Do screenwriters realize when they’re drawing from human experience, as opposed to when they’re copying types from other screenplays? The new movie Neighborhood Watch has a couple of great examples of this distinction right out front.
Simon McNally (Jack Quaid) is a young man attempting to piece his life back together after an attempted suicide and an extended stay in a state hospital; despite the treatment, he finds it hard to hold down so much as a job interview without the intrusion of a gravelly voice in his head, taunting and undermining him at every turn. His next-door neighbor is Ed Deerman (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), an older man who has been let go from his campus-security position at the local college and still skulks around his old domain, attempting to apprehend students for minor dining-hall theft.
Both of these types are at least based on how some people might have behaved at some point in genuine reality. A lot of younger people struggle to get a foothold in the world while treating a mental illness; a lot of older people struggle with the power trips they’re desperate to maintain. But in Neighborhood Watch, every bit of behavior Quaid and Morgan are given to play feels overdetermined, cartoonishly telegraphing the kind of descriptions you might read on a video box rather than observe in life.
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