A collection of thirteen vignettes set around the country during George W. Bush’s presidency, We Pedal Uphill gauges the state of the union with less flash and blunt-force blather than your average Hollywood message picture, but nonetheless contains quite a bit of preachiness. Addressing various socio-political issues from the past eight years, writer/director Roland Tec certainly attempts a subtle touch, his script largely sidestepping declarative speeches and leaden exposition to make its points. His functional digital-video cinematography won’t win any awards, and his theater-trained cast’s unshowy turns are saddled with a stagey quality, but strictly in terms of aesthetics and performance, Tec’s film eschews – save for a few notable exceptions – ostentation and pomposity in favor of tonal and narrative modesty. Unfortunately, while he channels his anger, frustration and sadness about the nation’s health into short stories free of hysterics, his collage still all too frequently succumbs to moralistic clichés, and never coheres into a rousing, affecting whole.
We Pedal Uphill’s episodes often involve establishing a scenario that subsequently develops in an unexpected manner. Sensationalistic bombshells are mercifully nowhere to be found, yet Tec’s polite direction can’t overshadow the limpness of his arguments. In “The Mouse,” two men retire to a hotel room after meeting at a club, discover that they’re both Disney employees (one an exec, the other a parrot trainer), and then one offers the other monetary incentives to stay the night and get high, a supposed commentary on class tensions and economic disparity that comes off as half-baked. The same holds true for many of the film’s rough-sketch segments: prison management company employees discuss using every last inch of a cow for prisoners’ food before voraciously chowing down on a catered lunch; a Caucasian secretary brings to her African-American attorney boss’ attention a discrepancy regarding local voting machines, and is roundly criticized; a man goes to work, adorns his car with conservative bumper stickers (pro-life, pro-NRA, pro-Gitmo), enters his office and is revealed to be a liberal radio shock-jock. Mistaking insubstantiality for obliqueness, Tec’s stories only manage to brush up against their hot-button talking points before American-landscape transitional imagery shuffles us off to the next scene.
If some of these tales would benefit from ten additional minutes, others convey their meaning so bluntly that they seem unsalvageable. In “Wrong Turn,” an African-American man visits a suburban Louisiana community full of staring-from-their-lawns residents in order to thank the Caucasian man who saved him and his family during Katrina, a sequence about the squandered opportunity for post-flood racial harmony that – despite two solid performances – trades in painfully obvious juxtapositions. We Pedal Uphill’s clunkiness, however, is most strongly felt in “Treason,” a drearily one-note comedy bit concerning a New Mexico tour guide’s severely lopsided history lesson about the Rosenbergs to bored listeners. And the film’s fondness for indulging in already-hoary stereotypes is epitomized by the penultimate lecture “What Happened to Rita?”, in which a librarian returns to work after three years as a dazed semi-amnesiac, her condition the consequence (as nicely integrated flashbacks reveal) of a testy late-night encounter with Homeland Security agents who want the take-out records of an Arab man, and whose villainous menacing makes them come across like crude Big Brother cartoons.