Hi everyone!
One of the commitments for One Movie Punch in Year Three is to feature more microbudget and independent features. We’ve started to receive screeners from a variety of small independent distributors, featuring a wide variety of films. Every Wednesday, we hope to feature an independent and/or microbudget feature, with up to two interviews per month with the filmmakers when schedules allow.
Today’s review will cover Irish filmmaker Robbie Walsh’s EDEN, a microbudget drama looking at homelessness in Dublin after a recent economic crash. And it doesn’t get more microbudget than this film, made for just around 600 Euro in 2012, although not completed until 2016. I was lucky enough to sit down and speak with Robbie about the film, along with his film career and his brief MMA career. The full interview will be available at our Patreon page this Sunday, but you’ll hear snippets of the interview throughout today’s review. We’ll also be playing the full trailer audio for EDEN beforehand.
Subscribe to stay current with the latest releases.
Contribute at Patreon for exclusive content.
Connect with us over social media to continue the conversation.
Here we go!
/////
>
/////
Today’s movie is EDEN, the Irish microbudget drama written and directed by Robbie Walsh. Set against the dire homelessness crisis in Dublin, Ireland, EDEN follows a day in the life of Adam (Johnny Elliott), a homeless man living his life to the best of his ability. Throughout the day, he encounters a variety of Dubliners, struggling with their own problems, and a few willing to help him with his.
No spoilers.
I always get a little nervous when filmmakers tackle homelessness. I think the first film I saw that tackled homelessness was John Hughes’ last film, 1991’s CURLY SUE, where Bill Dancer (Jim Belushi) and his companion Curly Sue (Alisan Porter) pull scams to make enough to eat and conning a divorce lawyer into a heartwarming conclusion. The second instance was seeing another Hughes screenplay, 1991’s DUTCH, when Dutch (Ed O’Neill) must transport his girlfriend’s son Doyle (a very young Ethan Embry), and after losing their car, spend a night in a homeless shelter. The overall messaging in both films was positive, but making a comedy out of child homelessness and including a scene of a rich kid slumming it in a shelter cannot help but feel privileged. The same privilege sparked a more complex debate over 2014’s TIME OUT OF MIND, where Richard Gere played a homeless man on the streets of New York, including some method preparation by hanging out on the street. While this kind of effort also feels privileged, because Gere knows at any time he can just catch a cab home, it was also for a drama, which at least gets us moving in the right direction.
I’ve seen a new wave of films about homelessness that have gotten better at capturing the real plight, at least in the United States. 2016’s CARDBOARD BOXER saw Thomas Haden Church play a homeless man exploited by rich kids to participate in the atrocious phenomenon known as bum fights. It is a very difficult watch, and has its rough moments, but tackles way more than the tantalizing subject matter. 2018’s LEAVE NO TRACE saw the return of Debra Granik, the genius behind WINTER’S BONE, adapting a book based on the rumored lives of a father/daughter pair living completely off the grid in Oregon. The film not only showed a different side to homelessness, with a special focus on PTSD, but also the very real strains on families living off the grid. And now, as I’ve recently seen in Robbie Walsh’s EDEN, the situation isn’t just limited to the United States.
ROBBIE: "The inspiration itself came from a few different areas. At the time, I had recently just left the military and found myself in between jobs and in between homes, essentially. And at the time, I was lucky in that I still had a lot of my military equipment, like sleeping bags and what not, and I had my car, so I had a couple of weeks, and I was too embarrassed to tell my family I didn't have a job at the time, and eventually I did and I had to come back home, which was a huge thing you find with Irish people, especially if they travel overseas. And as we were making the film, our lead actor, Johnny Elliott, fantastic actor, as we were filming, he was literally the same thing, he was between homes and a couple of the actors who would guest, small roles, and a couple of two and unders, two lines and under, you know, one of the guys was my housemate, and he moved into the house with my producer, who we were all living together. We found out he was living in a doorway in the city center in town, in Dublin, and we were like, 'Dude, what are you doing?' And he was a dear friend of my friend Philip's, and he said, 'Yo, come on, come live in the house with us.' We helped get him back on his feet. Our cameraman was in between homes. He'd just been told his rent would be going up in his apartment, and he couldn't afford it, and he was trying to find somewhere else to live. Very, very rampant. One of the girls who was living with us was struggling to pay rent to the point where she didn't have a tv or anything. There was an actress, one of the finest actresses in the country, you know, and nothing. She could barely feed her kids, like, you know? We didn't know this until we were filming, and as we were filming, they were telling, sharing the stories, and telling the stories, you know? And I was just like, 'This is going to get worse before it gets better'."
If anyone is going to talk about homelessness in cinema, it should be those folks who have actually experienced homelessness. I’ve been lucky enough to have always had a roof over my head, but I’ve known a few people who’ve spent some time without a home, and the experience affects each person in similar and unique ways. EDEN’s cast and crew all have experienced some form of homelessness, and the authenticity shows in the storytelling and in the character’s portrayals. The hardest part about portraying the homeless is to not fall back on stereotypes, even if sometimes homelessness expresses itself in similar ways.
ROBBIE: “and that's where I tried to do as much as possible was to show slow descent into Adam's situation with each interaction, and each person will reflect a stage of life where Adam has probably found himself, and he's chosen to go left or right. Literally through no fault of his own, it's just because work dried up and he couldn't afford to pay the rent.”
Every character along Adam’s journey feels authentic, and each serves a unique purpose. Sarah Carroll plays Claire, a mother turning to sex work to make ends meet. Kelly Blaise plays a woman jumping to conclusions about Adam. Robbie Walsh himself gets in front of the camera as a taxi driver who had previously been homeless. And in Robbie’s favorite scene, Kevin O’Brien plays someone who just lost their job.
ROBBIE: “My favorite scene is the one where he sits on the park bench, and the guy sits beside him. At times, because of how Kev O'Brien plays this spoiled guy, he gets sympathy, you feel sympathy one second, then he's a sleazebag the next. And the next minute, I can see where people have done that. And then you're like, 'You know what, do you deserve it or don't you?'”
One of my favorite parts of speaking with the filmmakers for these special review episodes is that I get a chance to learn more about the process of how the film was made. I think films should be judged similar to how diving is judged at the Olympics; difficulty definitely plays into overall rating. I’m particularly interested in the constraints independent filmmakers are working under, and in the case of EDEN, just how much can be done with very little.
ROBBIE: “I filmed it in four days, because I didn't have the money, I had like 600 Euro, which works out at the time about $800, you know. When we finished filming after three days, my editor came to me, he's like, 'Robbie, you know, we need a bit more footage. We need another scene or otherwise we don't get the feature.' I was like, 'You know what, I have this great scene wrote for something else, but I think it might work. Let me see if these two guys are available.' And they were. We went down and shot the last day with just the two of them and a skeleton crew. I say a skeleton crew, it was my crew, my entire crew of four. And we got this wonderful, lovely scene that I really, really love, you know, and that... I don't know if it resonates with me but certainly my favorite scene in the film.”
I can’t think of many films that can be made for $800, at least not without a lot of sweat equity and team passion. Knowing this fact made my only concern about the film seem moot, a bit of shaky camera work in some scenes, particularly when Adam is playing with the producer’s dog, Lily. In fact, most of EDEN was shot in 2012, but finished up later on closer to 2016, when it first debuted. It has since been screened around the world, at a few festivals, and in support of the Simon Community in Dublin, which work to fight homelessness. Back to the diving analogy for a bit, this has to be one of the highest difficulties, and as such, EDEN excels well beyond its means.
The flipside of talking with the filmmakers is that sometimes you learn things you weren’t quite expecting. One of my favorite aspects of EDEN was the incredible scoring and soundtrack, mostly in the form of instrumental post-rock from an Irish musician named Andrew Mann. I was really excited to find out more about it, but wasn’t quite ready for the story that followed.
ROBBIE: “So I went along, and we got talking to this American girl at it, who was going out with an Irish musician, and I'd happen to mention to him that I was looking for music for a film, and his name was Andrew Mann.
ROBBIE: “And he went and sent me all of these pieces on, and then when I gave them to the editor, my editor rang me and he was like, 'Look, we can use this piece here, this piece...' He was literally reading my mind. And the closing song is from a friend of mine, a really great band called Keywest. If you guys check them, if you want to check them out, they are a fantastic Irish band, and there's a little bit of music from Richard Geraghty, but Andrew Mann scored mostly the entire film.”
ROBBIE: “Unfortunately, Andrew Mann passed away earlier this year. It was a very complicated situation, and it was by his own hands. It was literally two weeks or three weeks after the film had gotten its theatrical release. There was a lot of, a lot of personal... very public, very personal stuff that was really out in the world, and himself and the girl he was with a very long time, had kind of taken their own lives. I can't really talk much more about it because I don't know the intricacies of what happened, you know. Really nice guy. Fantastic musician."
Suicide sucks, and that’s coming from someone who suffers from anxiety and depression and has had more than one bout of suicidal thoughts. It also happens at a higher rate among those in poverty and dealing with homelessness. Mental illness isn’t necessarily something someone has but is a situation that can be brought about by the right circumstances. In these tough economic times, it’s easy to slip into that downward spiral. For anyone out there that might be having similar thoughts, please reach out to anyone and seek professional help.
On a side note before we wrap up, Robbie Walsh was also an MMA fighter, Ireland’s first MMA title holder by luck of the card. You can hear more about it in the full interview on Sunday, but what’s truly inspiring is how he leveraged that experience for filmmaking.
ROBBIE: “Actually, that's how I got my money to make ACES, my short film. I had no money to make it, so I fought in a cage and got some money together and made my short film ACES. I went then to get it into Cannes, and after that, it was pretty stoked about that. It was the first short I had directed, then I went on to do some coaching in boxing. A decent MMA career but I had to hang up the gloves because I was too old, too tired, and too blind."
If “filmmaker does cage fighting to fund his craft” isn’t an inspiring story, I don’t know what is.
EDEN is a marvelous microbudget drama dealing with homelessness in Dublin, as seen through a day in the life of one man. Constrained by a $800 budget and a quick four day shoot, the cast and crew of EDEN manage to leverage an incredible amount of a value from a very low cost, authentically held together by great acting and an excellent score. Coming in at a tight 76 minutes, EDEN is a quick, but powerful watch recommended for anyone who advocates for the homeless, or to see how great the microbudget scene can be.
Rotten Tomatoes: NR
Metacritic: NR
One Movie Punch: 7.5/10
EDEN (2016) is not rated and is currently playing on Amazon Prime, OPPrime TV, UK Film Channel, and on VOD.
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free