Review: BURNING BODHI: The Tale's More Scattered Than The Ashes

(The 22nd Annual Sedona International Film Festival, running from February 20th through February 28th, is featuring more than 160 films, including documentaries, features, shorts, animation and foreign films. The following is one of a series of reviews of selected films from the Festival.)

Passion and sensibility cannot be denied to Matthew McDuffie, the writer and director of BURNING BODHI, which premiered in 2015 at the Austin Film Festival and is one of the features in this year's Sedona International Film Festival. Following in the tradition of reunion films (most notably The Big Chill), he has planted the seeds of a compelling tale. In its execution, however, the seeds don't germinate into a tightly knit whole.

When the news of Bodhi's untimely death reaches old high school friends, they return home. Like scattered ashes, each had drifted away to define their lives and to escape old pains and unresolved issues. Truth is that there's no escaping one's demons until they're met head on. The demons bide their time, and at some point in one's life, there's a reckoning. That point in BURNING BOHDI is the mother and child and father and old friends and lovers reunion in a small town in New Mexico.

The good news is that McDuffie has created a platform for two compelling and finely nuanced performances by Kaley Cuoco and Cody Horn, and he's gathered an accomplished supporting cast.

As Katy, the girl left behind, now a mother, descended into a morass of drugs and booze, on probation and doing community service, disheveled, unfulfilled, and forlorn, Cuoco displays the range and depth of her acting chops ~ and her performance alone may be worth the price of the ticket.

One of the other girls left behind is Ember, the eternal flower child, whose plan is to have a FUN-eral, a surrealist midsummer night's affair, replete with crayons and flowers and balloons. Cody Horn plays the role with subtlety and a winsome appeal, befitting the definition of her character's name ~ a small piece of glowing coal in a dying fire.

Angst is personified by Dylan (Landon Liboiron), the reluctant returnee, whose disappointments and anger abound and boil ~ with his cuckolded father (Andy Buckley), his mother (Virginia Madsen), his girl friend (Meghann Fahy), and with Katy. Liboiron chews up the celluloid with merciless fulminations that make their sudden dissipation into remorse and reconciliation all the more unconvincing. His counterparts, all versatile and gifted actors, play their parts full and well, but the imbalance is palpable.

Sure there are a number of tender moments in the film. However, they get overwhelmed by a lot of sound and fury, and the messages of forgiveness and redemption that the film intends to signify get lost in a clutter of weakly constructed and disconnected subplots. For every burning body in BURNING BODHI, there is a phoenix waiting still to soar.

Photo credit to BURNING BODHI