Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Seneca debuted at last year’s HBO New York Latino Film Festival, and is now available on the platform’s streaming services. It’s an earnest drama about a Puerto Rican-born actor living in New York City and experiencing a crisis so difficult to define, it goes from personal to outright existential.
SENECA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: David Seneca (Armando Riesco) can’t pry himself away from the news. It’s 2017, and Puerto Rico is devastated by Hurricane Maria. He grew up there, and still owns his father’s house in San Juan, but only a few distant cousins still live on the island. His obsession with the media coverage jibes all too well with his relative inactivity — he’s a career actor with significantly more free time than gigs. And he can’t avoid the topic; whenever people he meets learn that he’s Puerto Rican despite his light skin and lack of a Spanish accent, they say, “It’s so sad what happened” or make a Trump-throwing-paper-towels joke.
From the looks of things, David is in his early 40s, and the sirens warning of a midlife crisis blare loudly: He and his wife Bianca (Susan Misner) are experiencing a profound disconnect. She supports their life in a nice apartment with their six-year-old daughter Annette (Claudia Morcate-Martin). His 20-something friend/protege Pedro (Moises Acevedo) lands a prime Broadway gig and makes professional connections for David, who never follows up. David takes some commercial voiceover work and gives private diction lessons to people with foreign accents. And an old friend and mentor, Father Ruben (Tony Plana), is going through cancer treatment in Puerto Rico, but David never reaches out to see how he’s doing.
David just keeps kicking cans down the road: He’ll pursue that job lead, he’ll call Ruben, he’ll go to Puerto Rico and assess the damage to the house his father left him. But he never does anything. Whatever is going on, he can’t pinpoint. Pedro invites him to a party to meet a Broadway director, and David, feeling like an outsider, steps into the bathroom and has a panic attack. His anger boils over when a racist creep tells David to make the bilingual Annette speak English — so he clobbers the guy in a cafe and becomes the unwitting star of a viral video. Something has to give.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The showbiz-insider stuff brings to mind Pamela Adlon’s extraordinary series Better Things and Lake Bell’s movie-trailer-voiceover comedy In a World, with a slight pinch of the immigrant drama A Better Life.
Performance Worth Watching: Plana, who enjoys a terrific third-act scene that’s terrifically naturalistic in its drama, is the movie’s secret weapon.
Memorable Dialogue: An industry veteran tells David that he wanted him for a TV series, but the role went to a name actor instead. “Would you hurry up and become a f—in’ name?” he jokes — although David obviously doesn’t think it’s much of a joke.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: But that’s not all: David’s daughter is scared of him after the violent coffeeshop incident, his marriage is kaput, his professional jealousy boils over with Pedro and when he finally gets a decent break with a video game voice gig, he’s asked to do a racist caricature of a Latino gangster. He moves into a cruddy little apartment, takes up meditation and exercise, pares his life literally down to bare walls and makes friends with the single mom Camila (Shirley Rumierk) who lives upstairs.
The film frequently cuts back to a conversation David had with Ruben, just before he left Puerto Rico for New York, and clearly, this was a profound relationship for our protagonist. But what director Jason Chaet — who co-writes with Armando Riesco — doesn’t make clear is how this element of David’s personality ties into his crisis of identity. David had issues with his father, who thought acting was “for gays and communists”; David struggles with fatherhood are innately tied to his simultaneous pride and shame for his violent outburst against a racist man; David struggles with being a mentor for Pedro. David is Puerto Rican, but he doesn’t look Puerto Rican. Who is David, exactly?
Like life, Seneca doesn’t offer any easy answers. But the hurricane of identity issues the movie inflicts on David doesn’t always feel enough like life to be more than just a solid drama rooted in thought-provoking realities. The character’s exasperation with Trump-era social politics could be a movie in itself — one that I think many of us would find painfully relevant — but it’s just another beat or two in an overstuffed screenplay. (And frankly, the “Kitty City” that Camila’s daughter builds as an arts-and-crafts reflection of New York is the overly cutesy stuff of overly twee indie dramedies; of course, she helps David build his own quasi-therapeutic shoebox dioramas.) All this adds up to a level of calculation that lessens Seneca‘s ability to land a more direct emotional punch.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite its flaws, Seneca is a well-meaning story of a modern Latino-American man’s struggle to define himself.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.
