Wild Honey: Offbeat, phone-sex rom-com

The 13th annual Sunscreen Film Festival, hosted at AMC Sundial in St. Petersburg, offers over 130 films — full-length features, documentaries, local shorts, college shorts, animation — plus panels and workshops on film financing, acting, discovering the male voice, discovering the female voice, directing, and screen writing. 

Full disclosure, Creative Loafing Tampa is one of the corporate sponsors of this filmmaker-friendly festival, and Opening Night festivities was populated by talent, both those in front of the camera and those behind. 

The Opening Night movie was Francis Stokes’ Wild Honey. And a honey of a film it is. It’s funny, it’s risque, it's raucous, it’s weirdly empowering. 

It takes the tired old rom-com tropes of a conventionally beautiful woman giving up everything in the search for the perfect man, turning that on its head to highlight instead a dumpster-fire of a female who finds her man, eventually, but more importantly, achieves a long-needed reconciliation with her super-competitive sister.  

In fact, the director Francis Stokes, in an after-screening Q&A, commented that Wild Honey is like an adult Frozen where reconciled sisters Anna and Elsa are considerably happier when they toss aside their competition for the perfect guy and focus instead on reuniting their sister-bond.

Roxie (Rusty Schwimmer) is a broke, aimless, living-with-her-mother, down-on-her-luck phone-sex operator who manages the husky groans and panting slurps from her headset, all while reading her fashion magazines, clipping her toenails, and flipping through the thesaurus for more synonyms for wet.

She’s good at what she does — so good, in fact, that the caller doesn’t stay on the line that long, if you get my drift…good…you got my drift — and since her pay is per-minute, she’s essentially an unemployed freelancer with little to show for her efforts. She certainly knows her clientele as “there are lots of guys out there who like to hear a woman with a sexy voice talking about their cock.” 

More later on that sexy voice Schwimmer uses as Roxie.

Then she phone-meets Martin (Timothy Omundson) who calls her frigid Chicago area code from sunny Hollywood. Apparently he’s out for more than arousal and a NSA (no strings attached) quickie, and says he wants connection. He’s a return caller and stays on the line for hours. Her paycheck soars. He sounds smooth and self-effacing, and what a contrast to Gabby’s toxic ex-boyfriend/landlord, a meathead named Vince (Todd Stashwick). Martin says he’s a sci-fi screenwriter (probably like the majority of Hollywood’s population), and Gabby is taken by visions of glamor and sunshine.

Impulsive to the core, she decides to fly unannounced to Los Angeles to meet Martin, and while there meet up with her estranged and unsuspecting sister Esther (Stephnie Weir). What could go wrong? Well, we can see the huge potential for complications in this setup, but Roxie seems oblivious.

The clever screenplay, also by director Francis Stokes, is charming, laugh-out-loud (I’m going to remember and make use of “Ritalin-addicted manchild in an ugly shirt”), witty, and filled with memorable characters in and out of Roxie’s life. 

Roxie reveals her real name is Gabby when she and Martin meet. We soon discover there’s more to these characters than what meets the eye. They ask those cringe-inducing, first-date questions to one another like “if you got a tattoo, what would it be?” Gabby opts for a Fred Flintstone tattoo as he represents the perfect man: rough exterior, heart of gold, funny, his bark worse than his bite. Martin characterizes his childhood as a nerdish boy filled with science fiction, Tolkien’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, Ray Bradbury and Dungeons & Dragons. And when Gabby expresses disappointments over Martin’s less-than-forthcoming revelations about himself and his family, she comments that it’s like her "11-year-old self looking at her grandmother’s tin of Danish cookies, then opening it up and finding it’s really just a sewing kit.” Damn, haven’t we all had those kinds of disappointments?!?

Rusty Schwimmer, in an after-screening Q&A, said that she usually plays a blue-collar chick with heart of gold that likes to tell it like it is. But in this script with the character of Roxie/Gabby, she gets to play a woman with arrested development, impulsive and uninhibited, and thus likely destined to repeat her mistakes over and over. She’s a schlub, eating dry Fruit Loops from a bowl, unconcerned about her make-up and her wardrobe. Schwimmer commented that “she represents most of the women in the United States. So many of us never get to see ourselves on screen. But Frank [director Francis Stokes] is a fabulous feminist/humanist, he knew how to write and direct this kind of woman. And I owe it to my ‘sistahs’ to portray this kind of woman.” 

And Stokes added that romantic comedies are “normally the territory of perfect young couples in enviable circumstances. But the rest of us have romantic lives, too.” In spite of the fact that her life is a mess, Gabby’s aspiration and kid-like optimism — OK, call it plucky — is what pulls her through and makes her such an appealing character we can all identify with.

All the characters are carefully, insightfully, gloriously written: Gabby’s overbearing mom Ruth (Paulette Cary), Gabby’s hyper-proper and hardworking sister Esther (Wier), the sister’s pregnant and put-upon work-assistant Gretta (Stephanie Jane Markham), Martin’s daughter (Kassie Hight) in a local performance-art piece called Mother/Syria that requires her to empty a can of pork-and-beans over her head and naked breasts, the ex-boyfriend Vince (Stashwick) and all his hilarious malapropisms  (“here’s a little token of my affectation.”) 

Here’s hoping this movie goes beyond the film festival circuit and reaches the mainstream masses because it’s loaded with earthy laughs and genuinely moving insights into our modern penchant for on-line relationships and long-distance dating, even while searching for real-life love. It’s a small, unassuming film of perfect proportions with perfectly-realized characters and characterizations. Who could ask for anything more of such an independent film?

And that phone voice that Schwimmer uses to entice her first-time callers into long-time listeners? It’s like a breathy Marilyn Monroe (“Happy Birthday, Mr. President”), with sexy tones of Melissa McCarthy channeling grace-notes from Betty Boop and Wilma Flintstone, filtered through a smoky-raspy Rachel Ray and Demi Moore. It’s no surprise that Schwimmer’s performance was recognized with the Sunscreen Film Festival Best Actress Award.

No wonder Roxie has the men at hello. This film will have you groveling at her feet too — no matter what you're wearing. 

Ben Wiley is a retired professor of film and literature at St. Petersburg College. He also was on staff in the Study Abroad Office at University of South Florida as statewide Director of the Florida Consortium/University of Cambridge (UK) International Summer Schools. His interests are in film, books, theatre, travel, literacy programs, kayaking Florida rivers. He also writes the 'BookStories' column for Creative Loafing Tampa. Contact him here.

This article appears in Apr 26 – May 3, 2018.