The old saying goes that you should never meet your heroes because they will never live up to your idealized view of them. In the case of Night Owls, it isn’t meeting your idols that is the problem, it’s inadvertently sleeping with your hero’s mistress in his bed as you find out everything you ever knew about him was a complete whitewash. In other words, it’s a bit more complicated. The hilarious, yet thought-provoking Night Owls forces the audience to consider what values should we celebrate, and which ones we should throw the window in order to pursue our own happiness.
Kevin (Adam Pally) is a low-level assistant on the coaching staff of Will Campbell (Peter Krause), the football coach of the Allen State University Owls. Kevin not only works for Coach Campbell, but he worships the ground the longtime community icon walks on. Though Kevin possesses a jock mentality and has been an ASU fan since childhood — he even has the ASU fight song as his ringtone — he’s clearly not made of stern stuff and appears to get by on the staff by being a pushover. At a banquet to send the team off to a championship game in Los Angeles, Kevin picks up Madeline (Rosa Salazar) and she takes him home. However, Kevin soon discovers her “home” is really the home of Coach Campbell, and that Madeline is his former mistress. Kevin soon realizes he is stuck with Madeline in Coach Campebell’s house all night, and over the course of the evening — which runs an emotional gauntlet between those two — Madeline gradually shatters the lofty allusions Kevin has of Coach Campbell. The night becomes an introspective one for him as he realizes that a person he believed in his whole life is not the paragon of virtue that he always thought he was.
From a storytelling standpoint, Night Owls is a low-budget movie about obstacles. While the entire movie takes place in one house, it involves two people “dueling” over points of view. Because of that, its an actor’s movie, and thankfully both Pally and Salazar have the chops to pull the script off. Director/co-writer Charles Hood and co-writer Seth Goldsmith challenged themselves with a dialogue-heavy script that deals with serious subject matter but manages to be very humorous.
Night Owls also comments on — in a roundabout way — our culture’s obsession with deifying big-name college coaches. Much has been written about the corruption and underhanded tactics within NCAA football and basketball in recent years, and men often hailed as heroes have been either ruined or spent many news cycles dodging reputation-ruinining rumors. For example, Kevin predicts that if Madeline goes to the press about her affair with Coach Campbell, sports media would quickly forgive him and portray the following season as a “road to redemption” story. It’s hard to argue that he’s not right.
There usually doesn’t seem like there’s much you can do with a single location, but Hood and cinematographer Adrian Correia manage to make Campbell’s house a maze of emotional confusion that is navigated by Kevin and Madeline over the course of the film. In fact, I wouldn’t be shocked to see Night Owls the Play some day because the dialogue and character development of the two leads is far beyond most “chatty” indie movies.
So yes, never meet heroes. But if you insist on doing so, meet their mistresses first — they’ll tell you the truth and reveal much about yourself in the process. And you might just end up with a funny dark comedy in the process.
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