Paddleton is a 2019 drama about an unlikely friendship between two misfit neighbors that becomes an unexpectedly emotional journey when the younger man is diagnosed with terminal cancer.
The opening scene in director Alex Lehmann‘s Paddleton doesn’t pull any punches and goes right for the jugular in terms of getting on with its endgame, allowing the rest of the story to be something else. It’s smart and clever, but it’s also strangely funny, not because anything about what we’re hearing should be, but because the people talking feel genuinely bound to each other, even as we only just met them. It’s a sad story yet it’s also remarkably honest, playing deep into its natural quirkiness without ever once making it about that.
Michael (Mark Duplass) is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Two doctors tell him so. It’s not his wife or girlfriend or mother or children or brother or sister who stands with him when the news comes, but instead Andy (Ray Romano), his friend and upstairs neighbor. They’re close, with no one else in their lives, living on the fringe of town, spending most of their time watching old kung-fu movies, eating pizza, and playing a homemade game called paddleton, which is basically bouncing a small ball off a wall and into an old barrel. Not wanting to let the disease take him out, Michael opts for prescriptive suicide and asks Andy to be with him for it.
Part road trip movie – as the two drive six hours one way to get the drugs – part bromance, Paddleton plays, at least on first contact, into the obvious, but emerges not long after as something far more subtle. Michael and Andy are dear friends who bond in the simple routines, Andy entrenched in the relationship out of a deeper loneliness that stems from his clear dislike for people in general. This creates a partnership that leaves many to think they are lovers, though this is but a passing observation. What they are is symbiotic, and with the reality that one is one his way out, it leaves the other in chaos.
Duplass has always found a way to make himself feel very lived in, even when his films get absurd, and surely, Paddleton has potential to be that, yet he keeps things as genuine as possible. However, let’s be clear. This is Romano’s movie. And it’s surely meant to be. He is, as he puts it, ‘the other guy,’ struggling to figure out how to take care of someone he loves while realizing that soon a terrible void is coming. It’s devastating to watch. It’s also uneasily funny because it feels so real.
There’s a lot layered in the simple setting and relatively small cast, the story hinged on a decision that both know has to be made. Naturally, it’s on an incline, funneling us to a conclusion that seems impossible to avoid, yet even as it might take a few missteps, this is a powerful invitation into the lives of two deeply shadowed men. It’s a story ripe with potential contrivances that many take to melodrama. Not so here, the men drawing close to a finality that isn’t awash in big emotional set pieces flooded in sweeping orchestral music. It’s instead a quiet, intimate portrayal of inevitability that is one of the most honest human moments in recent memory.