Given how famously *particular* he is, it’s a genuine surprise that it’s taken this long into his career for John Travolta to take full control of a production by making the move to the director’s chair. What is less surprising is that his directorial debut, Propeller One-Way Night Coach (adapted by Travolta from his own book of the same name), is really rather baffling. A completely uneventful semi-autobiographical little nostalgia trip that barely crosses the 60-minute runtime mark with credits, it’s a strange, semi-embarrassing experience that will offer you nothing if you’re not passionate about classic air travel or the childhood of Travolta himself.
As well as writing, directing, and providing the source material, Travolta also narrates almost non-stop from start to finish, detailing his memories of a flight he once took with his mother in 1962 on a soon-to-be-obsolete propeller plane from New York to LA. This flight, and its brief layovers in flyover country, is the entire story here and Travolta steadfastly refuses to add any actual drama to it. His eight-year-old self’s stand-in Jeff (Clark Shotwell) is excited to be taking the trip, and everything goes right and everyone’s really nice to him and that’s it.
As drab as its story is, Propeller One-Way Night Coach manages to avoid being boring on the strength of being very strange instead. Most of the dialogue sounds like it was written by an alien trying out human conversation for the first time, everyone’s conversations carrying a strained and deeply unnatural lilt. Meanwhile, Travolta’s narration effectively captures the clunky stream-of-consciousness style of a kid telling a story, which could be interesting, but it’s not actually meant to be from the point of view of child Jeff, but instead his adult self recounting the memory, so it just further exacerbates how off-kilter the script sounds.
The performances are just as odd. Poor young Shotwell mostly just looks confused while all the adults – from Kelly Eviston-Quinnett as Jeff’s slightly delusional mother to Travolta’s daughter Ella Bleu playing, in a psychologically interesting touch, the stewardess who Jeff falls madly in love with – are either entirely flat or entirely overacting, with no middle ground anywhere.
The whole thing is deep in the fog of Travolta’s own mind, right down to the sleekly nostalgic sense-memory set design (which is easily the highlight of the whole thing), and you can’t say it’s uninteresting to essentially share a dream with one of the great *characters* of Hollywood. Terrible as it is, you can’t really call Propeller One-Way Night Coach a failure; this is clearly exactly the film Travolta set out to make. That doesn’t mean it’s one that anyone else is going to want to watch.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 