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Used every way she can be, Ellie struggles through demeaning auditions, bad relationships and idiotic acting classes all for the sake of her ever-diminishing art.

A tormented believer in method acting, Ellie battles her best friend Sam about process and the battle results in a fully self-aware, and fabulously ridiculous, contest for tears. The melodrama of Ellie's work and the life that bleeds into it is fantastic in its absurdity. One can hardly overcome embarrassment for her. Incompetent at living her life, she seems only able to play act, and she doesn't quite have a handle on that either.

A character with little ground beneath her feet, Ellie is tested extensively, and the environment in which she surrounds herself is lousy with potential confrontation. As a reflection of the narrative challenges of the film, the aesthetic (if I can call it that) feels arbitrary. Camera placements are easy to question and close camera work seldom looks logically motivated. While the script is littered with bits of insight as well as catharsis about the caustic craft of acting Ellie Parker seeks less to tell a story than to explore an idea.

Accepted as a short to Sundance in 2001, you can occasionally sense that the film's been "extended". That old adage that all you need is a camera and a good story is tested with Ellie Parker. If it's true that all you need is a camera and a good story, then why aren't all well written independent films quality products? Ellie Parker offers a strange answer to this question in the penultimate scene. Ellie, goes to a call back and is auditioned by a pack of drunk and medicated European Producers talking about how their film will not be Hollywood: It will be "art". In response, Ellie seems unable to access the life trauma that feeds her method. These producers confirm the artifice Ellie has been struggling to produce is self-indulgent and narcissistic. At this same point, the seemingly random cinematography and editing, mirrors this conclusion. When, at the beginning of the film, the aesthetics appeared to be some comment upon the natural state of people and performance, given time, we find out it's simply unmotivated. Slowly, we see the camera work is a product of necessity (i.e. the camera's close because there's no room for the camera operator). And though that asks some to exercise tolerance (particularly for the sea sick) it finally produces a parallel to the plotline at large. This anti-aesthetic has a purpose. Still, it is questionable if the purpose was a deliberate one.

Though the film is lacking in some areas, the central theme of identity is alone in a context of personal insecurities and make-believe, and that is a statement in itself. If the filmmakers and the characters were complicit in the plight of Ellie Parker, Ellie's status as abject would hardly be as successful. The audience's own sense of humor and consequence is required for the viewing of the film: when we laugh, we laugh at the characters, which requires us to keep our own values in check. And as Ellie is on such shaky ground we really do need to keep our bearings, because following around an actress is dodgy business.