The sandwich club
Google Translate launched in 2006. Over the next few years, online teens and young adults, like myself, made a game out of using it to warp passages of text by translating from English to another language to another, and so on, finally back to English. The results were often funny, not because they were purely nonsense but because they bore enough resemblance to the source material that you could usually map words and phrases from the output back to the source, with some absurdism tossed in for good measure. The tool has gotten a lot better in the years since, though some of the newly added languages still struggle. I just messed around with it for five minutes and morphed the opening of Hamlet’s Act 3 soliloquy into the following:
To buy or not: the question is:
Pain is healthy.
Best Parts and Parts, .
or naval weapons
I thought a lot about those old Google Translate shenanigans as I watched Ham on Rye. It was my best comparison point for the type of quasi-comprehensible dream language and logic that the film operates in. It’s like Tyler Taormina, debut director and co-writer, took a coming of age movie — not just the dialogue, but the narrative structure and themes and imagery and archetypes — and let Google Translate scramble it into surreality, but a recognizable surreality.
Ham on Rye could only be made by someone who deeply understands and loves teen films, but also kind of hates them. I absolutely relate. This is a film resentful of how formulaic and turnkey the genre can become. So many moments of the film are stock coming-of-age characters and situations but turned inside out and punch-drunk. If it’s operating in the subconscious, it’s not quite a nightmare; more like a jaw-clenching anxiety dream or the fractured mind wanders of dozing off. The result is a deeply bracing and surprising film even when it’s slow and obtuse.
The first half of the film is a hangout anti-comedy about a bizarre social ritual that takes place at a sandwich shop called Monty’s. Groups of teens take interminable journeys through suburban streets to arrive at the deli. Some people never show. Their banter is a gargled, tear-streaked argot, nearly recognizable as filler teen dialogue but inexplicably off-center. The characters talk about nothing but also everything in a way that’s either gibberish or back-of-the-napkin poetry or both. Throughout these early scenes, the teens constantly ponder what happens after: after they arrive at Monty’s, after they do whatever is done at the shop, and, most of all, the great big after that follows.
Everything in Ham on Rye is created with sincerity coupled with hallucination that occasionally borders on dada. But the heart is there, as are the approximate shapes of tropes. For example, Ham on Rye features one of the great “teens singing in a car” scenes of recent memory, which will make literally any film better, but it has a hazy blip-of-consciousness quality to it, like the characters will vanish the second they’re offscreen. The ceremony at Monty’s itself is remarkably joyful and tense: part prom, part bar mitzvah, part crazy after-party (and all mating ritual). The nitrous-oxide giddiness of the film rises and rises to an apotheosis with a fantastical payoff.
Then comes the film’s second half. It’s downbeat and slow and cruel and empty. The people who are left behind in the sleepy hometown wither. A boy in a wheelchair (“he fell in a pothole!”) gets abandoned by his mother in a parking lot. Losers hanging out at a convenience store and mock the clerk. Everyone drives around aimlessly and bickers with each other. They fondly remember when they had aspirations. One girl sadly calls her friends over and over; they never answer. Life that once had a shining promise to it now slowly rusts. The film’s only professional actors are three former child stars who appear in one scene: Nickelodeon legends Lori Beth Denberg and Danny Tambarelli plus Heavyweights and Mighty Ducks star Aaron Schwartz. They represent the film’s sense of lost potential — kids who were briefly Hollywood names on the rise but are now a bit of “remember them?” trivia. They sadly play Uno next to a campfire at night.
The film ends exactly as it begins, with a panoramic view of people living their lives at a park on a summer day. But everything has changed, at least in the eyes of the viewer: We know all these people are haunted by demons and deferred dreams, depressively making the most of an existence that will never live up to the youthful hopes they once had. It’s the maggoty underbelly of the coming-of-age film: What if nothing comes with age?
Ham on Rye will surely find more haters than lovers. (The Rotten Tomatoes user score hovers in the 20s, and that audience is already self-selecting.) The story deliberately underexplains its arc, preferring dreamy snapshots and vignettes. Per Taormina, he did not permit the cast to have full copies of the script, only the lines for their scenes, so the sense that nobody’s quite sure what is going on is authentic. But those of us with an appetite for gentle avant garde that still hews to familiar themes and cinematic language will find one of the most original teen stories in a generation, an off-kilter tone poem on both youthful ecstasy and depressive agony.
The bifurcated structure and U-turn of tones that still all feel part of a Mobius strip whole leaves me no doubt that Taormina is a David Lynch fan. Ham on Rye is Mulholland Drive but for chipped-paint suburbia rather than glitzy Hollywood, weaponizing and splintering ensemble teen comedies rather than erotic crime thrillers. It has that same Lynchian uncanniness, too, of a world with its shoelaces tied together.
Despite the difficulty in pinning down much in the film, it offers a rich and round thematic landscape. The two times I’ve seen it, I’ve found very different ways to take it in. I think there’s a strong case to apply a queer reading to the film: The left behind crowd are those who failed to pair off in a hetero-normative ritual. The closest the film offers as a lead is Haley (Haley Bodell), who is overly clingy and affectionate with her girlfriends, but reticent towards the boys and proceedings at Monty’s. There are also moments where Ham on Rye evokes incurable wounds of childhood suffering and mistakes that are difficult to talk about, of lingering trauma or ghosts, without putting too fine a point on it. And there’s an apocalyptic undertone to the story, like the characters might be stuck in purgatory.
What is incontrovertibly good is the film’s look and production on a microbudget. Ham on Rye has frankly spoiled me on other dim and vibeless indies. Carson Lund, the cinematographer, manages a look that flows between glowing and smudgy with grace and beauty. The daytime scenes, in particular, are distinct; the lighting is a bit overexposed, giving a gauzy sensation. Taormina has credited Lund as a significant creative partner for the film, and Lund has since become a director himself with the divisive baseball comedy Eephus that debuted this year. If it operates anywhere near the creative register of Ham on Rye, I think I’ll love it.
Somehow I’ve barely mentioned how funny the film is. Like any piece of comedy built on surreality, of people saying ridiculous things juxtaposed with ordinary situations, it’s a bit hit and miss. But when it hits, it’s a thing of hysterical beauty. There’s a monologue towards the end of the film about an oyster that I fully plan to memorize. The same stoner character offers an improvised proposal for the origin of the universe (and vacuums) that is not far behind. The young actors bring some great physical comedy during the dancing scenes, too; they dance like extras in A Charlie Brown Christmas.
I’m hesitant to even publish this review with so high a score and such enthusiasm because Ham on Rye truly may have an audience of one in me. I am certain that this is a film that will not work for the large majority of watchers. But it is immediately a Certified Dan Classic, a cursed little gem I’ll watch whenever I’m in a teen movie rut and want to see the genre’s insides delicately scooped out and put on display.
Is It Good?
Exceptionally Good (7/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.