Indie gems that proves it doesn’t take big money to make it work. And that’s exactly what All I Want does. It works.
All I Want is now available on Amazon