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Movie:		7.0
Picture:		8.0
Sound:		8.0
Extras:		6.0
Score:		7.0

Director(s):	Enid Zentelis
Writer(s):	Enid Zentelis
Starring:	Addie Land • Bruce Davison • Cara Seymour • Lynn Cohen • Mary Kay Place • Noah Fleiss • Gary Farmer
Genre:	Drama
Website:	http://www.evergreenthemovie.com/
Release Date:	November 10, 2009

List Price:	DVD - $24.95
Amazon:

It's pretty widely known that teenagers are selfish and ungrateful little snots. Evergreen, a film from 2004 that only recently was released, drills this into the viewer's brain.

Henrietta, Henri, for short, played by the relatively unknown Addie Land, and her mother Kate, played by Cara Seymour (the chick who was demolished by Christian Bale's chainsaw in American Psycho) have fallen on hard times and have to move in with Cara's mother (Lynn Cohen), who lives in grubby leaky shack on the edge of town. Henri's mother is the type who goes out of her way to do everything she can for her daughter, to give her the things she didn't have when she was a kid.

On paper this sounds great, but, if you recall your time in high school, the greatest thing your folks could do for you was to just leave you alone. Cara just wants to spend time with her little girl, though, and be total besties. Henri has other plans, and her desire to be around her mother as little as possible only intensifies when she meets Chat -- this is not a typo; his name really is Chat -- played by Noah Fleiss, a popular boy from an unnecessarily wealthy family (they have a buzzer and gate to get through to the driveway). Mary Kay Place and Bruce Davison, two actors who seem to have a penchant for portraying "perfect" people who actually have real problems, play his parents. She's got agoraphobia, and he, as a result of her resulting panic and anxiety attacks, suffers from a gambling addiction and, from what I can tell, alcoholism. Chat, apart from having the dumbest name ever, is super spoiled and doesn't really seem to know how to treat a lady right.

Henri, however, is blind to all this, at least at first. She sees Chat and his family as the very picture of domestic perfection, especially in contrast to her relationship with her mother and old-fashioned grandmother. She tries to hide who she is and where she comes from -- she refuses to be picked up from or driven home to her grandmother's, and when Cara visits Henri's new little haven as a traveling make-up sales lady, Henri intercepts and tells her mother that if she really loves her she'll pretend that they don't know each other.

When they start to treat her like a member of their ideal little family, she embraces it with open arms, but eventually overstays her welcome. Luckily, though, just as the family starts to get sick of her, she starts to see that they're not the poster folks for ideal living she took them to be.

Penned and directed by Enid Zentelis, whose most notable credit is as a production office assistant on Freeway, this flick is a little sloppy. The dialogue is decent, and the cast is fairly top-notch, but the very abrupt ending will most likely leave you disappointed. Obviously meant to leave viewers with a sense of closure, the final sequence does so only because of its transparency; you have to wonder if Zentelis had become weary with this first venture into actual filmmaking and just wanted it to be over as quickly as possible.

DVD Bonus Features

Few special features to speak of on this one, just a little info about IndiePix, the film's distribution company, and a lengthy list of cast and crew bios.