Written and directed by Wes Hurley
Starring Jonathan Bennett, Lauren Tewes, Dan Lauria
Runtime 1 hour 35 minutes
Currently playing virtually at SXSW

by Emily Maesar, Staff Writer

So… Wes Hurley is one of my new favorite filmmakers - let’s just start there. Potato Dreams of America is this precious, full-hearted film. It’s one that really hits all the right beats of being universal in its specificity, and fun in willingness to see the human condition in all its complexities. The film sits on a knife’s edge of tone, and it balances every aspect in the most enjoyable way possible. 

The film, a spiritual and fictionalized successor to Hurley’s documentary short Little Potato, is about Potato (Hersh Powers & Tyler Bocock) and his mother, Lena (Sera Barbieri & Marya Sea Kaminski), as they live their lives in Vladivostok, Russia. They love American movies (his mother even allows a boyfriend to move in because he got a color TV), and they both want to move far away from Russia. Lena is scared for Potato’s future, since he’ll be drafted into the military at 18, and Potato wants to make movies in America. Also, he’s gay, even if it hasn’t quite hit him yet. 

As Potato tries to grasp that aspect of himself, Lena dreams of making a better life for herself and her son. She decides to join a company that allows her to write to an American and, when they’re eventually married, Potato and Lena end up immigrating to Seattle, Washington to start their lives in America. 

This film is practically split down the center between Potato and Lena’s old lives in Russia and their new lives in the US. And Hurley is really precise about the two halves of the film. Not only are they shot in completely different (but complementary) styles, but Potato and Lena are played by different actors, with a different take on looks and even their accents.

All of which I found brilliant. The dream-like reality of the first half of the film is utterly entrancing. It looks and feels almost like a stage play as sets come up and go down around Potato in the various locations of his Russian life. It’s where Hurley gets to play around with the memory of childhood and the dreams that help make life bearable in its worst moments. Those elements are there in the way a bout of domestic violence is turned into a dance before Potato’s eyes. It’s there when Potato needs to accept Jesus into his life… and he actually appears. (Played hilariously by Jonathan Bennett, the absolute icon that he is.) And it’s there when Potato and Lena realize they’ve been given the freedom they’d hoped for. 

One of my favorite things, one that I thought was superb, is the accent change I mentioned earlier. I also really like the swap in actors as the story moves from Russia to America. It allows the “reality” of the film to kick in, as though the two Russian versions of Potato and Lena were just a fantasy. However, having their American bound counterparts speak English with a Russian accent, when they’d been speaking it without accents in Russia, is inspired. It really sells this idea of how Potato viewed the world in Russia as a coping mechanism verses how things actually are for them in America.

The absolute strongest thing about the film, though, is the relationship between Potato and Lena. The film is described as “an ode to mothers” and it, undeniably, is just that. The joy of Lena as a character is knowing that she’s real - that Wes Hurley won the parent lottery by getting every queer kids dream mom. Most people don’t get to have moms like Potato’s, but Potato Dreams of America works because we can all imagine what having a mom like Lena might be like. To have someone who is so kind and loving. Someone who says all the right things not because she’s reading a script, but because that’s just who she is. Someone who inspires the people in her life to be open and honest about who they really are, and to never feel shame for that. 

Lena is a gift. If nothing else was wonderful about this film, then having Lena simply exist would be enough. However, Hurley has made a really astounding piece of cinema. I’m so excited to see what other stories he has to tell, because this one absolutely rules.