American Fork starts with a close-up of Tracy Orbison’s eyes before eventually pulling us into the painfully ordinary surroundings of a driver’s test waiting room. It’s a simple introduction, but almost immediately you get the feeling there’s more going on inside this guy than anybody around him is ever going to bother noticing.
Tracy, played by Hubbel Palmer, is overweight, still living with his mother, working at the same grocery store he’s been at for years and repeatedly failing his driving test. On paper, he’s exactly the kind of character a worse movie would either turn into a complete joke or spend 90 minutes condescending to.
Thankfully, American Fork mostly likes Tracy.
Palmer wrote the screenplay as well as playing the lead, and apparently based parts of Tracy on people he remembered from working at a grocery store as a teenager. He has said he was interested in telling stories about ordinary people who usually wouldn’t be considered important enough to have movies made about them. That intention comes through pretty clearly.
Tracy wants to be an actor.
More than that, he wants to be somebody.
Doesn’t everybody?
That sounds like the beginning of some inspirational speech printed over a picture of a mountain, but there’s something genuinely sweet about how American Fork approaches it. Most people have some version of themselves they thought they were going to become. Then jobs happen. Families happen. Bills happen. Somebody tells you that your idea is stupid. Eventually a lot of people just stop trying and become whatever their life happened to turn into.
Tracy hasn’t completely gotten there yet.
He is incredibly naive, though.
Enter Truman Hope, Tracy’s acting teacher, played by William Baldwin, and this is about as perfect a role for Baldwin as I can imagine. Truman has just enough charisma and professional credibility that Tracy immediately sees him as somebody who has figured out the world he desperately wants to enter.
Of course, Truman is also kind of an asshole.
Baldwin understands exactly how to play him. He isn’t some gigantic Hollywood success swooping into town. His level of fame is just high enough to completely impress somebody like Tracy, which makes Tracy’s admiration both funny and a little sad. He looks at Truman and sees the life he wants rather than the man actually standing in front of him.
That naivety is one of the better things about Palmer’s performance.
Tracy isn’t stupid. He’s just remarkably willing to believe people when they tell him something good might happen.
There’s a difference.
The supporting cast is surprisingly strong for this kind of little 2007 indie. Kathleen Quinlan plays Tracy’s mother, Agnes, Mary Lynn Rajskub plays his sister Peggy, Bruce McGill turns up as his grocery-store boss, and Baldwin gets to enjoy himself as Truman.
None of them make the movie feel bigger than it is, which helps. American Fork is fundamentally a small story about a guy in a grocery store town trying to convince himself that his current life isn’t necessarily his entire life.
There’s something very 2000s-independent-film about the whole thing.
The slightly strange people. The bland Mountain West locations. The deadpan humor. Characters whose greatest crisis might involve a driving test or somebody taking a ticket that wasn’t theirs. There’s obviously some Napoleon Dynamite DNA floating around the general filmmaking world this came out of, and producer Jeremy Coon had also produced Napoleon Dynamite, but American Fork is warmer and less interested in turning every odd person into a punchline.
Sometimes that works against it.
The movie meanders. Certain storylines feel more substantial than others, and there are stretches where I kept waiting for everything to click into something slightly bigger than the modest character comedy I was watching.
It never really does.
But I also don’t think that’s entirely a failure.
There’s something appropriate about a movie about Tracy Orbison being fairly small itself. Tracy isn’t trying to save the world. He wants to act. He wants a driver’s license. He wants people to stop looking through him. He wants to feel like his existence is moving somewhere.
That’s enough material for a movie.
Palmer is also smart enough not to make Tracy’s weight the entire character. It obviously affects how people treat him and how he moves through the world, but American Fork isn’t one long setup for some transformation where Tracy loses weight, gets hot and suddenly earns the right to be happy.
Thank God.
His problem isn’t that he needs to become another person.
He needs to figure out how to stop allowing other people to decide who Tracy Orbison is supposed to be.
That’s where the movie's message worked for me more than some of the actual storytelling did. Everybody wants to be somebody, but most of us are frighteningly good at talking ourselves out of it. We forget. We quit. We get comfortable. Life starts swallowing up whatever version of ourselves we once imagined.
I could probably go much further down that road, but this is supposed to be a movie review and not me complaining about society.
Still, American Fork got me thinking about it.
That counts for something.
The film has a sweetness that occasionally borders on being too precious, but Palmer keeps Tracy grounded enough that I never completely turned against it. Even when the character makes frustrating choices, you understand the emotional machinery producing them.
He wants to believe.
Sometimes desperately.
I also appreciate that the movie doesn't turn his acting dream into some ridiculous overnight success story. Tracy’s idea of becoming somebody is much larger in his imagination than what the movie actually promises him. There’s something more honest about that than the usual indie-film ending where somebody gets discovered and suddenly every humiliating moment was secretly part of the journey to greatness.
Most people aren’t getting discovered.
Sometimes the victory is simply not quitting.
American Fork isn’t some forgotten masterpiece I’m going to start demanding everybody track down. It’s a decent little indie movie with a good central performance, an unexpectedly strong cast and enough sincerity that its rougher or more meandering stretches never completely sank it for me.
Palmer is the reason to watch it. There’s something vulnerable about Tracy that could have become unbearable in the wrong hands, but he walks the line between funny, frustrating, pathetic and genuinely lovable.
And Baldwin is pretty damn funny.
The weirdest part is that this little Slamdance movie from 2007, with Kathleen Quinlan, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Bruce McGill and William Baldwin in the cast, is currently just sitting on YouTube for free. A verified movie channel uploaded the full film in 2024, where it has since picked up hundreds of thousands of views.
There are much worse ways to spend an hour and a half.
American Fork didn’t knock me over, but I liked Tracy. I liked what Palmer was trying to say with him. And somewhere underneath the quirky indie-comedy machinery is a simple thought I found hard to argue with:
Everybody wants to be somebody.
The difficult part is remembering that before you give up.
5.7/10