Look/Listen

Natural Selection is the tale of forty-something Texas housewife Linda (Rachael Harris). She is deeply unhappy, but she has settled into her unhappiness with a smiling, anxious resignation. Mousy and bland behind strip-mall spectacles and beneath faded sweatshirts, she is a benign little slip of a Bible Belt woman, afflicted with one glaring defect in the eyes of her God-fearing community. Linda cannot have children, and from this husband Abe (John Diehl) concludes that lovemaking is a futile endeavor. Sexless though her married life might be, Linda has come to accept the ordered, stable quality of its banal miseries, including the acidic disapproval of her sister and the anodyne reassurances of her brother-in-law. Until, that is, Abe suffers a stroke at a local sperm bank, where he has secretly been making, um, deposits for twenty-some years.

Her assumptions about her life thoroughly upended, Linda leaves Abe's bedside and heads off in search of his oldest sperm bank progeny, now 23 and dwelling in Florida. Raymond (Matt O'Leary) is not what Linda would have preferred in a son: gawky, oily, directionless, and strung-out on drugs. However, she is determined to deliver him back to Texas, and while the bewildered, jumpy Raymond would ordinarily resist, Linda's appearance represents an opportunity to quickly depart the Sunshine State under cover of darkness. In this way, Natural Selection sets up a determinedly quirky cross-country odyssey with two mismatched and lonely souls, who—surprise, surprise—eventually bond  after some early culture-shock clashes.

Helming his feature film debut, writer-director Robbie Pickering offers a Sundance-pleasing formula that is now familiar in the landscape of America independent film: the comically poignant quest that allows a troubled person (or persons) to Discover Things About Themselves. Pickering, fortunately, doesn't fall victim to some of this sub-genre's usual sins. The film uses its worn, warty Southern milieu of greasy spoons and sweaty churches in all the right ways, while only rarely expressing explicit contempt for its characters and environs.  Moreover, the script admirably refrains from clunky monologues that strain the film's paper-thin realism.

Still, Natural Selection projects an unfortunate air of wheezy narrative conventionality, without offering much in the way of compelling characterization or novel observations on its supposed themes of family, faith, and disappointment. Pickering seems eager to play upon the viewer's expectations—hence a third act revelation that re-contextualizes all that has gone before—but he does so without any sense of what might be gleaned, emotionally or intellectually, from such an endeavor. In truth, the film discovers only curt and toothless cynicism, ultimately concluding that people are awful and rarely deserve second chances. Amid such derivative, slipshod proceedings, the lone bright spot is Harris' delicate and beguiling performance, nestled snugly between sheltered evangelical naivete and wrung-out despondency.