Olympic Dreams
Olympic Dreams is the first film shot inside an Olympic village, the temporary home for athletes competing during the most significant competition on the planet. Movies with a gimmick like this are traditionally hit or miss, and the initial signs of disaster usually reveal themselves in the trailer. For example, if the promotional materials highlight the first use of a specific technology or the first time a feature has been allowed to use a particular location, one has to wonder why that element is used instead of a film's story. Thankfully, Olympic Dreams is an exception to the norm in almost every way.
Ezra (Nick Kroll) is a 37-year-old volunteer dentist who’s living an unfulfilling life. He loves his work, but wishes he had a practice of his own. He loves his fiancé, but he's beginning to realize she may not be the person for him. The only good thing in his life is The Olympics, which he has dreamed of attending since childhood.
Penelope (Alexi Pappas) is a 22-year-old Olympic competitor. Her life revolves around cross-country skiing — so much so that she often worries that the sacrifices made to reach the 2018 Winter Olympics were too great. She's a stranger to romance who struggles to make friends and secretly fears her career is already over.
Despite their many unanswered questions, and perhaps because of them, Penelope and Ezra connect amidst the excitement of the Olympics. Though neither one is getting everything they want from the experience, the pair makes the best of things by exploring the Pyeongchang-gun area, poking fun at competitors, and getting to know one another. The sparks of romance are present, but so is the understanding that the experience they share is fleeting. The games will end, and no matter what happens before that, Ezra and Penelope will inevitably part ways.
There are countless ways that Olympic Dreams could go wrong, with the biggest and most obvious way being the sizable age gap between the film's leads. However, the film uses the outspoken recognition of those numbers to deepen our understanding of these characters. Penelope wants to live with reckless abandon because she still believes anything is possible, and death is something she won't encounter for a long time. At the same time, Ezra is stuck in motion because he fears change despite desperately wishing for things to be different. Their distinct perspectives on life create a space between them that feels achingly wide, and with it comes an inherent romantic tension that runs throughout the film.
Being able to shoot within an Olympic village does add a sense of authenticity to the proceedings, but it comes with setbacks as well. Director Jeremy Teicher, who worked with Pappas and Kroll to create the script, never finds a smooth way to transition between documentary-style scene compositions of the setting and handheld close-ups of the characters. As a result, Olympic Dreams often feels like a smart fictional narrative wrapped in an undercooked documentary, and the juxtaposition between the two continually threatens to pull viewers out of the story.
More often than not, however, Olympic Dreams accomplishes precisely what it sets out to do, which is provide a saccharine-sweet romance between two fully-realized characters that’s firmly grounded in reality. Though the final minutes do succumb to genre tropes, the film more than earns its right to give people the most emotionally fulfilling finale possible. Pappas and Kroll give everything here, in front of and behind the camera, and the results speak to their efforts. To borrow a phrase far worse movies have used in the past, Olympic Dreams is a love story for adults. It's a film for real people with real problems and practical desires. It's as human as a movie can be, and it makes achieving that level of relatability look easy.
Grade: A-minus. Rated PG-13. Now available on Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, Vudu, and YouTube
(Photo: IFC Films)
