Marmalade

Recently incarcerated, Baron and his new cellmate Otis hatch a daring plan to bust out of prison, while Baron recalls how he came to meet the love of his life, a young woman named Marmalade, and how they came up with a scheme to rob a bank.

Marmalade is the story of Baron, long-haired and lovestruck, and newly imprisoned after robbing a bank. But Baron isn’t a bad guy, he’s a sweet-natured doofus who takes care of his ailing mother, a guy who was recently fired from his job as a local mailman, and really only decided to try and rob a bank after he found himself unemployed, with no other options in a slowly dying small town, just as the Pharmaceutical company raised the price on his mother’s desperately needed medicine.

Well… after  all that, and also after he happened to meet a manic pixie dream bankrobber by the unlikely name of Marmalade, a wild and carefree spirit, rolling into town one day in a most likely recently stolen 60s-era boat of a Cadalliac convertible, in her pink tresses, her pink dresses, and her pink boots. She’s a woman who seems to know her way around guns pretty well, and also how to rob banks, almost like she’s done it before.

Plus, she really seems to like Baron, and he really likes her, so it’s…

Baron is telling his story all in an effort to convince Otis—a man with a long history of jailbreaks—to help him break out of jail, all for the promise of a big fat pile of bank robbery money, and as the story goes on it becomes apparent that while Marmalade and Baron are the usual suspects, a modern day Bonnie and Clyde, this is not your usual “bank robbery gone wrong” kind of movie.

I don’t want to go into it too much, because there’s a couple of fun and fairly clever little twists in this film, and I don’t want to spoil them for you.

What I will say is this… Marmalade is delightful and unexpected, and it is definitely worth checking out. It’s a clever little comedy that plays with your expectations, while also being a classic tale of wild young love, with all the betrayals and chases and tricks that you want in a crime movie, that ends up feeling pretty fresh.

Filmed right here in small town Minnesota in order to get that really accurate “depressed, one-stoplight, dead-end town that is well past a prime that wasn’t ever anything special in the first place” kind of feel, the movie also included a quick scene that was shot in the same building where my wife and I got married—which is always a treat to see when that happens. It’s also always interesting when a movie is shot in Minnesota, but is then at the very least implied that it takes place in some other area. Watching the film, I would’ve guessed it was set in Tennessee or Indiana, somewhere Central/Eastern/Southern U.S., which it may have been, at least as far as the narrative was concerned, but it was all shot in Minnesota. That’s an experience that reminds me of watching the movie Beautiful Girls, a film that, during my first viewing, I missed when it was mentioned that the film was supposed to take place in upstate New York, and so, because it was clearly shot in the area of Stillwater and Minneapolis, I could not figure out how the main character was supposed to drive to NYC in 4 fours. From Minneapolis? I mean, his fiancé mentions he drives fast, but god damn…

Anyway…

Baron and Marmalade, played by Joe Keery (Stranger Things, Fargo) and Camila Monroe (Al Pacino’s stepdaughter) are great together. Baron is sweet and innocent and well-meaning, and often confused, while Marmalade is all wild war whoops and sweetly seductive smiles with an ocean of raw emotion roiling beneath the surface. Otis, played by Aldis Hodge (Black Adam) is pretty much the same as he always is, a decent presence that at least doesn’t detract from the film, more handsome than talented maybe, but still, decent enough as an actor.

Overall, the film is clever, fun and funny, so even if a couple of plot points don’t connect as cleanly as they should, it doesn’t matter, because Marmalade is not just a good time, it’s also not what I unexpected, both before I started watching it, and also while I was watching it.

I’m sure that you know all probably know by now that I love a good heist film, especially when the “criminals” get away with it, and most especially when it’s not in the way I expected, so…

Big thumbs up.