Mother’s Loss Tests Friends in ‘Everything’

Marc Forster’s “Everything Put Together,” one of the American Cinematheque’s most exciting presentations last year in its ongoing Alternative Screen series, is now the first new film to be offered in the Cinematheque’s latest venture, a distribution company in partnership with Vitagraph Films. It opens today at the Monica 4-Plex and moves to the Cinematheque’s venue, the Egyptian, where it will commence a regular run on Nov. 16.

“Everything Put Together” is one of the those low-budget pictures with high impact that seem to pop up out of nowhere to take audiences by surprise. Its setting is an expensively tasteless California suburban tract where three young wives, close friends, are drawn even closer together by being pregnant. Forster focuses on Radha Mitchell’s Angie, a lovely young woman with a devoted husband, Russ (Justin Louis). It is a time of joyful anticipation, with the couple and their friends painstakingly assembling a nursery for Angie’s baby.

Angie may be a bit more anxious than her friends, but she and Russ are soon rewarded with a baby boy. Then, without any warning, the next day the baby’s heart stops, a victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS. That Angie would be plunged into profound grief is to be expected. As she struggles with her sanity she is, however, hardly prepared to become regarded as a pariah in her community.

Her friends are well-meaning: They decide she needs her solitude and that it would be cruel to expect her to go through with her duties as godmother to the baby of one of the friends at its upcoming christening. Conditioned to conform rather than to think for themselves, they aren’t aware that they are simply succumbing to the fear that they may sometime suffer the same tragedy. As a result, Angie might as well be branded with a scarlet A, so shunned is she by her friends.

While compassionately chronicling Angie’s wrenching odyssey, Forster, who co-wrote the script with Adam Forgash and Catherine Lloyd Burns (who plays one of Angie’s pregnant friends), is at the same time making a smart and satirical comment on Angie’s all-American community as a consumer’s paradise where everything is supposed to be perfect.

In short, the carefully crafted “Everything Put Together” is unpredictably venturesome, and cinematographer Roberto Schaefer makes virtuoso use of digital video to create the images and movements that play so large a part in the film’s success. Mitchell’s portrayal is virtuoso, too, and she receives solid support all around, starting with Louis as her increasingly hard-pressed husband. The rigorous “Everything Put Together” gets American Cinematheque Presents.../Vitagraph Films off to a strong start.

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Unrated: Times guidelines: disturbing adult themes.

‘Everything Put Together’

Radha Mitchell: Angie

Megan Mullally: Barbie

Justin Louis: Russ

Catherine Lloyd Burns: Judith

An American Cinematheque Presents.../Vitagraph Films release of a Furst Films presentation. Director Marc Forster. Producer Sean Furst. Executive producer Adam Forgash. Screenplay by Forgash, Catherine Lloyd Burns and Forster. Cinematographer Roberto Schaefer. Editor Matt Malloy. Music Thomas Koppel. Production designer Paul Jackson. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.

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Exclusively at the Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741.