Sundance: "Strawberry Mansion" review

by Jason Adams

"Out of my hair and into my home, to enter you must lick the ice cream cone," is how one character greets another in the trippy and lovingly strange Strawberry Mansion from writer-directors Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney. That invitation gives y'all your gist -- if you wanna enter a movie that will bestow such a whimsical greeting upon you at the door then you're probably in the right place. And it only gets weirder once you've come in. It's up to you whether you're willing to let the Strawberry wash over you. Me, I was mostly tickled. Pinkish, you know...

Besides co-writing and co-directing the film indie-stalwart Kentucker himself, looking like Spike Jonze stretched out several inches, plays our leading man James Preble.He's a sort of Minority Report for accountants -- he deep dives into a person's memories via an elaborate cardboard robot headset and then visualizes their costs of living life along the way. Here one dreamed of a hot air balloon, and there a tree branch, add ten, carry the two -- Preble (pronounced like Fruity Pebbles) carelessly takes notes in his little notebook calculating former expenditures for the IRS presence in this slightly off-center sci-fi world.

It's at the door of a grinning Arabella Isadora (played by Penny Fuller as an older woman and by Grace Glowicki once we start tripping into Bella's youth) where that seminal ice cream cone is offered, and Preble can't refuse a good lick -- and here one is reminded of what happens when one licks a hallucinogenic toad as Kentuucker's screen-sized tongue bears down in slow-motion and lo, the film's title appears. The moment feels of import.

But it's not like the world of Strawberry Mansion only turns weird post-cone -- this is no Dorothy into Oz situation; we've already at this point watched Preble order a chicken smoothie under a sky of fast food signs as a man in a Northern European seeming folk costume made of grass clumps watches on. If you saw the movie called The Twentieth Century last year (and if you haven't I recommend it) or anything from the mind of Michel Gondry then you'll feel comfortable and safe by plenty inside this ketamine dream-space that Audley & Birney have crafted for us.

The delights are in the details, in the sifting through the drawers of this golly-it's-cuckoo Playhouse here, so I don't want to spoil too many of Strawberry Mansion's quirkified surprises -- I found it a lovely place to visit but then I maybe have an excessively high tolerance for this sort of thing; your mileage will most assuredly vary. And even as a fan I'll admit I wish the clever outlandishness ultimately felt in service of something more -- at its heart the film's your basic heterosexual love story dressed up in frills and given some mouse-men in sailor costumes to spin around. The ride's a gas but an awful lot dissipates upon reentry.

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