Edsa Woolworth tackles the exploits of three Filipino siblings living in the Bay Area caring for their American stepfather following the death of their mother. The titular character Edsa (Pokwang) is the eldest, and has sacrificed much in order to care for her family, particularly their Alzheimer’s-stricken stepfather Frank (Steven Spohn). She long gave up on the idea of romance, but now she is confronted with the possibility of finding love. Her gay brother Boni (Ricci Chan) lobbies for moving Frank to an assisted care facility, but Edsa is having none of it. Their adopted younger brother Paco (Prince Saruhan) is neglecting his responsibilities to the family, and is spending most of his time looking for his real father.
Edsa Woolworth tries to be about many things, but its lack of focus mostly turns into a movie that isn’t really about anything. The movie’s attention bounces haphazardly between the concerns of the siblings, unable to commit to the narrative demands of any of its subplots. It spends its nearly two hour long runtime drifting through slivers of stories, none getting the development needed to turn these slivers into compelling drama.
The film’s multiple storylines don’t really work well together. The whole subplot involving Paco and his deadbeat father, for example, feels like a complete diversion, and it doesn’t really amount to anything. It could have cut out completely from the movie, and it likely wouldn’t have affected the final product in any way. In theory, this movie is about how the personal concerns of these grown children come into conflict with their obligations to the man that raised them. But the film struggles to get this idea across as it keeps its characters in isolation, trapping them in scenes that have little to do with the bigger picture.
It all just gets really clumsy. The movie basically saves up all of its drama for one big blowup scene that has the siblings airing their grievances to each other in overly dramatic ways. It feels completely unnatural, the movie doing little to build up to those large emotions. It doesn’t really spend too much time exploring how these characters really feel about Frank or each other. It doesn’t lay down the groundwork for any of their future conflict. It is more prone to keeping the siblings apart, each of them dealing with non-issues that don’t really matter much in the end.
The acting is more or less okay, but the cast does struggle with a lot of clunky dialogue. Pokwang manages to bring a lot of realness to her role, but her efforts are squandered when the film saddles her with long chunks of exposition, or has her say things that no human being would ever say. Ricci Chan fares a bit better in this department, but the actor runs into trouble with contradictory characterization. Prince Saruhan is stuck with the most underdeveloped plotline, and the actor isn’t able to make much of an impression.
On paper, Edsa Woolworth is a story about family. It is about the responsibility that three Filipinos feel for a man with whom they share no actual blood. Maybe it’s about what it means to be grateful, or about the rift that still exists between people who consider themselves family. But the movie seems to forget about the family for long stretches. It isolates the characters to a degree where it may as well have been three different movies. There’s a story worth telling in here somewhere, but the movie never finds the focus to tell it.
My Rating:
