Family and belonging structure society to a mythical scale, their symbolic value readily plugged into ideologies categorizing the world into binaries—”us” and “them,” “familiar” and “foreign,” “left” and “right.” Persistent as they are in our collective imagination, these remnants of long-gone purity find new forms in the works of filmmaker Rob Rice. Hailing from Massachusetts, the Los Angeles-based writer-director debuted Way Out Ahead of Us in 2022, and with it, his pledge to cinema as community and communion, a stage for authenticity and seemingly indirect action. In that hybrid film, a real married couple deals with questions of actual mortality and the hypothetical independence of a fictional daughter; its follow-up, the Tribeca-premiering Ponderosa, is a clear-cut work of fiction in comparison.
Ponderosa, like the “Old West”-themed dining chain it’s named after, is suspended between past and present, and in an arm wrestle for a better future. Zeke (Jack Dylan Grazer), our protagonist, seems to embody the definition of an “old soul” in his early 20s—unruly hair and a wise, sympathetic gaze—perhaps as a result of being an only child to a single parent. His mother Sandra (Alexis Bledel, like you’ve never seen her before) may work in a Ponderosa buffet, but her presence is pure melancholy. She glides instead of walking and rarely speaks. Yet when she does, the warmth of her deep-blue eyes feels like a soft blanket. A family of two (mother and son) is undeniably symbolic, yet the film never frames it as missing a crucial part—be it a father, financial stability, or extended family. What are Zeke and Sandra to each other, you may ask? They are enough.
Leave it to heteropatriarchy to ruin a perfectly good thing, here in the face of buffet regular George (Bill Camp, endearingly terrifying) who swoops in once the Ponderosa location is due to close. Driven by an irrational, inexplicable desire to father (symbolically, but somehow wholly) Zeke, George emerges as a misdirected villain––an avatar for capitalist inequality as a middle-aged single man whose life has been spent accumulating fortune by building shoddy houses. A glaring lack of self-reflection colors Camp’s frightening character as an aging white man riddled with the question of legacy. Moreso, he spends his weekends with a group of similarly minded men of the “fathering” kind: nationalists with a uniting “founding-father” complex. We’ve seen versions of this subplot wherein toxic masculinity is put to ideological use, but never met with a hilarious stoicism like Zeke’s––à la Bartleby, he would simply prefer not to.
With Ponderosa, Rice takes aim at America’s national myths in a more stylized way, using uncanny aesthetics, unexpectedly low angles, and comical wide shots captured by cinematographer Barton Cortright (The Cathedral) and placed in poetically awkward (with the sharpest intention) sequences by editor Mina Fitzpatrick. That gap between what seems familiar—the tone of a dramatic thriller, the soaring score, suspenseful man-to-man encounters, even the soft features of Alexis Bledel’s dearly well-known face—and what feels completely alien powers a mythical kind of storytelling: everything and nothing is possible at once. To call Ponderosa a strange movie doesn’t do it justice. Its enigmatic nature is less a riddle than an invitation to imagine societal structures anew––not necessarily in a way that’s radically different, but questioning one’s intentions and refusing to conform, even in the face of endemic loneliness. One of the most touching things about Ponderosa—and believe me, there are many!—is being able to share that loneliness without the fear of it taking over. “Just keep pushing,” says Sandra to a despondent George with a touch of irony that can make a kingdom crumble. Her simple (and rather ominous) advice is not for definitive use, however: the future belongs to those who soften to endure.
Ponderosa premiered at the 2026 Tribeca Festival.