Film festival audiences have wildly different reactions to the dysfunctional family drama “Fanny, Annie & Danny.”
“Some people can’t stop laughing, and some are angry that people are laughing. They’re offended that someone would find it funny,” says “Fanny” writer/director Chris Brown.
It’s understandable given the nature of a film, a serio-comic study of three siblings and their uber-controlling mother. Sister Fanny (Jill Pixley) just lost her job – and possibly her home – while brother Danny (Jonathan Leveck) is deep in debt after playing fast and loose with a client’s finances.
Tensions flare when the family reunites for Christmas, setting the stage for a shrewdly conceived showdown.
“Fanny, Annie and Danny,” which debated Nov. 11 at the Starz Denver Film Festival, didn’t spring from Brown’s own family memories. The writer/director is an only child, and he wrote the movie, in part, to experience life in a large nuclear family.
The story itself all but forced Brown to tell it.
“I was prepared to make another movie and had just finished another script and was heading to pre-production when these characters started gnawing and nagging at me,” says Brown, whose film earned him the festival’s Emerging Filmmaker award Nov. 13. “They insisted the movie be made … a unique urgency. I kept worrying about Fanny and her family. What was going to happen to them?”
Fanny was of particular concern since she lives in a group home and suffers from OCD – and other unspecific woes.
Pixley says she wanted to keep Fanny’s condition vague to keep audiences from “pigeon-holing her into one diagnosis.”
“We wanted it to be something that wasn’t so clear cut and categorized,” Pixley says.
Both Annie and Danny live more complicated lives than Fanny, but the family still revolves around their troubled sister.
“She’s the eye of the storm,” Pixley says, and when Fanny makes an important revelation mid film sister Annie (Carlye Pollack) says with a sigh, “can we not make today the Fanny Show?”
The family matriarch (Colette Keen) will draw hisses from virtually any audience. She’s shrill to her sad-sack husband and treats Fanny like a nuisance. The mother’s attempts at arranging a simple family photo strain the already precarious balance. Brown didn’t want to portray her as one dimensional all the same.
“No one’s a monster [in the film],” he says. “Her first line of dialogue on the page really surprised me. She arrived to the party fully formed. Who is this? Who would say this? I loved her right away.“
Brown and Pixley are married, so each has been living with the filming – and watching it repeatedly – for months.
“I’ve been more involved with it than most actors,” says Pixley, a Denver native who has family roots in the city. She still gets swept up in the family drama every time it plays.
“It takes me on its ride … and I feel something turning in my stomach,” she says.
(Photo: Top, right: Writer/director Chris Brown on the set of “Fanny, Annie and Danny.” Bottom, left: Actress Jill Pixley plays a mentally challenged woman talking to her brother, played by Jonathan Leveck.)
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