It’s the first high school basketball game of the season and all of Cayuga, N.M., population 492, is cheering on the Statesmen at the gym. Except for the town’s two brightest kids, Ever…
and was scooped up by Amazon the night before its Toronto premiere, the first-time director is content to let his leads light up the shadows with their conversation about science and technology.For a while, he doesn’t even film their faces, just the back-view as Everett chain-smokes and Fay races to keep up with him, ponytail swinging, and clutching her new tape recorder. The effect is, well, alienating.
“The Vast of Night” is all about execution. Its B-movie plot is so familiar that writers James Montague and Craig W. Sanger unabashedly frame the story as an episode of a TV show called “Paradox Theater,” an on-the-nose “Twilight Zone” imitation that’s the closest the film gets to nostalgia. Otherwise, “The Vast of Night’s” young cast and crew view the 1950s without sentimentality.
Instead, the film has a let’s-put-on-a show energy. The audience can sense the cast and crew’s verve to not just complete the picture, but pull it off with style. Once Miguel I.
From there, “The Vast of Night” takes flight. At the midpoint, Patterson wows with a tracking shot that seems to race a half-mile down a quiet street, take a left-hook through a parking lot, sprint through an ongoing basketball game, and zip up the crowded bleachers before plunging out of a window. It’s effective razzle-dazzle that will probably get the young Oklahoman hired to make something 20 times “The Vast of Night’s” budget.
However, audiences who’ve lived in small towns, themselves — or towns that felt small, no matter the size – will appreciate the nuances in “The Vast of Night’s” script that give it emotion and weight. When Everett boasts that he’s getting out of Cayuga for a city, Patterson watches the way Fay’s smile wavers. Even though she’s as clever as he is, perhaps even moreso, the girl can’t imagine getting to have a better life than working on a bigger switchboard, a job that we know soon won’t exist.
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