Heather Matarazzo turns 26 next month. Matarazzo was still in her early teens when she starred in Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse, in which she gave a brave, risky performance as the iconically dislikable high school nerd Dawn Weiner; in her most recent movie appearance, in Hostel II, she got to hang upside down while a naked woman split her open with a scythe. Whether her future roles will give her more of a chance to show what she can do as an actress, she's already confirmed the promise of her work in Dollhouse. She's never been more affecting than in Getting to Know You, a first feature directed by Lisanne Skyler from a screenplay she adapted from stories by Joyce Carol Oates. Matarazzo plays Judith, who arrives with her pissed-off, uncommunicative brother, Wesley (played by a not-yet-irritating Zach Braff) at the bus station where they'll be waiting to go their separate ways. Judith strikes up a conversation with Jimmy (Mark Weston), who seems to appear out of the ether as if in response to her yearning, lonely vibe. Jimmy claims to know her from school, but he also claims to know the back story to just about everyone in the station, as he spins yarns about how the weary-looking security guard (Bo Hopkins) came to be a haunted man in hiding from his past and a woman (played by the director's sister Tristine Skyler) got mixed up with a manic-depressive gamblin' man (Chris Noth), his glib tongue and honeyed smile are like a red flag alerting her to his untrustworthiness. But the possibility that he's a nut seems less important in a setting like this than whatever his fantasies can provide in the way of entertainment value.
A decade or so ago, following in the wake of Robert Altman's Raymond Carver tribute Short Cuts, there was a mini-trend of independent features--such as Rose Troche's The Safety of Objects, which drew on the writings of A. M. Homes--that mashed together story threads from an author's collected words and tried to shape them into a single movie. Getting to Know You is much more gracefully shaped than most of these; it weaves the character vignettes supplied by Hopkins, Lisanne Skyler, and the other members of a supporting cast that includes Mary McCormack, Sonja Sohn, and Leo Burmeister into a slowly percolating narrative that slowly closes in on the subject that has aroused Jimmy's curiosity, and that Judith is in no hurry to address: what are she and her brother running from, and how has it split them apart, both physically and maybe emotionally? (The answer involves Bebe Neuwirth and Mark Blum as the missing component of their family unit, a pair of self-involved failed ballroom dancers--I didn't even know that was a category--who would rank high on any list of the sorriest sets of parents in the history of independent movies.)Getting to Know You, which has its own look and a wistful emotional tone that stays with you, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the "Someone to Watch" prize at the Independent Spirit Awards. To date, it remains Skyler's only feature film; here's hoping she gets to give us something else to watch soon.