Fruitvale Station meets Good Will Hunting in Ronnel Ricardo Parham’s Odd Man Out: Part 1 and Odd Man Out: Part 2. The auteurist peregrination follows the journey of a young man probing for distinctiveness and being in the right place while circumnavigating the convolutions of foster care mentorship and personal suffering spanning two feature films. While also being the writer, producer, and director, Parham serves as the protagonist, Charles Winters. His life, or the life he planned for, seems stuck in neutral. He’s got a reasonable job and a nice crib, but he, as the title of these pictures advertises, feels like the odd man out.
No matter the class of approach, the hard work in his academic background, the drive, the hustle, Charles still feels like a second-class citizen, even though he had to fight for his place at the table. Good friends and family intertwine and intersect. They come to Winter’s as brother, as a friend, as a confidant. They think he’s educated and has it all together. But as the story unfolds, we find that one of the themes of this journey is that things are not always as they appear.
Inside, Charles is deeply unsatisfied. He’s catching flak from all angles. Struggling with finances, struggling with love, it’s an easy decision that the guy should sign up for a Tony Robbins seminar, right? But Charles is as complex a character as the socially dramatic labyrinth he seems lost in. When at last in sheer despair, he quits his high-paying, high-flying gig for something with less pay, but less responsibility. This gives our lead some wind under his wings and instills him with enough confidence to re-enter the love game.
“Patrice Williams walks past Charles at work and straight into his heart.”
Patrice Williams (Princess Elmore) walks past Charles at work and straight into his heart. Still, lust is fleeting, and as things progress, Winters finds himself ill at ease and conflicted. The situation comes to a head when Patrice announces she is pregnant and stands uncertain as to her choice. Charles, seeing this unexpected side-quest into fatherhood as a hindrance, especially since his career hasn’t really taken flight.
Panicking, he makes a leap, cuts ties with all the strife of his Los Angeles life, and flees to Atlanta. There, ironically, the man who wasn’t ready to be a father rediscovers a kinship with his early passion: to be a positive influence in the lives of the underprivileged, underestimated youth via social work. Eagerly, he signs up as an occupational therapist, jumping into the lives of dejected boys, one being Terry May (Bryson Robinson), a foster kid struggling with himself and a violent, alcoholic guardian, Shawn (Martinez).
As Charles lifts the spirits and confidence of his clients under his care, he, too, seeks ways to discover the root cause of his own internal turmoil by reaching out to therapist Mary Bowen (Stefanie Kleine). Mary probes deep into Winter’s past, helping find the questions he needs to stop and really, truthfully examine. For the success we seek sometimes lies behind an obstacle we are unable or unwilling to face.
Odd Man Out: Part 1 and Odd Man Out: Part 2is an extremely personal tales of triumph through tragedy that was perhaps endured by Ronnel Ricardo Parham, allowed to gestate into the story, then come together as this uniquely inspiring, cinematic endeavor, which is at once both sprawling and intimate as the lives of the characters and the courage in the face of perpetual conflict we need to see our roads to their ends.
For more information, visit the Odd Man Out official website.
"…an extremely personal tales of triumph through tragedy..."
