Lord Finn -- A Movie Review

Lord Finn, Official Trailer

My friend Al Mertens has a film out. His first as writer and director. He graciously allowed me to view it prior to its release and asked me to review it.


In Shakespeare, theater is either history with familiar names and events and outcomes. Or it is comedy with laughs and obstacles to the inevitable happily-ever-afters. Or it is tragedy where the hero is a person of high birth or one who holds a position of status.  And that hero’s journey unravels because of his own character flaws.

Lord Finn is a tragedy. But certainly not a Shakespearean tragedy. Daniel Finley, well-played by Ben Richardson, is Lord Finn and he hates Shakespeare. The old English speech he enters and exits seamlessly are of Mallory’s King Arthur or Dickens, not Shakespeare.

This heartbreakingly realistic film follows three main characters, none of whom is high born or holds a position of status. They are the people we’d rather not know.

Daniel Finley, his father is a Native American and his mother an Anglo, is mentally ill. The movie opens with him on the ground out behind an Indian casino. His speech is absurd, nonsensical. And his manner, aggressive. You and I see people like him on the street. We avoid eye-contact and pretend that they don’t exist.

Jasmine, a Native American prostitute, enters the story by inducing a car thief to help her steal a john’s car. She’s not the kind of woman a man would bring home to his mother or a mother would point to proudly.

And Cheer, a hostile, white, lesbian, prison inmate. She’s in for selling drugs. We meet her in an AA meeting inside the penitentiary. Even her fellow cons dislike her.

They’re not traditional Shakespearean characters with traditional character flaws like ambition or jealousy. With all their problems, their tragic flaw is how they deal with the tragedies in their lives. It’s how Daniel and Jasmine deal with loss. And for Cheer, it’s how she deals with never having had.
Daniel refuses to take his medication. Jasmine fills her sleepless nights with drugs and johns. And Cheer uses people, alcohol, and whatever other drugs she can get hold of to make her way in whatever world she’s in.

Each of them is an outcast. The movie brings us into their lives. Our sense of discomfort with people like them dissolves and we no longer want to ignore them. We no longer dismiss them with the old saw “There but for the grace of God….” We want to know how they got like that, what’s going to become of them.

Sissie, Daniel’s beloved, younger sister is played by Suzy Weller. She touches the heart of the story -- of all our stories -- when she says twice, “He’s all alone in there.” Once of her brother and once of their father.

Each of the three -- Jasmine, Cheer, and Lord Finn -- is all alone in there.

Lord Finn has abandoned sanity and rejected that part of himself that is his father. Jasmine, played by the beautiful and talented Jamie Loy, has abandoned her birth name and the person she loves most. Sarahjoy Mount plays the mercurial Cheer, who moves from being victim to being predator and back again. She has abandoned freedom and any possibility of acceptance in the world for the surety of prison.

Each of them is like hail damage in a windshield. Fissures spread across the glass from pock mark to pock mark. To the people they should be or could be closest to. People who suffer their own damage.

In his debut film, Al Mertens has written and directed a serious film about people we all know. A father or a child. A girl we went to school with. Someone we once loved. And about us, too. As difficult as these people’s lives are…as difficult as our lives are…in the end, he reminds us that no matter how “alone in there” we feel, the truth is we are not alone.