45 MINUTES FROM BROADWAY
About
Whether trodding the boards for paying audiences or performing at the kitchen table for her theatrical family, the only place Pandora Isaacs has ever felt truly safe and entirely at home is onstage. Like so many actors she is not completely sure about the difference between real life and the theater and – as she willingly admits – she really doesn’t want to.
Stinging from a recent romantic break-up, she retreats to the safety of her parents’ ramshackle upstate country house – just 45 minutes from Broadway – where her non-theatrical sister and her sister’s non-Jewish fiance are also arriving for the weekend and the family’s yearly Passover Seder, which is presided over by another uncle. Family secrets, sibling rivalries and the possibility of true love as rare as a blue bullfrog all emerge, but at what cost?
REVIEWS
Tanna Frederick is excellent as Pandora. She is volatile and extremely present each moment she is on the screen. Tanna is exciting to watch. You never know what you are going to get.
As much as Jaglom is an actor’s director, Tanna Frederick is an actor’s actress. Having already worked on four of Jaglom’s films with more on the way, the Iowa-born Frederick has an uncanny knack for matching rhythms with her scene partners… [For example, there’s] a scene between Tanna Frederick, who at times seems so in tune with Jaglom’s vision that you’d swear they’re living in the same skin, and Judd Nelson, playing Betsy’s fiance. The two are sitting at a dining room table and Jaglom allows the silence between the two to linger before a sort of quiet playfulness is introduced that completely shifts the mood of the entire film and reminds me why I so consistently adore Frederick’s work.
Playing Pandora, the younger sister, Tanna Frederick stands out. As usual, she takes over the screen, and Pandora — an actress through and through — might be her most emotionally charged role yet… Frederick, always fearless in her performances, lets it all hang out as Pandora careens from one feeling to another while trying to understand herself.
