Stubbing Out: Samara & Karl/Kyle

Eenie Meanie, 2025, Shawn Simmons (primarily a writer; directorial debut) -- Disney+
Carolina Caroline, 2025, Adam Rehmeier (Snack Shack) -- download

Well, fuck. I had it all planned out in my mind, and I thought I had properly confirmed it, but apparently Samara Weaving was not starring in two star-crossed lovers, back-water America, crime stories with the same guy. Turns out, Karl Glusman (Eenie Meanie) and Kyle Gallner (Carolina Caroline) are not the same actor.

But, same look in each movie, same initials... there is something going on here.

My original intent was to, and I doubt it would become a new tag, but begin the write up(s) just after I started the movie(s). I often watch movies, these days, in fits & starts: with week day morning coffee, and just after I get up on weekends. Life interrupts. Occasionally, when doing so, I like to put in a "stub" post, to capture what I was thinking as I watched, even before completing the movie. Given this post was going to be about two movies, I tagged that onto the post title.

Original original intent aside, the plan will still goes, just with no comparing about how odd it was for Samara, and really she is the star power here, to be in two very similar movies with the same co-star. She is still in two very similar movies, in genre if not tone, about people on the ass-end of American life making terrible crime-ridden life choices.

Samara Weaving started her career, in my eyes, as "not Margot Robbie" but came into her own, again in my mind, in a 31 Days choice of The Babysitter -- for some reason, I did not do proper credit-ing in that post. Not long after, she stood out again in Ready or Not. She hasn't been a Margot Robbie stand-in, in my mind, for quite a long time, which makes her role in Babylon all the more amusing.

Karl Glusman will always be, to me, Sergei from Devs but that is because I never saw any of his previous projects. The Internet loved his threesome in Love, a Gaspar Noé movie --- odd note, Kent references his movie Enter the Void at least three times in other posts, but neither of us wrote about it.

Kyle Gallner doesn't really have any prevalence in my mind. He's just one of those ten million character actors that have played a single episode of all the TV crime dramas and just enough roles in movies that I recognize his face. I guess his only stand-out, to me, would be "Beaver" from Veronica Mars some 20 odd years ago, but he was a kid then.

***

Edith, or Edie, Meade (Weaving) was raised by two degenerate drug-using criminals. When she was 14, she picked them up from a bar and while attempting to escape the cops, crashes the car, killing her mother and paralysing her father. She spends the rest of her youth in the usual abusive foster system, in Cleveland. After escaping that, she ended up back in the seedy crime-ridden underbelly of her parents. The movie begins when she has escaped that, going to school, keeping a job. But what she hasn't escaped is her on-again off-again relationship with John (Glusman), who is a complete loser.

We are introduced to Edie in a nightclub; she is supposed to be the typical skanky but smart girl, wanting to go home early so she can study. I don't buy Weaving's American skank -- she's just too statuesque. But she's a bad girl wanting to go straight: school, shit car, shit boss, shit job at a bank, which gets robbed and Edie is knocked unconscious. When she awakens at the hospital, she finds she is pregnant, and that means a hard decision: should she talk to John (Glusman), her ex, the father, or should she avoid him.

She should have avoided him. She walks straight into his shit show, where he owes Nico the Mob Boss (Andy Garcia, Wrath of Man) and she has to put her legendary driving skills back into action. In the intervening years between the car crash and her going to school, Edie was a driver for Nico, a very very good driver. But John is her Achilles Heel, an entire mess of a human being, stupider than pavement, but able to charm Edie in ways she cannot control.

John had kidnapped Nico's card counter, a man who makes Nico a lot of money. Then the card counter is accidentally killed, and now John owes Nico all the money the card counter could have potentially made. Edie has two options: help John on a job for Nico that could recoup the money, or let.... John... die. We wouldn't have a movie if Edie didn't love John, trainwreck and all.

What plays out in tragi-comedy is a fun mish-mash of violence and stupidity and adrenaline, from the guy who did the YouTube / TV show Wayne, a violent little romp about a high school kid on bicycle trying to get his dad's car back. John continues to make bad decisions, Edie ends up having to make some really hard decisions.

I would do some comparisons to specific car chase and/or heist movies, but we know the tone. There are tense chase scenes, avoidances and bone-jarring crashes. There are betrayals and murders that don't sit well with Edie. Its all familiar ground, but... I rather enjoyed it. Weaving wraps herself in the role, and unlike the next one, it is not as enamoured with her statuesque body. We get most of her performance from her eyes, sad and disappointed most of the time, hard and determined when needed.

***

Caroline (Weaving) opens the movie alone, carjacking her ride, driving off into the sun. She is going to end up here, but where we really meet her first is a gas filling station in Texas where the makeup-lite Caroline (code for innocent, unworldly) observes customer Oliver (Gallner) con the gas station owner out of $20. She's annoyed he would take money out of the hands of another; he is amused she caught his con so quickly.

Later they bump into each other at a roadhouse, she is surprised he is still in "town". Why would anyone stay in her little bumpkin speck-on-the-road of a town? She, of course, is desperate to get out. Commenting leads to flirting, flirting leads to dating and dating leads to sharing -- Caroline's mother left her when she was young, and she has always wanted to go to Carolina, where she believes her mother is, to ask why. She's also mesmerized by his little con jobs, and asks him to show her how its done. They are taken with each other, but you are always left wondering how much of their interaction is him controlling the beautiful blonde in front of him, but I remember the opening scene where she is alone, and wonder whether she is manipulating him from the very start.

When they do couple-crime dramas, the go-to is Bonnie & Clyde but this is more akin to True Romance but without all the Tarantino quirkiness. Its romantic, its exciting, its tense. 

By midway through the movie, things have escalated. Simple $100 cash shuffling has become large sums of money, has become lifting wallets and emptying bank accounts, has become... robbing banks. Caroline wants more: more excitement, more cash, more slinky outfits. That is, until she sees the darker side of what they are doing: the fear they generate, the intimidation and violence they have to use to keep things going -- the harsh cruelty that keeps Oliver moving along so he can do the next job. Caroline likes it when its fun & exciting, not so much when they have to pistol whip someone. That escalation also brings real life into play, and they are on a Wanted List.

Reality has Caroline question where's she from, so the original intent of the road trip, before the con jobs, before the slinky dresses, before the bank robberies, was to find her mother in Carolina. But we all know how those visits turn out... Meeting Deborah (Kyra Sedgwick, Bad Shabbos) for 10am screw drivers is not a pleasant experience and Sedgwick is incredible in this pretty-much cameo, eliciting waves of revulsion from the way she holds her chin and the words vomiting out of her mouth. But, instead of a call to her Daddy and a wake-up call, she asks Oliver if they can rob the world.

"How do we know if we are good people pretending to be bad, or bad people pretending to be  good?"

Their world comes crashing down pretty quickly, and hard. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't provide much breathing room for neither us, nor the couple. Caroline should have just taken the time to absorb the reality of her mother, but instead it leads to the death of a state trooper and, finally, Oliver taking Death by Cop so Caroline can escape. TBH I was imagining he would abandon her, to return to his life of lone con jobs, but I guess he really did love her.

So, two stories with similar paths, similar bad decisions, both ending with Weaving's characters alone and expecting. Two entirely different tones. The first is more my thing; my days of being charmed by violence-crossed lovers out against the world are gone. Like Edie, I have grown out of that. But the latter was a competently done story and I cannot fault it for anything, including the familiar story, because telling the same story over and over again is how the telling of tales is done.